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After building two tank engines, the BR 070 and BR 065 I thought it was time for something with a tender. There are many to choose from in Germany but in the end I picked the BR 055. There aren't many pictures of the real thing online so I mostly based my model on pictures from the likes of Fleischmann and Marklin. Grunneger also helped me out with some pictures he took himself of a BR 055 as well as a blue print from a book in his collection. Thanks! Using a little tool I wrote back in the VB6 days I put a brick grid on the blueprint. Apart from the gap between engine and tender I've managed to stay pretty close: The tender on this engine has quite a tricky shape at the back. With some snotting in all directions it worked out quite well. Oh, and underneath all the snot I had to get the wires in for the lights. The battery and receiver completely filled the tender so the (PF-L) motor had to fit in the engine. Not easy, because I wanted to keep that gap underneath the boiler: The driving gear wasn't easy either. The initial version had some issues with the rods catching eachother as documented here. This version works a treat though. Going round corners is always difficult. The tight curves are the reason that the gap between engine and tender is much bigger than in real life. To keep that gap as small as possible the flanged drivers are on the second and fourth axle. That unfortunately results in the front hanging well outside the track in turns. Compromises... The tender itself also took some tinkering. It has three axles and they are too far apart to make it around a corner if they were rigid. With the way I did the detailing on the side there was no room for the normal sliding axle. In the end the solution was to make a 5-wide axle; the middle wheels never touch the rails at the same time but they're close enough to look ok from the side. Overall I'm quite pleased with how this engine turned out. I may paint the rods and add some stickers at some stage but that's about it. Looking forward to running it on a layout now.
