Before I search the entire internet has anyone bought one of these DCC WOW Americans?
Mine drags its sorry little umbilical tender cord which catches every frog.
Before I take the tender apart to see if I can pull enough wire back into that has anyone had the same problem and fixed it.
At least Bachmann moved the motor into the actual locomotive.
Nice runner with decent detail, albeit completely wrong for a Canadian railroad, c’est la vie as we say.
Did it on another engine.
Might be able to stuff it back in enough without opening it all up. Wouldn’t be the first nor the last loco to have too much wire sticking out.
–Randy
Mine dragged and I didn’t notice and it wore through and shorted. I put a new harness on and tried taking up the slack with no success as that little loco is so light weight it would come off with the harness pulled in. So I tacked it up with a dot of CA to the the pin the holds the tender on and it has been fine for years. I rarely remove a loco from the layout and picking up a 4-4-0 with the tender attached is not a biggie.
The replacement harness that bachmann sent had the red and black wires reversed from the one I took off, that was problematic. Poor quality control or maybe I was suppose to know colour coded wires can go into any slot in a harness plug.[:|]
Gracie Mille. I thought tying the cable to the height of the tender drawbar might serve but had not thought how to achieve it without adding forces that are unwanted. I’ll give it a try.
Hi there. I had a similar problem with the Richmond 4-4-0 (I assume yours is the 1800s Baldwin type). I was successful inserting the cables in the tender using a tweezer. I also tied the cables to the connector using some wire. I need to look at it to confirm, but I think another problem with the Richmond was the drop-down plate behind the loco. If memory serves, it needs to be kept on an upright position, otherwise it will hit the cables beneath. Otherwise, it’s a sweet little loco!
Simon
I have no idea what the Amerian wires look like.
On my Bachmann steamers, I slit the clear plastic tube off both cables, carefully, and speparated the wires to look like hoses and tucked the wires up into the tender a little. Mostly made them look like hoses with black coloring.
It is a real pain to replace a harness.
Rich
I’ve had the occasional low-hanging umbilical on a few BLI and perhaps old Life-Like Heritage engines.
Sometimes I would plug the harness in then give the tender a 360° rotation before engaging the drawbar. Might take a try or two (CW or CCW rotation?) but this often helps to take up the slack and add a bit of “spring” to the wire.
Good Luck, Ed
Thanks to all for their suggestions. Very helpful.
The wires are too long but they are only bound together by four short bands of what looks like unheated wire shrink wrap.
They need to either be shortened back into the tender or tied up to the drawbar. The locomotive end is one of those goofy downward facing plugs Bachmann likes to use. They formerly used a back facing plug under the fireman’s stand plate.
Unfortunately, the tender drawbar is fastened to the locomotive end. It’s as if Bachmann tried to make this difficult to fix.
Stuffed as much of the wiring back up into the tender, including two of the sections of unshrunk wire tube. It’s fairly crowded in there. I took the lid off the tender thinking that might help but it really doesn’t, full of speaker and boards including the decoder. The designers of this locomotive really should have made the boiler bigger so we four put the electrics in there, 150 years later.
I carefully positioned the other two short sections of wire shrink tube and shrank the part right close to the locomotive end, leaving the ends towards the tender unshrunk. I used a dab of Walthers Goo to secure the six wires in more or less flat orientation just under the bottom leading edge of the tender shell, splitting them around the tender drawbar.
The wiring no longer drags nor catches the frogs. Whether this locomotive will now haul anything without derailing remains to be seen.
I use my BS 4-4-0 for my MOW train and it hauls six cars up through my 2% Rogers pass like nobodys business.
Derailments are very rare for me usually caused by some senile old idiot leaving a switch in the wrong position.[:-^]
That’s what my 4-4-0 will be used for. Unless it’s starring in a remake of The Last Spike, if I ever drive one.
I recommend you fire the idiot, or sit him down somewhere quietly with a three fingers single malt (after he throws the switch correctiy, that is).