After playing with the New Hornby Castle I decided it was
time to give my elderly Bachmann Halls a fresh airing.
When I returned to railway modelling back in 2007 I already
had Castles and Warships from a previous 'life', but no Halls. This was just before Bachmann upgraded their
Hall and at the time I acquired three BR variants off eBay (6969, 6990 and
7915). The plan was to use the Halls on
four coach sets on my 'branch line'.
However at 1in 50ish the branch line proved to be over steep and the
haulage capabilities of the old Bachmann Hall was somewhat suspect. I had to adopt 'Plan B' - double head using
small Prairie tanks.
The track was still unballasted and it was an easy matter to
move the Nylon rail joiners along the track and to create a suitable section
break enabling the pilot engine to be uncoupled from the train engine at the
top of graded section.
More recently the layout was extended and the Halls can now
be taken round the newly created continuous run. The gradients on the 'mainline' are still
quite steep at around 1 in 56 and for one particular Hall (Mere Hall), four
coaches were still a problem.
I had already packed the front of the boiler with lead
(carefully wrapped in paper or tape to prevent shorting across the split
chassis). However the quantity of lead
was small and did not offer any meaningful improvement in haulage capacity.
It was time to turn my attention to those front bogie
springs.
These springs are easily removed and their removal seems to
me to provide an instant increase in haulage power without any discernible
degradation in running qualities.
However not all the Bachmann springs were the same! The spring out of 7915 (Mere Hall) was twice
as long (and strong) as the springs from the other two Halls, hence the
inferior haulage capacity.
Problem solved, all three Halls will now haul four Bachmann
Mk1s or Colletts up the branch line as originally planned.
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