My Projects#

  • A small gravity-powered sand dispenser to put a thin layer of fine sand on track for a bit of extra train traction.

Candidate Projects#

My goal is to build my original designs, but that won’t happen immediately. I need to first build my skills by undertaking projects designed by people who had put in the effort to document at sufficient detail to be reproduced by aspiring builders like myself.

  • Live Steam & Outdoor Railroading is a magazine whose topical focus is exactly what the title says it is. Among its various types of content, the most relevant to this page are the “Construction Serial” which are projects shared by people encouraging others to build one for themselves. Project details are given in installments spread across multiple issues. I am now a subscriber and have access to digital back issues dating back to January/February 2016.

  • Village Press Books online store is a consolidated storefront for several magazines including Live Steam & Outdoor Railroading. Some of the construction serials are compiled into books after their publication in LS&OR, usually incorporating feedback from readers and adding supplementary material not found in the original serial.

  • Kozo’s Books is a subset of the Village Press book store listing construction serial compilations of designs by Kozo Hiraoka. Unfortunately, this selection is limited to books currently in print. I had hoped to find his Pennsylvania A3 Switcher book here as it was explicitly subtitled The first project for the beginner. It is currently out of print and eBay auctions have been closing in the neighborhood of several hundreds of dollars. On the one hand, this is a trivial amount considering the money that would be spent on raw metal stock to build the A3. On the other hand, I prefer the physical appearance of the K-27 anyway.

  • Steam & Stirling Engine You Can Build is a four-book (so far?) collection, published by Village Press, of introductory thermal engine projects. Several people have recommended that I build a few stationary steam engines before attempting a steam locomotive so I should look into these projects and see if anything catches my eye.

Projects by Others#

Live steam model engines and locomotives have been a hobby for far longer than consumer internet has existed, but that doesn’t meant every project since then have been documented online. This is a place for me to collect the ones I’ve come across.

  • Quinn Dunki (Blondihacks) Pennsylvania A3 Switcher Quinn Dunki is building Kozo Hiraoka’s Pennsylvania A3 Switcher locomotive and documenting the process on her YouTube channel ‘Blondihacks’. Which covers many hobby machining topics beyond building this live steam locomotive.

  • Neidrauer 4166 Frisco Mikado is documented as a set of photo albums. Upside: a lot of cool pictures. Downside: not much in the way of technical details like dimensions and theoreticals behind the design implementation. I stumbled into this album when looking into what happens to steel boilers as they age. This locomotive needed a new boiler after the original one corroded away from a decade-plus of operations.

Sand Dispenser Forward