40-class Locomotives Arrive In Gunnedah

Did the 40-class ever run out to Gunnedah, I’m not really sure, in any case when I ordered them back during 2008/2009 I wasn’t particularly concerned about that, they were simply one of my favourite locomotives, so I ordered one of each colour, 4001 in blue, 4018 in red and 4019 in green.

After a little bit of research, I figured out that those three locomotives were in those colours at the same time for a while, 4018 was painted from green to red in August 1958, 4019 was still green until May 1960, and 4001 was still in blue in July 1962. This would mean that between August 1958 and May 1960 these three units could have double or triple headed in these colours. I have seen photographs of triple 40-class working the Newcastle  Flyer, I wonder if 01, 18 and 19 were ever captured working together in their three different colours?

It’s kind of funny to think that it took longer for the 40-class to be delivered, than it does for a child to complete high school, but, much has been said about this particular locomotive and the difficulties and delays involved, so I won’t go into that any further.

My three arrived just before Christmas, but it was only recently that they were unpacked and placed on the layout. I ordered my three with factory weathering, which on my three is basically a light dusting over the bogies and underbody, which is enough to take away the shiny black finish, giving a fairly fresh “not long out of shops” look.

I am reasonably happy with how they look, the colours look good to my eyes, some of the detail is very nice, and some parts are somewhat underwhelming, the most obvious feature that does take away somewhat from the overall appearance is the height of the running boards over the bogies, which appears to be too great. Again much discussion has been made of this point, they are what they are, and for the most when running back and forth on the layout they do look okay.

One thing that has me slightly stumped, is that under DCC control they seem to take forever to stop, so even at speed step one, once returned it to zero, they take a few locomotive lengths to stop, which is ridiculous. I have gone into Decoder Pro and set CV4 to zero which had some effect, but nowhere near enough. Looking through the QSI document, it is possible that CV24 may need looking into??? Curious to know if anybody else has had this phenomenon with their 40-class?

As for progress on the layout, a friend of mine spent a couple of hours the other week labelling the points in Gunnedah yard and the appropriate pushbutton switches that activate the points. Until the proper yard panel is built, the pushbutton switches are just temporarily hanging, so it was quite difficult to know which buttons activated which set of points when wanting to run locomotives through the yard section. At least now each set of points is identified which makes life somewhat easier when wanting to change roads.

Some track has been roughly laid out where it needs to go further around the layout, and hopefully over the coming weeks this track can be permanently laid with dropper wires attached.

Apart from that there’s not much to report on, so I will leave it there for now, with some pictures below of the 40-class and a few other shots just for the sake of it.

Cheers

Darren