Team Steam is Back!

I finally got around to getting two of my mainline steamers up and running again. For the past two years, my Kato/GHQ L1 has been sitting idle in the Altoona locomotive shop. The darn just didn't run right after conversion to DCC.  After a little detective work, I found the problem lay with the tender. Its wheels provide most of the power pickup and they weren't making good contact with the rails.

The solution turned out to be dead simple. I went to Hobby Lobby, bought some Pinewood Derby car weights and packed as many of them as humanly possible into the tender. And that was the ticket! The locomotive ran smooth as silk after that.

You may recall that a few months ago I ran my brass I1 into a turnout set the wrong way, shorted it out and cooked the decoder. I purchased a new decoder back in August and over the past few days have been working on installing it.

Now, as delivered, the locomotive's drivers pick up the right rail current and the tender wheels picked up the left. This arrangement was okay but not optimal. There were a handful of turnouts on my layout that were impassible obstacles for this loco. My solution was to swap out the stock tender trucks with Bachmann trucks, which draw current from all eight wheels. This would prove far easier said than done.

The tender chassis had to be modified to accommodate the new trucks.  For the forward trucks, I fired up my Dremmel and proceeded to cut two slits in the chassis. Believe me, taking power tools to a $400 brass locomotive is not for the faint of heart! I successfully cut said slits but in the process obliterated the screw holes for holding the shell on. What's worse, I cut right through the end of the chassis! Once that happened, I knew it was time to fight my Greek genes, go downstairs and take a break. After having some lunch and taking some time to cool down and think rationally, I arrived at a solution. I reinforced the front of the tender with a piece of styrene.

For the rear trucks, I decided cutting slits wasn't the way to go.  Instead, I opted to cut off the vertical tab on each truck contact. Using a pin vise, I enlarged the holes on each side of the bolster to accommodate the wires. This worked beautifully.  With that done, I soldered the wires to the truck contacts and the decoder.

The final hurdle was mounting the trucks. The mounting holes on the Bachmann trucks are considerably larger than those of the stock trucks. After scavenging the local hardware store for washers, I came up empty-handed. My solution was to take two small pieces of styrene and drill small holes in them. These act as retention plates for the trucks.

With the decoder installed, I put the loco on the tracks and it ran perfectly. It moved through the turnout that had once stopped it dead with total confidence. So, the effort paid off. That said, I would sooner endure a root canal without novocaine than do that again!

While we're on the subject of steam, Broadway Limited delivered their long-awaited T1 shortly before Thanksgiving. While not quite as good as their M1, it is a fine locomotive. In terms of steam, we sure have come a long way in the last five years.