BACHMANN 31-177ds ex-LMS JUBILEE CLASS 6P 4-6-0 no. 45593 KOLHAPUR (revamped).
This older locomotive was found by accident in an unmarked box behind a lot of others! Why was it in such a box at all? Well, simply, because it was not much good! Keith bought it as a memory of the real one, which he had made a sound recording of. As supplied, it had sound fitted by Bachmann in the form of a Loksound 3.5 decoder, with presumably Bachmann’s own sound files. Unfortunately, these were to our minds worse than useless! Upon opening the throttle nothing happened for ten seconds, then the engine hooted; this was followed by a further five seconds wait, whereupon an acceleration from rest to a scale speed of 80 mph took place in about 10 seconds. Regardless of any ‘tweaking’ of the CV’s that was undertaken, the performance of the locomotive did not get any better. Moreover, the general ability of the machine to run smoothly seemed to be very limited by the fact it jerked, started and stopped all over the place wherever it liked! Examination showed the engine only had pick ups on the six driving wheels; none in the tender or on the front bogie. In disgust, Keith and I hid the thing, hopefully never to be found again. But surprise, surprise. Hollie found it and put it on the track. She drove it without the sound switched on and surprise again, it acquitted itself very well indeed. Turning the sound on once again resulted in the same rubbish performance recounted above. Keith was shown the non-sound performance and decided that perhaps the model should be given a second chance. So it was refitted with a Zimo MX644D decoder along with a 17000mf stay alive from You-Choos, a Rail-Exclusive 15x12x11mn sugarcube loud speaker in the coal bunker and of course a set of sound files by Mr Soundguy. The result is what you have been looking at in the video. Now why couldn’t Bachmann have done this to start off with?
29 сен 2024
