Also worth a mention at the Heyside bash was Richard's Duchess, painted & running. I believe he said it was 30 years in the making. It ran really smoothly, it had been built to fit a Crailcrest motor & gearbox, so that's what was fitted. It made me think how dcc chips have advanced now, so some can even power such a power hungry motor.
It reminded me of our early Heyside days, when the newly acquired ex exhibition Heyside layout had been cut down a little to fit Richard's basement & we had built a new fiddle yard covering just under half of the layout, along with considerable changes to the track around the station on the public viewing side. Running was just dc and Crailcrests were used in locos if there was space for them, while the smaller, powerful for it's size Ron Chaplin Red Arrow motors were used by some of us in preference to the Mashima 1833 as they had more power.
Then it was decided to go dcc. A wise decision as it turned out. In those early dcc days there was no sound & we found out by trial & error which motors could be safely powered dcc by which chips available at the time! The new helical gearboxes offered by Ron Chaplin & ABC gave us the opportunity to run low power consumption motors like selected, powerful variants of the Canon 1833 motor, as well as Maxons through these new very efficient helical gearboxes which gave very smooth, powerful loco performance.
Fast forward to the present & we have locos with great dcc sounds as well & can run those powerful Red Arrow motors too as I did in my Super D at the Heyside bash.
Progress indeed! To the future!
Steve
