Enhorning Industries Product Notes

The Enhorning chassis is unique. What appears to be very large weights over the frame of the model, are actually lead gearboxes rigidly attached to the frame. The interior of the gearbox contains a large planetary gear driven by a cylindrical gear on the shaft from the motor. There are no universal joints. The vertical center shaft of the planetary gear serves both as the truck kingpin and the driver of the truck gearing. The bottom of this shaft is fitted with a 45-degree bevel gear which drives a mating bevel gear mounted on a shaft that in turn drives each geared wheel axle. The wheelset gears are also 45-degree bevel gears. The three-piece drive-wheel gearbox allows rotation about the drive shaft passing between them, thus permitting true equalization of the sprung wheelsets in the truck frames. This design is one of the smoothest, trouble-free drives ever. There are no universal joints, no plastic tubing.

The photo below shows Enhorning's second version of its power train. The first, described above, used planetary gears and had gearboxes on all axles, and its chassis was made out of plastic. This second version's chassis is cast metal, the motor is a Pittman DC-94, which has a double-ended armature shaft. The trucks are driven via flexible shafts (long heavy coil springs, really) that connect to a gearbox on each truck's closest axle. Each axle (all four) has a pulley adjacent to one truck sideframe; the second axle of each truck is driven by a rubber belt around the pulleys. The flexible shafts have collars with set screws on each end; these clamp onto the gearbox and motor shafts. Those big clumps of metal are lead weights. This brute can pull everything on any layout!

Mark Mugnai has two of these models, and both of his have slotted tubes instead of the coil springs. Note that the elastic band shown in the photo is a temporary replacement for the O-ring that is supposed to go there, but Mark hadn't been able to locate any of those at the time of the photo (he has since replace them with the proper O-ring drive belts). At least the photo demonstrates how the system works. Mark states that these are among the smoothest and quietest models he's seen (he equates them to N- and HO-scale Kato engines for their running quality).