Jouef 141R extra pickups

[RSR Engineer]

Good morning, fellow members.

Quite a number of the locos on my layout are of somewhat advanced years, dating from as far back as the late 1960s. A typical case in point is a Jouef 141R that I found at a local flea market / carboot. Typical Jouef of those days, tender drive (no problem), traction tyres (de rigueur), pickups on just the four wheels of the other bogie. This is a woefully short live wheelbase, totally inadequate for the dead-frog points and slips of the old layout (and thus perforce of part of the new one). As this was also something of a trial balloon, I made do with extra pickups on just one pair of driving wheels, which seems adequate in practice. Also, the work is not quite complete, as I still need to find a decent two-pole miniature plug and socket.

It's all a bit primitive and Heath-Robinson but then I'm no Werner von Siemens, nor am I much good at bending wire accurately.

The work is, as usual, documented and illustrated on flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/188026976 ... 0310022394

Cheers,
Artur

[RSR Engineer]

In addition to the extra pickups, the tender needed a new power bogie chassis, because the gear train was jammed, and the loco needed a new front pony truck, because the wheels of the original one were decidedly out of true and rejoiced in derailing on every point frog (except when I watched it, of course). I was luckily able to obtain spares from a seller on eBay France.

There are a few videos of the 141R in action on flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/188026976 ... 7994476728 (titles in alphabetical order).

Cheers,
Artur

[Aussie 3 railer]

Your not doing to badly with the wire bends. Like your videos as well.

Dirk

[508035]

Hi RSR Engineer

I noticed in some of your pictures that you soldered some phosphor bronze pickup strip to the wire running along the chassis on both sides to allow the leading pair of coupled wheels to collect power. That is what I was going to suggest doing but my suggestion was going to be to fit as many pickups as possible in order to get 6 or even all 8 coupled wheels collecting power, the idea being to get full power collection in place because the more wheels you have picking up power, the better the loco will perform.

I had a number of tender driven hornby locomotives and found that they ran better with extra pickups, however, that was after the base keeper plates had been modified by fully removing the leaf spring detail to allow all the wheels to collect power.

The modifications had to be done because with some hornby steam locomotives generally only 2, 3, 4 or 5 of the coupled wheels ( depending on the class of loco ) actually collect power but by carrying out this modification those numbers can double.

To achieve this, I removed the original hornby pickups and made my own from scratch using single sided copperclad pcb board and phosphor bronze pickup strip. On some of my locos, I had to setup the pickups so that they made contact with the wheel treads instead of the backs of the wheels because due to usage by previous owners or general age of the models, the backs of the wheels became very rough and could rip the pickups to shreads hence the need to set them up to make contact with the wheel treads.

Granted there is more cleaning of the pickups required during maintenance but the extra pickups did help to improve performance. As my track setup became more complex, I found there would then be a need to fit pickups onto the leading coach which would preferably be a parcels coach. The wires from these pickups would then be connected to the tender, in addition to the loco pickups to give power collection over a much longer distance and therefore further improve the performance, the only drawback with this is that the loco and the parcels coach are permanently coupled, a small price to enable good power supply to the motor from the rails but well worth doing.

Hope this helps

[brian1951]

The OPs question was dated July 23, maybe your a bit late.

[508035]

Only found the topic this morning, hadn't seen it before today.

[Walkingthedog]

You have to be careful responding to posts. I once gave some advice to somebody who asked the question 2 years before and hadn’t been seen since.

[Rog (RJ)]

Late answers may be too late to be of help to OPs but can be helpful to others who look in later, so not always a waste.