We have the Tomix "Thomas the Tank Engine" set. Thomas has a decoder installed and (once the chassis was put back together properly) runs quite well. In principle, Thomas could run on a sequence of schedules and visit any through or terminus type platform.
However, there is a catch: Annie and Clarbel have plastic wheels, so we can't add resistors to the axles for detection. The result is, Traincontroller can't detect the train reaching the end of a terminus block if the train is running with thomas at the rear.
The model seems to be significantly out of scale: it is (probably for artistic reasons) significantly bigger than you'd expect. The running wheels for Annie and Clarabel are 8.9mm diameter (10.2mm across the flanges); typical wheelsets that we can get are nearer 6mm. It would look badly our of scale simply putting smaller wheels in place of the provided ones. as I recall, the axle length is also different from those we have access to.
There could be several solutions, for which we don't yet know the best way forward:
- Get a suitable wheel set made on a "bespoke" basis by a competent metalsmith
- Find a "near equivalent" that fits the existing axle (1.49mm diameter, approx 1/16")
- Replace the chassis for Annie and Clarabel by a different chassis that we can get wheels for. The chassis is 20.3x62.9mm.
Any ideas anyone?