Piko 38847, G-scale covered hopper car

My last business trip to the United States was just one week long. I have decided however to stay over the weekend and do some sightseeing. I traveled down to southern California and obviously I had to visit a nearby train store, too. This time it was a place called TrainShack located just a couple of miles from the famous Hollywood sign.

I liked the store a lot. It is big and offers a wide selection of items in different scales. I could not find any amazing deals though, but I was still determined to buy myself a souvenir. For that single reason, I decided to get the following Piko G-scale hopper car.

The item's number is 38847 and it cost me a little over $50. Well, it was "just a little over" before the sale tax was added. All taxes included it was very close to $60. Still cheaper than in Poland, but I can't say it was a steal...

The car comes packaged in a cleverly shaped piece of a cardboard. I forgot to take a photo of this interesting invention, but it was veeeery difficult to open. This time Piko has definitely managed to surprise me with the way they delivered their product.

The content is very little - just the wagon and a set of instruction and leaflets. It's surprising that an American cargo car, probably targeted towards the US market, does not come with spare knuckle couplers. Well, I guess Piko simply never does it...

Since there's not much to unbox, let's just take a look at the model...

The car definitely feels sturdy. It does not contain any fragile details, and it feels like it could actually survive being dropped on the ground. There are no movable or operable elements, either. This simplicity is understandable considering the price point, and it might actually be an advantage for people with kids. Still it feels like USA Trains offers more fun with their products at a similar cost...

The wheels are obviously made of plastic. The painted symbols and letters are flawless and crisp. The roof seems to be the most decorated element of the model, but still the walk is not really see-through and the hatches do not open at all.

My major concern with the car is however its size. It just feels small. Even the product's box is smaller than the usual Piko packaging. The model is supposed to be a freight car and I think it should really be larger. It's only 30cm long...

Comparing it to my European gondola car confirms that something is not right. Piko 38847 is not just shorter, it's also barely as tall. I think the volume of those two models should be comparable, but it looks like the American car would offer only around half the capacity of its Polish counterpart.

The funny thing is: this is a two-bay hopper and Piko offers a one-bay version, too. The other one is even shorter and features only 21cm of length. Is this really the same G-scale as other Piko rolling stock? I'm really not convinced...

The model is a nice souvenir from my trip to the USA. It is a good quality product for rather undemanding audience. Its price might be a tempting factor if you plan to assemble a longer train. Just remember it is simple and its scale seems to be a little off...

***

A further note about the size - the hopper cars made by USA Trains are all produced in 1:29 scale, and not 1:22.5. So they're smaller, too. The difference is however that USA Trains is very transparent about this fact. Perhaps it would feel fairer, if Piko was a little bit more vocal about the characteristics of its products.

Dapol "Great Western" coaches in N-scale

Both my wife and I are huge fans of The Crown TV series on Netflix. The first two seasons were great and we hope to see more in the future. One thing that caught my attention in this show, were the frequent train travels of the queen Elisabeth. And since I already had a nice N-scale British locomotive, I've decided to add some passenger cars and turn it into a train...

That's how I became the owner of three coaches produced by Dapol. They're priced at around 20 GBP each. I've ordered my pieces from the Hattons online store and they arrived quickly and in perfect condition.

The three cars look very similar to each other, and two of them are actually almost identical. But they are different models after all, as shown in the picture below.

They're all packaged in the same fashion which is not a surprise. The box is solid and makes an impression of a very safe enclosure. There's only one piece of information included: the roof removal instructions. We won't find any extra elements in the set, and the models come with Rapido-style couplers only.

I've chosen these specific items since they were advertised as "interior lighting ready". So the first thing I did was look under the car to see if there was anything that would fulfill that promise.

And yes, there are definitely some power pickups installed in the bogies. I'll be taking a closer look at this matter later in this post.

Let's see what the three cars look like overall...

...and let's notice some fine details, too.


They do look good. The paint job does not seem flawless in some places (eg. window frames), but we do get some nice tiny labels, too, and those are perfectly sharp. The body of each car offers quite a lot of small elements, and peeking inside the coaches reveals some realistic looking compartments and seats.

I've decided to remove the roof from one of the cars to confirm the "interior lighting readiness". The manual explains this process very well. Four metal pieces have to be extracted from both ends of the coach. One thing the instructions do not warn about however, is how springy those elements are. They jump away with great energy when loosened, and I almost lost one of those. So remember to secure them with one hand while detaching with the other.

Here's the inside of the car. One of its ends clearly shows...

...a tiny electrical socket. So the model not only features a set of power pickups, but it also delivers the voltage in a very elegant way.

