I won four Atlas Dash 8-40B locos on Ebay. Two were from the same person and the other two were from different people. One is DCC equipped. The two I got from the same auction run identical speeds. The DCC equipped runs slower and the forth one is considerably slower than the rest.
I also have an Atlas GE U25B that runs faster than a the Dash 8-40B’s. And an Atlas B23-7 that runs like a bat out of He!!.
I know that the DCC equipped loco will run slightly slower because of the decoder.
I am running these loco’s on DC right now until I can afford to change them to DCC. Can anyone tell me why the difference in speed?
I’m not positive, but the B23-7 or first run U25B likely don’t have the newer slow speed motors in them, so they might very well be notably faster.
Overall, even with the same loco’s, it’s common to have a slight difference in speed. I saw a LHS owner test run a whole box of the same Atlas loco’s and they all had varying speeds. Sometimes this corrects itself with break-in, and sometimes it won’t.
You should be able to overcome speed variations when running in DCC.
Any drop-in DCC decoders that folks reccomend for Atlas Dash 8-40B units? I didn’t see an apparent match on the Digitrax site so I’m appealing to the experience of other folks who’ve done DCC installs for these locomotives.
UPDATE: Looks like the Digitrax site says a DN163A0 will work in this application.