An American Lady

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This is a little project we started while on vacation.  We were visiting with Gail Graham and Gail and I were looking at Roundhouse Lady Anne chassis and boiler kits that I had brought along.  We had also brought Diana's Lady Anne so Gail could see what the kits looked like when assembled.

The Lady Anne as she looks in September 2002.

We started trying to figure out what could be done to a stock Lady Anne to make her look more American.  The only rule was that anything done had to be installable by a person with just the normal hand tools.  One of the first things to come to mind was to replace the smoke stack cap with something more American. Gail had an extra diamond stack from the Emilia (John Clark's inspection locomotive) and we soon had the original Roundhouse cap replaced with the diamond stack.

The Lady Anne as she looked in August 2002.

One of the worst looking things on a Roundhouse Lady Anne is the safety valve/regulator assembly.  We thought covering this would do a lot to improve the appearance of the Lady Anne.  Gail had Diana pick out a dome style that she liked and soon had a dome fitted up to Diana's Lady Anne.  The fluted dome style was picked by looking through pictures of locomotives and picking out styles that were popular in the 1870"s.  The 1870"s was a time when narrow gauge was popular in the United States.

Once we saw how much better the Lady Anne looked with a dome covering the safety valve, we decided to add a sand dome to complete the look and replace the smooth dome that originally came with the Lady Anne.

When we got home, I looked through the "stuff" box and came up with a bell and headlight.  The bell and headlight are from Trackside Details.  The bell and sand dome were mounted to the boiler with JB Weld.  The headlight was mounted by making up a simple bracket from sheet brass.  The bracket was painted black and the two hand rail holes were used to mount the bracket.  I turned the number plate on the lathe, but similar number plates are available from Trackside Details.  The brass window trim was removed and the windows squared up.