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Reply to "Strasburg Meet - on the 14th?"

colorado hirailer posted:

Okay...so who THREE rail[s] two rail locomotives...?

I'm not sure it's possible, for the reasons Joe said (and he would know!)  A 3-rail loco has wide wheel treads (nominally 0.215") so the frame has to be a little narrower, the cylinders are more widely spaced, etc.  All of these considerations force minor compromises in appearance.  If new 2-rail wheels were fitted with a narrower tread, it seems that the extra side-to-side play could be taken up by adding spacers between the wheels and the frame, etc.  But if the frame of a 2-rail loco was originally designed for a .145 or even a .172 tread, and you try to install 3-rail wheels with their wider .215 tread, either the wheels will end up gauged too wide, or the frame will have to be narrowed to make room for the flange side of the wheel.  That's a lot of work!

I might be mistaken about the technical details of why this conversion isn't easy to do.  But I've seen a thread on another forum where an experienced modeler tried to convert a Lobaugh Berk to 3-rail and ran into some of these difficulties.  He ended up putting the whole mechanism from a 3-rail Williams Mikado under the Lobaugh boiler.  And I remember all the grousing about the Atlas 0-6-0 for similar reasons... The frame, cylinders, etc., were all designed for the wide three-rail 0.215" wheel treads.  The factory made some adjustments on the 2-rail version for the loco to accept narrower wheels, not unlike what Joe might have to do in converting a loco that was originally 3-rail.  More than a few two-railers were unsatisfied with the Atlas 0-6-0, and Atlas O hasn't attempted another steam loco since that initial effort.

Joe for our education can you be more specific about what makes it so hard?

Last edited by Ted S

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