Sunday, November 04, 2007

Building a big 2 stall engine house



This weekend, I used almost all evening hours to construct the BIG 2 stall engine house that I purchased a few weeks ago. This nice model structure was made by IHC and although clearly intended for the American toy train market, it mentions "made in Denmark", well that is a surprise. The building instruction is one piece of paper with one drawing and that is a bit short, but the construction is straight forward. One aspect is not completely clear. There are two rectangular holes where we could fit two different ventilation blinds in, I just chose one. The construction time is about 6 hours and the resulting building is enormous: 27 1/2 inch long (70 cm), 10 1/2 inch (26 cm) tall and 12 inch (30 cm) wide. Four engines easily fit inside. It is a model-MEGA-structure or a train cathedral. I didnot bother about the BIG when buying it, but buyers beware, this thing is HUGE. My layout is full now. But it sure looks good.
One aspect is a bit daft though. The center-to-center rail distance for the two tracks is 5 inch, whereas for Lionel 027 6 1/4 is conventional. Well, this means I have to cut and solder a special rail to get it fitting. But for the rest it is a great structure.
Unfortunately, IHC do no longer offer 0 scale structures, in month time they vanished from the IHC website. Fortunately, Atlas 0 has included this engine house in their catalog, so most likely they have purchased the moulds. But this Atlas structure is with 2 chimneys, whereas the IHC has four!

2 comments:

Francesco Villani said...

ciao eggo !!! greate structure for your engines... it's huge :-O now tell me, can you move on your layout ?!? LOL :-)
have a nice day !!!

PS: have you seen my new videos ?!?

francesco

Anonymous said...

I have discovered that the Atlas 45" radius switch track split-forked works perfectly with 5" between center rails.