The first Scale-Craft locomotive I ever owned was this 4-6-0 rebuilt by David Sacks. He was an active OO gauger, originally was involved with the North Jersey group and then later lived in California. When I bought this from him in 1982 he sent this photo as a post card with the following note: “Your choo-choo + cars shipped today – Dec. 29. Pic shows your loco.”

As purchased it looked exactly like this. Greenbrook #18 was a rebuilt Scale-Craft 4-6-0. Basically he did four things to it besides the paint job:

1. Changed the motor over to a large DC permag motor.
2. “Streamlined” the body with brass side panels and a lot of glue, in the process also adding more weight and physically gluing the body to the frame!
3. Switched the loco over to use the tender from a Nason 2-8-0.
4. Changed the wheelsets in the pilot truck of the engine to smaller diameter wheels.

On the plus side the engine ran when purchased on DC! The other work on the model however was in ways a little crude. I stripped off all the paint and glue and brass panels and weights, restored the mounting of the body to be with screws, and the front truck I rebuilt with RP-25 contour wheelsets. 

I still have the side panels, which I have put in this close up photo, but I want to focus in for our purposes today on the motor conversion.

I have no idea the maker of the motor on this model. What I will say though is to do this you would have to sacrifice the original motor for a portion of the drive shaft, the part that is visible coming out of the gear box. He then drilled a hole through the shaft to add the wire needed to make it mate up with the universal coupling on the motor shaft.

The model itself still runs OK. Rather noisy! But it gets down the line! Prior to taking this photo I had it pulling a dozen average to free rolling OO cars around the layout.

Speaking of layouts, his layout was pretty large. You can pick up a few things about it from the photo, and that he was still active making equipment such as the converted HO hopper.

UPDATE 2011: One thing I did not notice until recently is that this specific model was originally shipped out with the S-C DC motor instead of their later AC/DC universal motor. The way to tell is that the gear tower is angled instead of having a horizontal drive shaft to the motor. I have an early motor on hand and I am not that pleased with how this model runs; be watching for another update on setting this back up with the original motor type.

UPDATE 2011 #2–it has a new motor now! I had a spare, original SC DC motor and switched to that.