A Small Garden Railroad: Christmas in July!

Saturday, 20 July 2019

Christmas in July!

When is the best time to buy Christmas ornaments? In the summer!

I bought this Toy State #5430 "Christmas Magic Express" secondhand for the price of a burger and a soda, taking the risk it won't work. I was aware the quality of these sets is not very good. Mostly they survive 1 holiday season.
But I figured I could always chop the engine and place a LGB motorblock in it or use the cars with another engine.
The wheelbase fits the tracks perfectly. The engine runs on 4x C-type 1,5 volts batteries (6 volts total). The dining car and the pumpcar have a light that is powered by a 1,5 volts AA type battery. The tender can play 19 Christmas tunes (but I never came further than 3 as my ears were protesting).

During the first testrun with locomotive runs without any problems on the layout. Though... it does make the same sound as a vacuum cleaner...

Testrun with the complete train was no success unfortunately. The engine could not pull all cars through some of the curves. The train gets stuck. This is most likely caused by the two animated cars; the moving bear conductor and the pumping toy soldier. The animated figures are connected to the axles of the cars to make them move. This is causing resistance on the axles and the wheels start to brake because of this. Also, both these cars seems to have a slight bit wider wheelbase on the axles driving the animated figures. The wheels do not run as freely as the other cars. I guess this can be fixed on 2 ways: somehow making a less wider wheelbase and if that does not work, try to drive the figures in another way, for instance with a little electric motor.
An other solution could be to build a motor block in the engine (what was my plan B anyway).
This will make it more powerful and will fix the vacuum cleaner sound as well. Not sure yet what to do...

Some more pictures of the trainset: