Reading 1633 at Tamaqua

Detail of poling car

There was a question over on the Reading Modeler site about the Reading Poling cars so I thought I’d post this image. It was scaned from a small print, but it shows the poling car working on the back of 1633. It appears to be built from a Tender frame. It has Tender trucks under it still. The side boards are similiar to the configuration of the steps behind the pilot beams on steam locomotives, only they have a long board attached to the length of them.

I’ve changed my mind a couple of time on which hill I was going to model. If I had stayed with Tamaqua to Mahanoy Tunnel this would have been at the top of the “to build” list. I’ve seen this in many of the yard photos from the top of the hill.

Sunset 3 rail drivers pulled from a Y-3

I started working on the first of my N1 projects this past week. I have a pair of the Sunset Y-3’s to use as the start of the model. One is a two rail locomotive and the other is a three rail locomotive. Both need to be converted to Proto48 but their conversion is different because they are starting from different places.

I started working on the three rail model first, mostly because it was out of the box and sitting on my shelf.

I pulled the three rail drivers out of the model’s frame. Boy they are really fat tires on there. 

Pressing the Driver centers off the axels

The driver centers were pressed off the axels. I also pressed out the pins at the same time.

Driver centers pressed off the axels

Here is my set of 3-rail driver centers all pressed off the axels and ready for the next step, the hack saw.