This has been a very entertaining and sightful experience! I’ve certainly learned a lot in an attempt to do what I thought would be rather straight forward. The primary benefit is some of the basic lessons that I have reinforced for myself. Most important of ALL is don’t think you know so much you don’t need the book.
It all started as far back as December, we received the new Legacy Big Boy, and almost immediately my son (Chris) asked about doing a Lash-up with our scale size Cab Fwd. Now, my concerns were we have 2 very expensive engines here and I’m going to put them together to see if we can run them without damaging anything? Not in a big hurry to tempt fate with that one. So relied on the fact that they would have not run together, one was intended for mountain use, and the other for high speed applications.
But, as time went on the issue would not subside with him, and as my confidence grew became more of a challenge to me.
We have done lash ups before using TMCC, and a couple of K-line diesel engines. Two of the exact same engines as a matter of fact. Had no difficulty as long as we went step by step with the instructions in the TMCC manual. We were quite pleased with the result. The only issue was after we were finished, and were running the engines separately, it was probably 2 months before we realized that the reason one of the engines always started in reverse was due to the lash-up programming. But that was OK, then we were also disappointed that we couldn’t use the DCS controller so we could monitor the speed setting and some other minor things like whether smoke was on or not. Again not a major issue. I’m thinking hey this lash-up stuff is all right, we are running the two diesels on our layout as a lash-up even though they are not connected, and finding out which engine is faster and how close they are actually matched. We then decided that thi