Yes , you can remove the steampipe.
What i did was remove the pipe, snipped off the connection to the boiler and glued it inside the recess of the front truck.
So you still see the steampipe but it moves freely.
I also removed the top bolts of the front leaf springs.

Ton

Yes and yes , very sharp corners 37.5cm.
My 2-6-6-2's also manage these extreme radii and have, after some mods, no problems at all.
But no problems with wires breaking off, yet.
The buildup of both types are the same.

Ton

I did the same and it is a perfect runner.
I had three split gears , the small ones.

Ton

I have two 2-4-4-2's running on my layout.
First one and now the second one had power pickup problems.
It seemes like the two pickup wires, black and red, on the front bogie are to tight.
They go trough two holes on top of the front gearbox and then go down to the two bronze pickups.
On both two locomotives one of the wires just broke off near the pickups.
That means that i had to disassemble the locomotive and the front bogie to get to the soldering points.
I resoldered the wire and after reassembling the bogie i gave the wires some slack. through the holes.
Let's hope it will solve the problem.

Ton

I did the railbus to and it's a smouth runner!
Mr.B. sent me so much gears that i nearly can repair an other one!
In total i had three small split gears......

Ton

Steve, i have two 2-6-6-2's on my small radii layout running smoothly.
However i had to make some slight modifications.
see replies above.

Ton

Update; 2-4-4-2's run unmodified on a radius of 14.8" without any problems.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB_hL4T0YpU

Ton

Due to lack of space my father had his layout underneath the parental bed.
The track and locomotives were Fleischmann.
The track was folded steel tracked and had cardboard sleepers.
His first loco was an American diesel switcher and his second a T3.
I still have them running in my collection.
I was born literally with trains under the bed!
I can remember my first train set.
It was a windup from Fleischmann.
Have a look in the 0n30 section/pictures of my website.
www.pe2tr.nl
The first photo is me in 1958 with the diesel.

Ton
The Netherlands

TATATATAA TATAAA!!! the package has arrived!
Thanks Mr.B.

Ton

I have had a reply from the gears replacement dep.
No thanks to the service dep.
The simple thing is that in English it is O N thirty,  pronouncing the O as the letter O.
Here in the rest of europe we use the 0 as in zero.
So i used a zero in stead of the letter O.......

OOPS!

Ton

Now you can see that english is not my native language and that reading is also something you have to do very carefully!
They will forward the message to the appropriate department.
i was focussing on the warenty bla bla........
OOPS!

Ton

Yes i got a reply from your service department......
The only problem is that your service department don't seem to communicate with the replacement gears department!
The service departmenr reply was the standard bla bla about rates and warenty.
I don't think that dear Laura had any idea what i was talking about!!
I send here a link to this topic and asked again to forward the previous mail to the replacement gears department.

Will be continued.....

Ton

I have tried to send a mail to the special mail adress again, no joy!
It bounced right back with the statement that the adress does not excist.
So now i send a mail to your service department. explaining why and if they could forward my message.....
It didn't come back (yet) , so there is hope.

Ton

I just tried to send a mail to the mailadress 0n30support (at) Bachmanntrains.com.
The postmaster at bachmann stated that it does not seem to exist!
Mr.B. ?

Ton
The Netherlands

I have the same noise problems with my three 4-4-0 Americans and a Forney.....must be the design.
The rest of my collection is silent running!

Ton