Other Small Locos

As I said in my last post, an early layout I built was a shelf layout, what Carl Arendt might have called a micro. I'm still interested in the idea, I have a very small micro on a shelf in a storage room near my layout room, and i don't rule out building another -- someday, I may need to go back to the shelf layout in the walk-in closet. So I keep looking for interesting small locos.

The Bachmann Porter 0-6-0T side tank loco seems to be the successor to the Spectrum saddle tank. According to the review in the January 2014 MR, the Bachmann Porter 0-6-0T is a class C S-K locomotive weighing between 75 and 83 tons, shown in the 1892 Porter catalog. Here's the one I got:

Like the Spectrum loco in the last post, it looks good with Accurail as-delivered USRA hoppers:

This is a good loco for micro layouts, but the two hoppers you see look to be about its limit. I haven't found a photo of any prototype much like it. The Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal had two side-tank Porters, but they were larger and heavier than this one.

I got involved in a round-robin project on the old Whistle Post forum, which was a good combination of friendliness and interesting content -- no forums are left that are like that one. (I got to know Ralph V there.) The late forum owner sent out an old Roundhouse saddle tank 0-6-0T for members to successively assemble, paint, detail, and post photos. I did some preliminary assembly, testing, and painting:

The fire truck was for the local railfans to fill the boiler so it could be steamed up! Looks like the motor on this one gave up the ghost fairly quickly, and then the whole thing went south as, pretty much predictably, a member got it in the round robin and disappeared. This model dates from the 1950s, I think, and had its drive upgraded in the 1970s. However, it's no match for recent Bachmanns.

Here's a Roundhouse EMD Model 40:

I haven't tried converting this to DCC, but it's a very good runner on DC. There's a Model 40, ex US Navy, at the Travel Town museum in Los Angeles, not far from where I live:

Here's a Ken Kidder brass steam dummy from the 1960s that I painted up to run on my early shelf layout:

However, the couplers were always set at the HOn3 level, and I never fixed that, so I never switched with it. At this point, I would try to replace the couplers with offset-shank Kadees -- but then I'd have to look at DCC. The prototype steam dummy ran on a pier in San Diego.