Jack Thompson's

An 'Inspection' Engine

For those of you who may be unfamiliar, many railroads provided what were called "inspection engines" for VIP excursions and inspection tours of their right-of-way. They came in many sizes and configurations. Often, an older engine was retrofitted and sometimes they were built from the ground up to serve this purpose. I'm sure they were quite cozy in the winter, but I bet they were a sweltering ride in the summer. Here ate some pictures show that such things really did exist and were the inspiration for this bash.

Here are some examples of 4-4-0's used as inspection engines:

Another common configuration was a 4-2-0 Forney-type.

This is the largest one I've seen so far.

Once the internal combustion engine became available, many railroads switched to something like this to save operating costs.

This is how it is done these days.

Here's another one from the New York Central,

... and from the Lehigh Valley.

The picture is a line drawing probably taken from this photo:

a 0-4-4. and very compact....

Did someone say they'd never seen a narrow gauge inspection train?
This is old #1 hauling business car #20 on the East Broad Top. Note the large windows in the ends of the car. Apparently, hauling the President around the railroad was all that #1 and #20 were required to do. He used them to go and meet pals for dinner - though only in summer I expect.

I had a nice Bachmann 4-4-0 wood-burner that didnÕt really fit the concept of operations for my railroad that I nevertheless wanted to use somehow. I also had a Bachmann 1:22.5 coach kit laying around that I didn't really need, so I decided to have some fun with the two. Granted, the above inspection locos were all used on standard gauge railroads and as far as I know there never was such a thing used on a narrow gauge one. But, as I have stated before, I have never been a slave to prototype. So I decided my 1:20.3 scale railroad would have one. Here's the result:

First, the 'official' builder's photos

Some quarter shots...

Going away...

Head on...

The toughest part of the project was building the front boarding steps. I would have liked to create curved, sweeping, wrought-iron staircases on either side of the pilot beam but I just didn't have the space or the necessary skill to do so. These were built up from sheet styrene and brass rod.

Here are some shots of the electronic "guts" of the thing. The coal pile is removable to allow access to the stuff in the tender. Those are the on/off switch and the charging jack in the water-fill trunk. I found that because the tender is made entirely of plastic, I could leave the antenna laying flat inside without loss of range.

The model is powered by a 14.8 vdc lithium-ion battery pack from Batteryspace.com (the big green thing on the left side) and controlled by an AirWire 9000 receiver/decoder. Believe it or not, there's also a Phoenix P-5 sound unit and 3" speaker in there as well as a programming jack and volume switch.

The coach body provides lots of room inside the cab...

Thefigures are from Preiser, who produce some very nice figures in several scales. Many of them are American turn-of-the-century types. They are done in 1:22.5 scale, which makes them a bit small for Fn3 (1:20.3), but that's what allowed me to fit these guys in the tight space I had. I guess that kinda explains why narrow gauge railroads didn't have inspection engines like this - they just weren't big enough.

Here is a shot of a couple of them on my workbench and some close-ups of them in the inspection engine:

On this part of the tender all I did was shorten the retaining chains a bit and swap the coils for leaf springs on the trucks.

On the rear deck of the tender, I added a handle to the tool box, scratch built a working cut lever for the Acccucraft coupler, and added a break line hose and "gladhand."

On the upper deck, I added a coal-retaining bulkhead, a larger water-fill trunk (for the on/off switch and the charging jack,) and, of course, a rear arc-type lamp.

The air compressor was relocated outside to just aft of the engineer's side rear driver (can't be disturbing all those VIPs in the cabin, y'know - not to mention suffocating them.)

I added a brake system and fenders for the drivers and additional air tanks on both sides.

The Stephenson valve gear is pretty much stock - just repainted.

The stock whistle and pop valves were extended up through the roof.

This will become my "traveling loco" - so I can run as a guest operator on other's railroads without having to haul a whole train around with me.