One of these was Wiseman Model Services, who have a wonderful selection of kits, including a kit to covert the venerable HO scale Rivarossi Heisler to an On30 version. Since I had a three-truck Heisler from the old HO logging layout gathering dust in a box, I decided to try my hand at my first conversion.
The kit came with a new boiler, cab and tank, all resin castings, and some white metal details. In effect, everything but the mechanism was replaced. It was intended for a two-truck Heisler, but after considering whether or not I wanted to sever the third truck, I made it work by upconverting said third truck from scratch with suitably embossed sheet styrene. A large part of the reason why I kept the third truck was because it provided half of the power pick-up - something I had added to it long ago when I found that the pickups on the first and second trucks were one-sided only and prone to stalling on turnouts.
It was also surprisingly easy to convert to DCC, but even in O scale, there was little room for the decoder and none for a speaker. I used a Digitrax DN163.
The conversion was not as easy as I'd hoped, requiring a lot of sanding and adjusting to make everything fit tightly. As is the case with many of these boutique kits, the instructions were not as clear and detailed as they could have been, and left a lot for me to figure out. It was at times frustrating, but I suppose the challenge is part of the fun.
In this case, I wired up the lights as the castings provided in the kit were easy to work with and accepted small 12v incandescent bulbs.
It runs very nicely, as it did in HO using DC. The motor is fairly quiet so I wish there was a way to equip it with sound.
A very handsome little locomotive.
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Salmon Run Lumber's #7 posing in front of the Robson Landing station  |
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