1" Little Engines Camelback 0-4-0 Steam Locomotive

Well we had the loco out to the club and Oskar and Charlie had a hard time getting it to run but they were trying to start it with some coal that has been siting out by the steaming bays for a long time  and was not marked what type of coal it was.

I switched to some Welsh coal I had from home and it ran good, but I think the other coal got the best of the boys and they got a little frustrated, however we got it running at the end. Every body there that day  got a big kick out of seeing the tiny little injector work on the loco.

A few weeks later Jeff H. told me that he thought the coal we used was old power plant coal that was from a full size car that had flipped on its side many years ago. He said a few people in the past have tried to get that coal to fire without much luck.

There was also a ripped up bag in one of the cans that sad "blacksmithing coal" on it which I have been told is hard to run in the little fireboxes. Well live and learn, but I think we will need to get some good coal before we try to run it up at LALSM.

Tom D.


Edited by administrator - Nov 12 2010 at 2:39pm

We will see how far we get. I will bring my welder for marks' track shelf thing. I also need to make a road trip down to the old so cal club site at the Lomita site, as I got asked to get some sizes and photos of the tool box on the caboose for a man building one in 1.5, that lives up north

On Saturday Tom D took the camelback up to the West Coast Small Scale Meet. A few days before the meet Tom took the piston out of the axle pump and put in a new O-ring on it. The O-ring I had on hand was just a little big but it worked well. It seems to work best when there is higher boiler pressure? Getting the piston out was a lot of work as I had to get the set screw out of the axle eccentric and slide it to the side, but I felt lucky, as I was thinking at one point, I was going to have to pull the front set of drivers down to get it out and that would have meant pulling a lot of items off.

I also took to injector off and pulled it apart and cleaned it. I also put some new flares on the ends of the tubes going from the injector to the boiler check valve. The injector worked but it was slow to add water and on one of the runs the nub fell off onto the road bed. Oh well, I well make a new nub. We didn't need the injector to run the loco as the axle pump was working very good.

The only bad thing is that Charlie was using a set of pliers to pull the rod in and out a few times when he was running the loco hopefully it didn't mess up the end of the valve but that move did end his time running the loco the loco for the day. Oh well he is a smart kid and he will learn.

The loco seemed to run good but it is slow to heat up. It took a lot of finesse to run this loco and not lose your fire or your pressure it was not an easy thing to run but was a lot of fun as you had to be on top of what the loco was doing all the time. You also had to think ahead and not push it too hard.

Other SCLS members showed up to the meet and tried their hand at running this little loco. Most ended with the loco dead it the water at some point but that's part of the fun! It was a fun day and it seemed a lot of people at the meet enjoyed seeing this historic little loco out and running around. One nice thing was there were people at the meet that had a lot of info on the history of this little loco.

Well now I will blow out the tubes and smoke box, get the tender and water lines dryed out, wipe it down, oil up the cylinders, and put it back up on the shelf in the club house until next year.

Tom D

Edited by PhilC - Jun 28 2011 at 2:32pm