Advice on Acela Motor

Model Railroader Electronics and DCC
1

Hello All

I recently picked up a DCC equiped acela and ran it on the club track.

The train was pretty sluggish and the max speed wasn’t what I expected to say the least after a 2 hour break in. It seems to take over 1/2 throttle to get it moving.

I picked up an NCE decoder to replace the factory one.

When I got the loco opened up I noticed something unusual. There are two 47 ohm resistors in line with the motor leads from the main board. There are also 2 capacitors which I’ll clip but the resistors are odd.

Does anyone know what voltage motor bachmann uses on these? I’m sure bypassing the resistors will bring much better performance but I wanted to ask if there is anything I’m overlooking before doing so.

Here’s a pic of the motor out of the chassis.

Thanks.

2

After checking into it more I found that these are not resistors but inductors. So they’ll be getting cut out [swg]

3

Well it’s noticably faster with the caps and inductors clipped out and an NCE D13SRP decoder installed. The startup speed is also low now and nice and smoothe. Worth the effort.
Taking the shell off was a bit different and took awhile to figure out since I hadn’t found instructions to do so anywhere. You first pry off the small nose cone. Then you slid the chin forward and off. After that the shell pulls off by prying out just a little and pulling up.
I’ll give it a better test run at the club tomorrow.