General Discussion

I decided to run my recently acquired Silver Link, I took the body off to check it, and it looked and smelled almost new, just a few heat marks, it doesn’t look as if it had turned a wheel.

Body back on and steamed up as normal and pulls away, but on the 2nd bend intense wheel spin. Stopped the run and found that the drawbar was lifting the main wheels, after a little bending, back on the track to continue the run.

Going round nicely under control with 8 carriages, I decide to take a video. Reached for the phone, and then…… I knocked the livedrive off the shelf, and looked up to see the 2nd carriage at high speed disappearing off the track at corner 3, engine already gone into the black void behind the chimney stack. The live drive had landed buttons down on the + button.

Climbing over the baseboard I looked down, no sign of my new engine, needing a torch, the iphone comes in handy again! Peering once more into the void expecting to see a pile of broken plastic, I see the back end of the tender and a carriage, and squeezing through the gap I reach the carriage, find the other one too and now that the hissing and rotating wheels have stopped I extract the engine which had landed on a pile of trekking bags and kit, then slid down in the gap. Surprisingly the chimney was still present but the coal took a while to find. Luckily on inspection there’s no damage, not even a scratch, so back on the track for run 3 which was almost as exciting….