[CFF] Romanian railbus

The last week, I showed you the logging railroad by Tobias. Afterwards I had a look into old photos of my first logging railroad and realized, that I’ve lost my original principles in modelling logging railroads during the last years.

Back in time, logging railroads meant to do something wired, outside of rules, eras and scale art, it was more some kind of “cheeky”, “crazy” and “rebellion”. Well, and then I found a LGB railbus in the classifieds of eBay…

Being “cheeky”, it had some analogy with the railbus used on the Moldovita line and in the next second “crazy” took the scepter and I bought the railbus. Once arrived, he came in contact with my “rebellion”… First I cleaned the gear boxes from old grease and replaced the electric stuff with Deltang and battery. As my layout features 4′ minimum radius, I locked the swinging gear boxes in place.

I added new coupler mounts to the frame with my own CFF-couplers and some rail guards. The body itself got only a few changes. I removed all the lettering and installed some compartment for the battery with bull’s-eye windows.

After just 2 days, the new railbus was ready for first service. Now I’ve a battery-powered loco in addition to my live steam Resita. Maybe I’ll build another steam loco with battery power as well? It would round the roster very nicely.

BTW, the railbus is very strong and can haul 4 loaded log cars up the hill with ease. The railbus at Moldovita was also used to haul log trains along the plain sections of the line.

AND I’ve to admit that I had so much fun kitbashing this railbus. Maybe my “logging railroad rebellion” just needed some refresh ;-)