I'm one of those odd "early to bed, early to rise" ducks* who does some of their best work at 0300 after going to bed at 9 in the evening.
*Alas, I am neither healthy nor wealthy. I AM something of a wiseguy, of course... 
This morning, I was mulling over a prewar 1668E Torpedo, remotored some months back, that was knocking about the Howard Roark Memorial Storage Facilities. The prewar tender was sitting in the Razorback Traction shops sans whistle, but, since I'm planning to get out of prewar rolling stock for the most part, I was wondering what I had on hand to allow postwar operation.
I then recalled a resprayed Scout tender on the roster which I had planned to letter for MarLines and use with my Marx 666es to confound the purists. "H'm!" I thought to myself. "I could drop an electronic horn into that and use it with the Torpedo!"
Into the parts bins for a speaker and horn board, which I wired together and tested on the bench. Worked okay, but it didn't sound much like a steam whistle. OK, there's always a plan B. I had a couple of electronic whistle boards in the same bin as the horn board. Now, did I have a DC air whistle to go with it?
Well, there was this HO Bachmann whistle platform lurking about... 
Promising initial test.
Now to remove the whistle, whose top was molded into the platform. A hot knife works like a hot knife through plastic... ;-)
Adding knuckle couplers to Scout trucks is a time-honored factory method for updating them.
Pickup rollers? Not so much.
A deceptively neat installation...
Shop Supervisor Norma Bates Kitteh was off napping, but Yard Supervisor Sylvia Siamese stopped by to keep an eye on things and get a scritch...
Another promising test:
A slot was marked and cut to accomodate the whistle outlet.
Alas, this turned out to be one of those things which works great in the lab, not so much in the field. We got bupkis on the layout...
A bit of fiddling indicated that the Scout trucks weren't grounding terribly well. Since this was "doing things that God and Joshua Lionel Cowan never intended" territory, that was not unexpected. Clipping the trucks revealed a rather insulating floor condition...
Some Dremel wire brushing was in order...
...and a couple of contact washers were modified to fit...
With all that, the whistle still wasn't working right. I suspect it really needs a fixed voltage of at least 14VDC to run properly.
Ah, well. Back to the horn for now.
Scout trucks bolted securely back in town. Back in place. Lulu's back in town. This is what comes of typing while listening to Leon Redbone.
Bachmann is still involved in this build, as the speaker was salvaged from a G gauge Christmas trolley with a blown sound board...
And here we are in action!
I plan to revisit this project at some point, once I locate either a DC whistle that'll work on track voltages or an electronic whistle board that doesn't cost $50 or more. Anybody having same that they'd like to contribute to the cause, please let me know!
Thanks for reading!
Mitch