Dapol offers a product called "lightbar" for adding internal illumination. I will be however using my own solution. Seems it will fit just fine, if I only shorten my PCBs a little. Sounds like another topic to cover on my blog in the future :)

The coaches from Dapol look very good. And considering they actually make the light installation very easy, they are really worth their price. Now I just need to find some time to complete the work and then I can give my new train a go.

Shooting cab-view videos on my N-scale layout

I'll spoil it right away. This post is not going to end with a spectacular success. But it's not going to be a complete failure, either. So while it's not a recipe everyone should blindly follow, it still contains some information that people might find valuable. That's what the blogs are for, right?

I was thinking about shooting a video from the driver's perspective on my N-scale layout for a long, long time. I was simply curious what it would look like... The challenge of doing that was pretty obvious - the camera had to be tiny, the focus had to be right, the movement had to be smooth, etc.

After careful consideration I believed I had found the equipment that would be good for my first attempt. And I've purchased two products:

• Tomytec motorized chassis
• SQ8 miniature video camera

Let's start with the chassis. This item was supposed to be a base for the camera, and I expected it to provide a smooth forward movement. The model I've chosen for this purpose is Tomytec TM-04 and it's priced at around $20 if you know where to look (Plaza Japan).

Here's the content of the box. It includes...

...the chassis with a preinstalled motor...

...a pair of couplers, a piece of weight, some details...

...and a manual (in Japanese).

The documentation is not very useful due to the language used. There's however a mention of the 12V DC, which seems the same as in case of my Tomix cleaning car. Coincidence? Don't think so... Tomix and Tomytec are one company. I better be careful with the voltage and not go above the limit.

Let's check out the camera now. First of all - this item was cheap. Actually very cheap - something around $10. Considering the price the content of the package is pretty impressive. It consists of:

• the camera itself
• a relatively well written manual
• a camera clip
• a charging cable

The camera is very small. It's a cube 2cm tall, wide and deep. Should fit on an N-scale layout well!

It's time for the very first test photo. I've placed the camera on my layout and... click!

Well, the first shot is not really good at all. There are at least three major problems with the captured image. Let's discuss them one by one...

Problem #1: the focus is somewhere far behind. In the above photo the elements in the front are all blurry, while the barely visible far items are sharp. This is really not a surprise. I didn't expect the camera to be capable of macro photography out of the box. That's why I also bought the following set of lenses. Those are aimed towards mobile phones and are extremely cheap on Ebay.

Without any extra lenses anything closer than 20cm from the camera is completely out of focus and the real crispness can be captured only when an object is around 40cm from the device. Once the macro lenses are added the focusing distance changes to around 8cm from the camera. And that's much, much better suited for recording a tiny train layout. Here's a photo to prove it - the foreground items look fine now.

The entire setup seems much more professional, too. Almost like a miniature SLR.

Problem #2 is about wrong colors. In the picture everything looks purple. That is caused by the type of lighting in my layout room. A good camera offers a selection of white balance settings to compensate for any lighting conditions, including a working auto mode, too. The cheap SQ8 device does not handle white balance well and it is calibrated for natural daylight only. So if you want to film inside, you need a light source of 6000K temperature or more. In other words: a very, very cold white illumination. Once this is used, the white balance issue is gone.

Problem #3 is about the overall image quality. But let's be honest - did I expect more from a cheap and tiny camera? No, I did not. This is not a GoPro. The quality will always be mediocre, even if we deliver a ton of light (which is still needed for the recording to be acceptable at all).

OK, it's time to put my video setup to a test...

Unfortunately I have quickly discovered another issue. While the Tomytec chassis's movement was pretty smooth, it was not able to go at a very low pace. Its minimum speed was way too fast for me.

That's why I've created a secondary setup with a Peco wagon kit. This contraption was pushed by a DCC locomotive capable of very slow and very smooth movement.

The outcome is the following video. It's a mix of recordings from both setups. You can probably recognize which shot is which by noticing the speed and listening to the motor sound.

Well, smooth ride it is not. Turns out that recording of an N-scale layout is very sensitive to any imperfections of the track. Even the slightest jumps - especially on switches - result in big disturbances in the video. The fact that my layout is tiny does not help at all. The loop is less than 2m long and it features 4 switches. So it's even difficult to capture a few seconds of video without unwanted jerks.

But in the end, the technology works. If my layout was larger and if it featured longer continuous  segments without switches, the video could actually turn out pretty good. Once the focus issue and the color inaccuracy are fixed, the only problem is the overall image quality which is something we have to accept. At least until a better miniature camera is released. As soon as that happens, I will re-visit this topic... And hopefully I have a larger layout by then :)