Powered Hi-Rail
This little fellow actually ran...
albeit not especially well. It was more of an exercise to see if it could be accomplished than to make something I'd run regularly. It's
powered by a pager motor, which was the first problem: it ran on 1.5 volts. A diode-based voltage regulator, with a light bulb as a ballast
resistor, allowed it to run on conventional throttles—but absolutely not on DCC (it was actually damaged by attempting to run it on a friend's
layout using his DCC system). The ultra-finescale wheels I used were another problem: the wheel treads were so narrow that they'd get caught
in most commercial frogs, and would drop between the rails of track that was the slightest bit out of gauge. And it was so lightweight that
it couldn't drag itself up any grade at all; it only moved on dead flat track with no switches. The body is from a GHQ kit, and owing to its
poor performance, it was never finished.
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