ETR 400 "Frecciarossa 1000" - part 2

 

Today, I decided to run my ETR 400 "Frecciarossa 1000" from ACME. See here for the previous post about it.

Running the full set

Here's the video of the full set running:

It's a beautiful model:

It basically takes the entire length of my layout ...

Because of the tight turns, I could not use all the black pieces between the cars and only left one at each junction, instead of the two provided. I still experienced a small issue, because a couple of those black pieces have extra material at the bottom and it prevented the couplers to move freely:

Car formation

I found out on Wikipedia that the car formation is: 4M4T; 1 Executive car, 1 Business car, 1 Business car with a bar-bistro, 1 Premium car, 4 Standard cars. I also found this document; on page 9, it shows the formation mentioned here.

However, 2 out of the 3 Standard cars have a pantograph, and it is not indicated by ACME how those cars should be positioned. The last Standard car is one end of the set, so easy to position 😆

I found this website that lists a lot of train formations, mostly in eastern Europe. There are some nice pictures from the train and several train formations:

I could see how the Standard cars are set, but I also wanted a "real" proof. And I found it with this video:

So, here it is in the correct order and direction:

1	Executive
2	Business   (panto on the right)
3	Bistro
4	Premium   (panto on the right)
5	Standard   (panto on the left)
6	Standard     (no panto)
7	Standard   (panto on the left, car is slightly different than car #5)
8	Standard

That was fun to investigate! The next thing to find out would be when those 4 pantographs are used ...