I’ve found an Atlas undecorated U30C at my LHS and am wondering how well these run. He’s got a good price on it and I thought it would look good in my Rock paint. Does anyone own one of these? How good do they run? I don’t care about accuracy to the real thing. Just if there are any known problems.
Thanks,
Jeremy
Juby,
I’m assuming you’re in HO.
The modern Atlas locomotives, IMHO, are sweet running units! I have a GP7 and an FP7. Very quiet, low amp motors. They run more quietly than my P2Ks.
If your hobby shop has a test track (and he should!!) have the sales rep run it for you. You likely won’t be dissappointed.
Hope this helps!
My bad, I didn’t say what scale. I put the scale I model in in my sig, just in case I do that again. Yes I model Ho and that does help. I will have them test run it for me and I hope I’m not dissappointed. I have some ideas I’d like to apply to it and he’s got a great price on it. Thanks for the info.
Jeremy
I have 3 of the Atlas HO scale U33c’s. One barely runs, and the other two had to have their wheels replaced because the Atlas wheels were very poorly made. Shell vibration is another problem with them. No amount of lubrication and isolation of the shell from the frame with electrical tape has been able to stop the noise. For some reason, this has been the only Atlas engine that I have ever had problems with.
I have six of the new U30C’s and they run very well. Three of them came with the pre-installed Atlas 342 DCC decoder, while the other three were analog units. Both perform well, and I would highly recommend them. I also have four of the U33C models referred to in the previous post, and I have had little problem with them. One of the circuit boards went bad, but other than that, they run great.
I dropped decoders in all of mine (9) and they run sweet. Very good stuff from Atlas.
BC