I added a roof to the DG today [which is probably a week ago as you read this as I did all this DG stuff over the Christmas weekend] using some 1 inch dia plastic irrigation pipe leftover from the AO cars.
After a lot of dremeling and sanding it's almost done. The real thing has an unusual cross section (curved on top but with steeper sections at the edges, but this will do. Its probably a smidge tall, but so is my other DG. Not shown in the mockup pic below was the removal of a section at the very back of the roof on the port side (avast!) for the dynamic brake roof shutters. I'm sure that will be visible in a later picture.
With that almost sorted it was time to go 'down there' into the netherworld of chassis surgery. The 'new' Kato Pa-1 chassis is DCC friendly, but longer than the old Kato/con-cor ones, so needs a few minor alterations. Luckily, it comes apart very easily:
A little nipping and tucking later and I have reduced the overall length by shaving the ends and removed some of the PA-1 fuel tank as the DGs had tiny tanks:
I then used a marker pen to blacken the lower surfaces of the metal casting that might show under the NZ120 body.Luckily, the PA-1 bogies are almost perfect for a DG. They are a tiny bit short in bogie wheelbase as almost all N scale mechs are for us (they should stretch further inboard towards the fuel tank), but the details are almost perfect. Technically the PA-1 has a pair of tiny coil springs on the outer of the equalizing beams where we had 1 coil spring, and the top of their bogie main casting has a tiny curve on top of it above the centre wheel, and our brake cylinders are more complex, but none of that bothers me enough to make any changes to the Kato items supplied.
p.s. Except for the bogie mounted sandboxes that one batch of the DGs had (the others had sandboxes hidden behind the headstocks)... I think perhaps all of the late-surviving locos had bogie sandboxes, but just at the '4 corners' of the loco, not one at each corner of each bogie.
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