Building it only took a couple of weeks, but painting it was another story and it was finally painted this weekend just gone. Part of the delay was that I thought I had no suitable white paint, but mostly because it took me several months to work up the enthusiasm. A couple of weeks ago I found a tin of old Humbrol white and finally ran out of excuses.
The model is a rail ambulance. They did exist in Australia and were common in inland Queensland, in places where there were railways, but no passable roads in the wet season. There were also a couple used on the West Coast of Tasmania, where roads were pretty much non-existent until the 1960s.
This one is typical of the breed, but not a scale model of any existing ambulance. I'm not aware of any Victorian rail ambulances, the VR would have used a gang motor and trailer to provide transport in a medical emergency. Since the TVT is theoretically based in a remote part of Victoria without much in the way of roads, this one is based on a Ford Model T ambulance design used in Victoria during the early 1920s.
The model is made to look like an older road ambulance from Melbourne has been purchased by the locals and converted to run on rails. The chassis design of the Model T makes it more difficult to convert to narrow gauge than other makes of car/truck and so this one has a modified chassis without the signature Model T transverse springs.
Mechanically and electrically the model is the same as my recent small rail motor models, with a small 6V geared motor, mitre gear final drive, rechargeable AAA batteries and with a simple on-off switch instead of a speed control circuit.
The first photo shows the basic chassis, which is mostly polystyrene sheet, with brass parts used where needed for bearings, gearbox etc. The basic chassis is fabricated from 0.080" polystyrene sheet, with the mechanical parts fixed in place with M2 machine screws. The chassis rails and leaf springs were fabricated from various size polystyrene strips and simply glued into place.
- Ambulance 1.jpg (63.29 KiB) Viewed 7095 times
The next photo shows the chassis wired and ready for a test run. Test runs on the backyard track showed it was running too fast and so one cell in the battery was replaced with a dummy cell. This reduced the top speed to about 20 scale mph which looks about right.
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The next step was to fabricate a 1917-23 Model T bonnet and radiator assembly and fix it to the chassis with a couple of screws. Note the dummy cell is now fitted in the battery holder.
- Ambulance 4.jpg (77.42 KiB) Viewed 7095 times
The body is a fairly simple fabrication out of various thicknesses of polystyrene sheet and strip. The only difficult part was forming the compound curve at the front of the roof. The completed, but unpainted model is shown in the next photo.
These old ambulances were very small and it will be noticed that the body design has only a half cab. The driver sat at the controls, with the patient and stretcher partly in the cab and the jockey sat in the back keeping an eye on the patient.
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The final photo shows the painted and finished model out on the track sitting in wintry sunshine before a final test run. Don't let the weak sunshine fool you, it is late winter here and yesterday was as cold as charity and blowing a gale.
- Ambulance 7.jpg (118.14 KiB) Viewed 7095 times
TVT Story
This is really just a bit of modelling frippery in terms of a railway like the TVT, let alone the timber trams I also model.
However, it kept me occupied for a while during our first level 3 shutdown and used up some of the bits and pieces that I have accumulated.
......and if the current shutdown gets extended, there's still enough bits left to build something like W. B. Marks "light petrol tractor" that he used to carry mail and goods to his general store at Tin Hut in the Rubicon Forest.
Regards,
Graeme
