I have a Broadway Limited 2-8-2 Heavy Mikado, which I am very satisfied with. I also have a Spectrum Master Series Shays engine. The Shays is very slow-even at top speed. I am running both with a Digitrax Zephyr. I understand the Shays is a work engine, while the BLI is a mainline show engine-but the Shays is so slow, and it doesn’t change from the #1 setting to the #5 setting–is this normal ?
Thanks.
Mike
The top speed of a shay I believe is about 15 mph flat out… My Bachmann shays are very slow as well. Hard to say about yours without seeing them run. I love the fact that they can take 7 minutes to run around an 80’ loop of track…
As for the throttle settings not changing the speed between 1 and 5 settings, this could be a decoder programming issue…
Guy
15mph is extremely fast for a Shay. Most of the time they ran more like 1-2 mph. They are the railroad equivalent of a Jeep not a sports car.
Shay and Heisler geared engines were meant to be used on mountainous logging railroads with steep grades and sharp curves, sometimes on temporary panel track that wasn’t even ballasted. The top speed for a real Shay was around 12-13 MPH, so the Bachmann model is correctly geared for that speed range. Trying to run it any faster is going to cause the gearing to fly apart.
I can out WALK most geared engines!
Actually, the HO Bachmann Shay is geared too fast - almost twice as fast as the real locomotive…
The Mikado should be able to go 5 to 6 times faster than the Shay.
My Bachmann Spectrum Shay, CPR 5903, takes about 10 minutes at a prototypical speed to do an 80 feet circuit of the flatlands of the club layout . I avoid running it at its maximum, having found that the three vertical piston rods are a bit fragile and prone to disconnect from the horizontal crankshaft at the maximum speed.
Other club members, who operate mainly diesels and some steam are fascinated to watch it creep along with a mixed freight load in tow.
I’m looking forward to putting 5903 to work on steep grades of the Grizzly Northern’s mining branchline.
Some years ago I was at the Illinois Railroad Museum in Union IL and I heard a steam locomotive coming at high speed. I ran like the Dickens to trackside, ready to take a photo – nothing was there. But the sound kept coming. It was their Shay. It sounded like it was going 80 MPH. I doubt if it was going 5 mph. Any faster and it would have shaken itself apart I think. The Shay takes advantage of one of the weaknesses of steam versus electric or diesels. At the risk of getting the physics a bit skewed here – steam develops its max horsepower at top speed, so steam can move a huge train at high speed but … it cannot always start that train from a standing stop. Diesels and electrics are the opposite – their greatest strength is when they start. So a Shay is all out at slow speed and can really pull or go up astounding grades, which is what it was built for.
Dave Nelson