New Rail Bus Coming

For Christmas I asked Santa (my wife) for a Bachmann ON30 Rail Truck. I'm not a big fan of the looks of the rail car but there are a lot of cool kits and examples of what you can do to customize one.

MicroMark was having a big clearance sale on them so they were only $49. Xmas morning I was delighted to find one under the tree. Unfortunately it only worked for about three minutes. Searching the web I found the their is a serious flaw with the gearing on these rail trucks.

So I contacted MicroMark and found out I had two options. One send it back to them for a refund but pay for restocking and postage (rip off!) or send it back to Bachmann for repair which I did.

About a month later I got a call from a nice guy at Bachmann who said the rail truck is being redesigned and it might be six months to get a new one! Yikes! But the good news is they offered me their new Rail Bus in exchange. Awesome. I can't wait. I like the looks of the rail bus and it can handle the low volume of passenger traffic on my railroad. Nice of Bachmann to offer the upgrade! Boo to Micro Mark for dumping the product on the market and then charging customers for returns.

Prototype: Lister 'R' Type Rail Trucks

Stoke-on-Trent once had a large number of small sewage works with many having their own narrow gauge railway. Several used Lister 'R' Type Rail Trucks to move the wagons containing the sludge around the works and one, number 39419, is now located at Mill Meece.

The Rail Truck is the rail version of the Lister Auto Truck, first produced by R.A. Lister & Company Limited in the spring of 1926. The original Auto Truck was a simple three wheeled vehicle with a single wheel at the front driven by an air cooled J.A. Prestwich (JAP) 600cc petrol engine.

Following the success of the Auto Truck a petrol locomotive was designed in 1928. These used the same JAP engine, oil and fuel tanks and front housing as the Auto Truck. The latter comprised a cast iron grille carrying the words ‘Lister’ and ‘Auto Truck’ at the front with a plain sheet steel curved bonnet top and sides.