Tomix 6421 Track Cleaning Car

[Arabella Kochanski]

Yesthe soft brush works well and it will keep it moist with your desired track cleaner (I always just use plaing old 70-90% isopropyl alcohol). I usually procee the tomix car with a heki tank car I have that just puts lots of cleaner down on the rails on a dragged pad, the with the centerline roller wheel cleaner that really is a good scrubber,mthen the tomix to do the final buffing! Also run it around as the vacuum as well,magazine the stuff it collects. I also have small box car that I put a good strong rare earth magnet under and it finds very interesting slivers of metal now and then that other things don't pickup.

If you have a smart phone or pad you can also try the google translate app and take a picture of the Japanese and then you swipe the line you want translated. It works pretty good to get in context stuff from stuff like this ir import a picture from the web. I was pleasantly surprised by how well it worked on some tomytec diagrams!

This is the one I have and I got it as one of our club members who has a giant kato unitrak layout in his basement that gets mega dirty used one to great results. I got mine for like $40 lurking ebay for a while.

i dont think there is an unpowered version of the new tomix power coupling bogies as its sort of its own beast design i think. you need the powered bogie though to power the cleaner car. why not try to adapt the whole power ring/coupler bogie to the cleaner car so you continue the full train power train as well as supply power to the power car? maybe i missed something in your question.

i would really suggest you run the cleaning car as a custom cleaning car train with a powerful loco, and the tomix on vacuum mode then a tank car that spreads cleaner, a roller cleaner like the aztec or centerline. this combo should really take care for most issues you would have as smutz is a major thing for starting crud and getting sucked up into gears and such and a simple fluid apply like isopropanol and then the soft mechanical action of the roller cleaners does a great job cleaning the rail heads. track cleaning is always a dirty issue so i opt for attaching it full on with something more dedicated. aint pretty, but look at it as an interesting MOW train!

ive not found the buffing or grinding heads for the tomix to be very useful. i worry the grinding heads will just scratch the track heads up a lot which many feel leads to faster collection of dirt, and the buffing wheel i think can be better done by the roller type cleaners and on those you just use hunks of handi wipes that you can quickly (and very cheaply) replace.

The 6421 bogie has spring contacts supplying power to the frame, and the concept is same as the shinkansen bogie, except that for the latter, the total length is divided between the spring and the connector width.

the tomix cleaning units will run with any loco you choose. atlas even licensed the car to have an atlas branded one a while back. ive pulled it with all sorts of stuff over the years. if you are running 2 cleaners i would suggest a couple of locos though.

I bought one of these from Ken R from our club. It does its job (the ED61) adequately, but I wouldn't go out of the way for it. Now, if I get a few more TOMIX track cleaning cars (in different colors) for my track train, and the ED61 works it fine, no problem...

ok i tore apart an n700 truck with the ring coupler all wheel pickup. im guessing its the same truck as on the 700 dr yellow, but these may differ some. i cant find my tomix parts catalog to see what was there, i think it came out after the other all wheel pickup trains.

good news is that bogie axle/pin assembly will fit the ring pickup and the pickup's will fit into to the chassis slots. also the coupler bar looks long enough to work with a shinkansen coupled. bad news is there are several minor size differences between them in other parts

one big problem you see in cleaner3.jpg is that the n700 truck is a couple of mm longer than the cleaner truck so that the wheels run into the chassis (cleaner1.jpg). you could probably take off a few mm of the chassis to make room for the wheels there.

another issue is that the cleaner truck rides a mm or two higher above the chassis than the n700 truck does. this might be fixed by some washers to move the ring and truck up a tad, but its going to be tricky to get it just right.

Jeff you reaffirm what I went through with the koki's 104. Trying to change the trucks or couplers is challenging. You have to redesign the trucks or design a new coupler. Because the tolerances are so tight it will be difficult to find a bolt on replacement off the shelf unless one is very lucky.

The way I see it...you can place the circuit in one of Dr Yellow's car and then have the output drive a LED bar graph. . Being that the circuit reads DC voltage from the track you can run your own diags. Find places that needs cleaning or feeder issues.

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