The Aster Lion
An Essay

By Richard Finlayson

Don't remodel your house. Tear it down and start over. I told our framing contractor that I didn't really want him to add on to our old house, I just needed him to burn down our existing one. He didn't take me up on it. Chief among the perils of remodeling are the inevitable cost overruns and missed deadlines. There are so many unforeseen decisions to be made that before you know it you quit asking for advice because it only prolongs the pain. A To-Do list that word-for-word outdoes the published findings of a Senate sub-committee soon obliterated my thriving obsession with live steam. My machine tools, locomotives, projects, and follies didn't deserve such treatment: too-hastily packed in a haul-away storage unit lurking in the bowels of a San Jose warehouse with an address that won't come up on Yahoo Maps. Scary thought that these trappings of the hobby were safer there than being here in the cross hairs of our DIY project gone mad.

Eventually, and quite unexpectedly, the whole project started to come together and the new house started to emerge. Our work on the structural and mechanical paid off, and craftsmen are now crawling through the place using skill and experience to inevitably cover what was our hard work and perseverance beneath.

What came out the other side of a long winter was both a house starting to look like a home, and a powerful need to build a locomotive. The Aster Lion quickly became the target of very high expectations for a headlong plunge back into the pure elements of live steam: reliable design with unique personality, detail with durability, and power with control.

Reliable Design with Unique Personality

Lion follows several Aster designs for rod locomotives with gearing and reduction at the center of the design. The GER/OUST/ETAT 0-6-0 is a vintage, successful design that included a single acting oscillating cylinder. More recently the Grasshopper incorporated gearing as part of the drive design. In a single cylinder design, or when valve moments are reduced on two cylinder designs, gearing can lead to a reduction in speed, controllability, and also the correct number of exhaust beats per driver rotation. This is all true for Lion, with great result.

Lion's unique personality starts with the exaggerated motion of the plunging side rods hung so prominently on the large drivers. This uniqueness continues with the completely open cab and wonderfully accessible controls. Lion, at one quarter the price and one quarter the size of the Mikado delivers on one major satisfaction: this scale locomotive has accessible controls combined with appropriate power and control. Parenthetically, the overall stable design of the Mikado suffers a major blemish with the flimsy hinged cab roof and crude controls.

Detail with Durability

My first exposure to Lion was with a roomful of fellow live steamers at Diamondhead 2000 during a viewing of "The Titfield Thunderbolt". The film is captivating, but the locomotive steals the show. Aster offers the Lion in two versions: restored and Titfield Thunderbolt. The two versions are identical in detail except for the paint scheme. Besides giving us these choices, Aster has also delivered a very high level of detail regardless of this being a less expensive locomotive. The rivet detail on the tender and smokebox add much to the overall appeal, but the fine truss rod detailing, brass capped chimney, backhead detail, appropriately scaled regulator and blower knobs really deliver on Aster's reputation for finely detailed scale models. Aster delivers this locomotive mostly painted, which goes a very long way towards successful completion of a beautiful model. The cosmetic boiler wrapper and firebox sides are delivered unpainted and cry out for a simple application of brown paint. Kevin O'Connor painted the cylinder and engine assembly black and Marc Horowitz chemically blackened the assembly. I wish I'd taken the time to check out their work before I finished because it makes a big difference in the overall look of the finished locomotive. Marc's review of the locomotive and accompanying construction notes can be considered mandatory reading for the interested kit builder and can be found at http://www.sidestreetbannerworks.com/railways/Lion/construction.html. There are other small, simply achieved paint details that Andrew Pullen outlines for our benefit on that same web site.

Surprisingly, this detailed locomotive is also very durable. The frame truss rods best illustrate this point. While the black brass rod itself is quite flexible, the design provides for very secure mounting during construction. While the rods can be expected to bend during mishaps, it would take a serious incident to have them come apart altogether. Likewise, the small, detailed regulator and blower controls are keyed to the valve post rather than relying on the force of a jam nut to keep things in line and tight. The overall impression that I have is that this detailed locomotive will stand up to long hours of handling, operation, and ordinary mishaps and still retain the clean, straight, detailed look that Aster is famous for.

Power with Control

Lion is surprisingly powerful and announces this with a sharp staccato beat. With a consist of 5-7 prototypical cars, Lion again surprises with a controllable slow speed. Lion can easily run uncontrollably away if the regulator is carelessly opened too far. In short, no excuses need to be made for either the capacity of the locomotive to pull a prototypical train or to achieve a satisfyingly slow speed under control.

Conclusion

The Aster Lion is a winner for both novice and experienced live steamers and to me seems an incredible value in the live steam locomotive trade today. Aster has touted this as one of their easiest kits in recent years. Not having built any recently I can't speak to that, but based on my experiences with building earlier models and rebuilding several recent ones I know that just a modest amount of enthusiasm and perseverance will reward the first timer with a well running locomotive. Experienced live steamers will enjoy a quality kit and a refreshingly unique design. Importantly, Aster USA stands firmly behind their US dealers and several minor problems on their side were dealt with quickly, and one major problem on my side (oops!) was gratefully accommodated.

In the final analysis I'm left pondering how it is that Aster is able to do what they do so well, and hoping they'll do it again.