I bought one of those Menards M&M "hirailer" trucks a while ago and have been tinkering with it on and off for months. I finally made up my mind to properly convert it into an old school railbus inspired by the Morristown and Erie #10 at the Whippany Railway Museum in New Jersey. Read along to see how it happened!
I started by dismantling the original truck, which is basically a small battery powered RC car with flanged O Scale wheels. Here's a decent picture showing the guts of the car-- the battery compartment fills the underbelly between the two axles. It also has a remote control providing 1 speed forward and 1 reverse. The front axle is unpowered with plastic wheels while the rear axle has a simple worm drive with rubber tires. There are LED headlights and taillights that turn on directionally, which is a very nice feature for a little model like this. My kit reuses everything.
As usual, I made a model of the frame with detail parts in Fusion 360, then drafted a new body onto the top of it. At first I was considering making a Mack railbus or the New Haven Railroad's infamous Cadillac Hirailer, but I found that the M&E #10 was a much closer fit to the frame. From what I've read on the museum's webpage, the current iteration of the #10 is built using parts from a 1920s White truck.
One thing that the original body does is hold the drive axle with the worm gears together, so when you take the back of the M&M truck out the whole axle pops out. I designed a small FDM printed part to hold the axle in place and rethreaded the original mounting hole to accept a #4-40 screw with a washer. After lightly greasing the gears and lubing the axles, then playing with the tension on the screw until the axle can turn freely without moving out of position, the frame can run by itself or with any body I can invent for it.
Here's the new body 3D printed in UV cured resin. It took a few tries to get the dimensions dialed in, but the fit is now just about perfect. The bus body goes in with three #2-56 screws and the front cowl is held in with one #2-56 screw. I tapped the screw bosses and chose screws of between 3/8" to 1/2" length.
Thorough track testing commenced. I took the unpainted bus to the Southern New England Chapter of the TCA's train show and had it running on the operating layout for most of the morning. It attracted a lot of attention, particularly from the families visiting the layout-- I let one young man drive it back and forth for almost an hour before his parents pried him away from the trains.
Here's a video of the original track test on my layout. This is optimal performance with fresh batteries in the remote and the bus-- I think they would need to be changed about every 2 hours (the range on the remote gets noticeably shorter as the batteries run down). I find that oiling the front and rear axles regularly helps with operation. The chassis will run on O31 curves and handles track switches well though the plastic and rubber wheels won't trip the non-derail.
With the design to my satisfaction, the next step was to build my personal model. I used Rustoleum 2x primer-paint as usual, using good old blue painter's tape to mask off the "zebra" pattern on the roof.
I have a whole bunch of K4 Decals left over from previous projects, including most of a sheet of Lehigh and New England, which seemed the natural choice for this project.
I chose my waterslide decals and applied them carefully, adding some nice contrasting colors to the sides and ends of the car.
After letting the paint fully set for a good 4-5 days, I topcoated with Rustoleum Matte Clear and glued handrails into the doors.
After taping in some clear plastic windows, the LNE White Truck railbus was ready to roll!
Here's a view of the other side. There are some wires exposed from the LED headlights-- I suppose I could cover them up with some electrical tape, but I think they kind of work with the livery.
Here's the finished railbus roaming the elevated section of my layout. I just snapped up a whole bunch of the M&M trucks in Menard's Black Friday sale, so I'll be able to offer kits with or without the entire drivetrain and control package. You can get my email from my profile if you'd like to reserve one.
