Consulting Reference Designs
I'm lucky that smarter builders than I have already solved some of these tricky problems with similar (and in one case identical) prototypes. What you see here are Andrew Harvey's splendid A1 Peppercorn pacific (Tornado in its grey primer) and Carl Greatrix's sublime LNER A4 Gresley pacific. Each of these models were scaled and mapped as best as possible to my stud scale for comparison purposes.
Observations:
1) The tenders for both locomotives are quite similar and superbly rendered by both Andrew and Carl--almost dead accurate to scale.
2) Spacing the main drivers to 5s spacing forces a compression in the overall length of the locomotive to maintain proportions. Despite compression, both locomotives still look spot on.
I'm worried that adherence to scale and therefore adopting 6s spacing on the XL drivers will not "look right"? I'm lucky that they are black wheels against black frames--this helps "disguise" the undersize nature of the drivers. I'd love to see a pacific wheel arrangement with BBB XL drivers with 6s driver spacing--I'm guessing it would still look ok?
Consulting Reference Designs
I'm lucky that smarter builders than I have already solved some of these tricky problems with similar (and in one case identical) prototypes. What you see here are Andrew Harvey's splendid A1 Peppercorn pacific (Tornado in its grey primer) and Carl Greatrix's sublime LNER A4 Gresley pacific. Each of these models were scaled and mapped as best as possible to my stud scale for comparison purposes.
Observations:
1) The tenders for both locomotives are quite similar and superbly rendered by both Andrew and Carl--almost dead accurate to scale.
2) Spacing the main drivers to 5s spacing forces a compression in the overall length of the locomotive to maintain proportions. Despite compression, both locomotives still look spot on.
I'm worried that adherence to scale and therefore adopting 6s spacing on the XL drivers will not "look right"? I'm lucky that they are black wheels against black frames--this helps "disguise" the undersize nature of the drivers. I'd love to see a pacific wheel arrangement with BBB XL drivers with 6s driver spacing--I'm guessing it would still look ok?