All --
I cannot recommend the Walthers transfer table. I bought two during
Walthers' clearance sale on these, intending to splice (enlarge) both
the bridge and the pit to accommodate S scale electric locomotives. And
I succeeded. But the thing is a piece of junk.
The primary problem is that the pit, which is plastic, is "dished"
downward. This causes the gears on the motorized bridge drive to
disengage from the gear track that's cast into the pit. Flattening the
dish shape is impossible because of the complex shapes on the underside
of the pit. It would be simpler to cut the floor out of the plastic pit
and use a plywood floor. Of course the rails and gear track would have
to be salvaged from the plastic pit floor and attached to the wood. Too
much work for me.
Then there's the bridge. This part of the conversion went well.
However, the motorized bridge is completely separate from the pit and
thus is prone to tipping, especially with a heavy locomotive atop it.
Start or stop the pit and the inertia of the moving loco tends to tip
the whole thing over.
The old MR article shows a homemade job that should work a lot better.
It uses a rope-and-pulley system arranged in an "X" configuration that
pulls both ends of the bridge in the same direction. The cable can be
hand-cranked or motorized, and slack is adjusted with a simple
spring-tensioned pulley. Because the bridge is secured to the pit via
the cable, inertial tipping tendency is limited to the loco, and not the
entire loco/bridge combination. Thus, the arrangement is more stable.
Dick Karnes
========
PS -- For those of you who are electric fans like me, catenary over
these things is yet another problem. Unless we use DCC to raise and
lower our pantographs remotely, some very tricky non-protypical gimmicks
are needed to prevent pantograph-snagging when entering or leaving the
bridge, or when traversing laterally across the pit.
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