I bought this Tichy PRR War Emergency gondola as a RTR model. As it came out of the box it was way too light at 2.6 ounces.
I therefore did the liquid lead thing to the underframe, even so I was only able to get this sucker up to 3.2 ounces. Just over half the weight it should be according to NMRA guideline, which for all there faults from being a trifle conservative, do at least provide a solid chance of reliable running.
So after much rumination over what to do, various choices, of do nothing, add more weight and if so how? I decided that if I got an AMB LaserKit false floor I could cut out the floor area around the metal weight and pour in more liquid lead.
Here it is just after I had used my Dremel to cut around the floor. I drilled through from the bottom and scored the floor to marked where I was cutting.
As soon as I cleaned this I poured some liquid lead in and was disappointed to find that I could only increase the cars weight to 4.2 ounces. All that work for so little added extra weight. It was at this point I decided that the best thing to do was remove the rather slim steel weight and replace that with some lead, and while I'm at it replace the liquid lead with lead sheet.
This required me to disassemble the gondola. by cutting across the underframe and teasing everything apart. I then saw the mes that I had to clean up, and I realised I had "jumped the shark", as this whole North Shore project is about keeping things simple, using RTR models with a few kits, having some laughs, getting on down, and playing with trains.
I asked my partner whether I had "jumped the shark"? I was told in no uncertain terms that I had not just jumped a shark, but that I had jumped a plurality of sharks, as it wasn't a question of whether I had, but how many I was I jumping?.
My mission is to now raise this model's weight to five ounces, cue music. My plan is to cast a lead sub-floor to fit the space I've created.
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