First of all, apologies that there was no April or June On the Work Bench - pressure of live work to blame - plus a bit of poor time management.

Advanced Passenger Train
We have been asked to quote for remotoring a Hornby APT (Advanced Passenger train) with a Heljan Class 33 mechanism. It was a fairly easy conversion but the results were disappointing for two reasons. First, the result was a rather noisy power car which would have made a nonsense out of installing sound ( part of the quote requested). Most of the noise seemed to be coming from the gears on one of the bogies and this could probably have been fixed. However the other problem was that the central motor had to be quite high in the body so that the prop shafts cleared the bogie end brackets. This made the power car rather top heavy stopping it from tilting as it should. Adding more low down weight may have restored the balance but did not seem the right way to go.

Coincidentally we were working on a Hornby Eurostar. It had been fitted with coach lighting and the pickups from the wheels were of the wiper type. These pickups were causing so much friction that the power car was having problems moving the train ! Our job was the put the low friction “spring round the axle” pickups which we use on our coach lighting conversions. This job was very successful and the sight and sound (it was sound equipped at both ends) of the Eurostar circling my layout was most impressive (even though it is totally out of time period and geography). To get to the point, it was while working on the Eurostar that I realised the Eurostar power bogies would fit the APT with very little error in wheelbase.

I fitted two of the power bogies into the APT after swapping the traction tyred wheels for metal ones. The conversion has proved very successful giving a powerful and quiet power car.

We also fitted front and rear lights (with anti-flicker) to both driving cars which are far superior to the original dim front only offerings.