Garden Railway Forum

I have purchased an old Billy loco (one with a square gas tank) and I want to fit a chuff pipe. There seems to be 2 problems with this. 1. I can't remove the smoke box as the steam feed pipe to the cylinders goes through a large hole in the smokebox base and not a slot as in later models and 2. the steam exhaust pipes are very short and go into a short piece of flattened tube wrapped around them.

Has anyone got a solution to these issues?. I am happy to dismantle the loco to any extent, just cant seem to get the smokebox off> Is it a push fit onto the end of the boiler as current models?

1) You'll need to take the boiler off the frames. Once that is done you can remove the smokebox, which is a push-fit on to the boiler, by passing it along the superheater pipe.

2) The flattened tube will pull off. You can specify a longer pipe length when you order the chuffer pipe to accommodate the shorter exhaust pipes.

Thanks Tony, I suspected I needed to remove the boiler. No problem, as I was planning to strip the loco down anyway. Thank you for your speedy response, this forum thing is so useful.

Rgds

My pleasure! If you're going that far anyway it would be worth changing the circular hole in the smokebox in to a "mouse hole", i.e. open to one edge, and modifying the fixings so it can be easily removed in the future.

Are there any issues with the old square gas tank? Any idea how old this is or when Roundhouse changed to using the round ones? Should I consider replacing it with the current round type?