Garden Railway Forum

Since there are tenders for mamods, and gas burners, has anyone made a tender for the canister, so there is more space on the footplate?
So the cannister would trail behind the engine on wheels?

You could do that. The reason gas tanks are often located somewhere on the locomotive is that the butane will boil better when the tank is kept warm, as it is on the footplate near the boiler. If you put the tank in a tender, you may have trouble with burner performance in cool weather. Some manufacturers of tender locomotives situate the gas tank in a bath of warm water in the tender.

ive also seen engines with the steam pipe go round the tender gas tank before it goes through a superheater and eventually to the cylinders, of course the longer the steam pipe the greater the time it takes for the engine to move when the regulator is moved

OK and thanks for the information

If however you take something like the Hornby 3 1/2 inch gauge Stephenson's Rocket the gas tank is well and truly in the "tender/wagon" with no form of external heating and this works very well. So yes, it's been done at a commercial level.

Hope this helps

Apologies for the late entry here!

Arthur, in short yes the gas tank in a tender works. I have recently rebuilt my locomotive 'Titan' into using a swift sixteen tender from a MSS one (for proportion reasons). The gas tank has always lived in a tender in this loco and I have never had any issues with steaming it. The point is that when you have a larger loco that has a higher gas consumption, that use of a higher quantity of gas causes it to freeze. With an mamod/mss derived loco the gas consumption is so low that you'll struggle to stop it blowing off and therefore hardly uses the gas quick enough to freeze. I can never seem to turn Titan's gas down enough!



This image shows prior to rebuild and clearly shows that the gas tank couldn't be further from the loco.

One thing you must do however is use a good quality hose / pipe to bridge the gap between loco and tender and make it so it doesn't come apart easily otherwise it will quite literally go up in flames.

slightly off topic but am i right in saying the new roundhouse garret has a separate gas tank away from the boiler?

Gas tank on the Darj D is in the rear bunker.

It goes without saying you need a decent gas pipe. I use a silicone braided type, as you see in my image. It's a bloody tight fit over 1/8" pipe nipples so requires no clamp.

Gas tank on the Darj D has the exhaust pipe from the rear engine unit coiled under it to slightly warm it, works well.