Steam loco that became a diesel

Simon Cannon has recreated a French metre-gauge steam loco that found a new life – as a diesel...

In NGW157 I introduced you to my railway passion, the French metre gauge, and my diorama of the Vivarais which I have created on a shelf above the TV in my sitting room.

Several of the locomotives I have scratch-built were described in that article but this project was slightly special, as I was modelling a steam engine with no boiler and no number...

The CFD (Chemin de Fer Departmental) created several metregauge diesels by re-using the frames and wheels of redundant steam locomotives.

Vivarais X and Y were built at CFD Montmirail in 1948, and were based on ex-CFD Yonne steam locos nos 23 and 24 which had been built in 1887 by St Leonard, at Liege in Belgium.

The new locomotives have 180hp diesel motors and weigh 17 tons. X and Y have worked on the Vivarais line from Tournon to Lamastre for their whole life and both are still active today.

Visually right

As explained last month I model the Vivarais in O-16.5 scale (7mm to the foot running on 16.5mm wide OO-gauge track). This is not accurate for metre gauge, but looks fine and it works well as I can reuse old OO locos as chassis for my building projects. The mechanisms fit well into the bodies that I build for them as the Vivarais loaded gauge is similar to that of standard gauge.

I built Locotracteur Y using the chassis of a Lima OO class 08 diesel shunter, as this has outside frames. The wheels are a bit small but this has worked okay for me.

Step one was to find plans for the loco, and I was amazed at how many French metre-gauge plans are available on the internet – a good starting place is the web forum ‘Passion Metrique’ (www.passionmetrique.net/forums/viewforum. php?f=2). It is in French but with a little searching much of use to the modeller can be found.

Step two was to build a base around the OO chassis, which I did using 2mm plywood. I then built the body onto this base, mostly using Plasticard.

The level of detail you can achieve in 7mm scale is great – for example the cab controls can be easily replicated – in the picture you can see inside the cab door the throttle and below it the huge clutch pedal. There is no seat for the driver who must stand.

One difficult job was making the front bonnet, which is curved and with thin bars. I managed to do this using thin Plasticard. The final touch was the headlights, which I made using old glass jewellery gems.