While I am here, I thought I might show a bash job I did to one of my shays. This started as standard non DCC Bachmann two truck shay.
I had rebuilt a bunch of sets of trucks and used them on my other shays and this is the one with the florist wire line shaft and NSL gears.
The two main ingredients were the Banta Cab and the water tank from Hamm River. The tender truck is from one of those left over shay trucks I had. I would have loved to make the coal bunker match the tender, but time didn't allow. I chose an onion style stack that I had in the parts box to give it something different and I actually like the style but may change it at some point to match closer to some of the eastern logging shays that I see in my books.
I enlarged the height of the coal bunker and chose to put the Tsunami decoder and speaker in that, although I could have easily added a huge speaker in the tender. I added extra pick-ups to the the shay drive wheels and of course the tender wheels have pick ups. I make them from 20 ga phosphor wire and they really seem to help as the stock shay pick up sucks.
This build obviously follows no prototype for those geared steam folks. I shot this on my little diorama that I have had around since my HO scale days, but updated recently. I am also working on a small bridge scen diorama, but I completed the shay first.
