I recently purchased this locomotive on eBay and have no idea how to remove the shell to install a decoder. I have never taken apart any locomotive as I am just getting started. I understand I have to remove front and rear couplers but then what? There are no instrcutions in the box. Can anyone help me? Thanks.
I don’t have that particular Atlas diesel, but I have a large numbr of other Atlas, and they come off by taking a screwdriver and popping the tabs up that extend from the shell down through the base. Might suggest going to the Atlas forum with the question.
Bob
This is a link to a picture of a U30C body shell found at the www.atlasrr.com site. You can see the tabs sticking down in the photo. The usual disassembly instructions I’ve seen generally say that you’re supposed to squeeze the body in the area of the tabs to disengage them from the frame and then lift upward. Probably easy to do if you have three hands. If you can access these from the bottom of the engine, the small screwdriver insertion method is probably better. I think, though, that sometimes you can’t actually access all six of the tabs from the bottom.
I have a couple engines where a portion of some tabs have broken off. I’m not really sure how detrimental this breakage is, since the coupler boxes seem to do a good job holding the body and walkway to the frame.
Anyway, I just wanted to post a picture of the shell so that you could see what you’re dealing with.
Oh, before I forget, the picture link is: https://secure.atlasrr.com/mmMOD1/Images/730402.jpg
Good luck and regards.
I just put back together an Atlas Classic C 424 after painting to PRR.
I removed the hand rails first then the cab and the rest just followed,reassembly was the reverse,after cleaning out paint from holes-the body shell looks similar to the one in the picture.
Go carefully and it should be OK
Steve