I’ve got 2 of these trains, and I’ve added DCC to both. They have run flawlessly for 8 years or so. A few weeks ago, one of them stopped working. It seemed to intermittently cause a short, which slowly went to a hard short. I put it on the program track and could not get the decoder to respond. Looking at the decoder, there was a burn through the wrapping.
I replaced the decoder (a cheap old Digitrax DH 123) with a DH 126. I put it on the programming track and was able to program it and read back CVs. It ran fine, so I replaced the shell. When I put it back on the track, it worked for a while, and then the behavior went right back to where it was.
It now looks like the motor has a problem. I’ve got the car apart and I can run it on a 9-volt battery, but if I stop and start it multiple times, it will reach a point where it won’t restart without spinnning the flywheel by hand. It seems like there’s a dead spot, and from the failure of the decoder it looks like the motor is shorted at that point.
When the motor runs, it seems fine, and there’s nothing obvious like a bent driveshaft of off-center flywheel. I get the same problems with and without the trucks connected.
Does anyone recognize the symtoms? Is there anything that can be done to fix it? Alternately, any ideas where I could get another one of these motors?
A dead spot like this is frequently caused by one of the armature windings breaking off of one of the commutator segments. These problems are fairly easy to fix in HO scale but are pretty tuff in N.
LION uses many of these cars,a dn some of the newest ones were really bad. I am in the middle of replacing all of the motors with NWSL 2032D-9 which fits right in and gives 1000% better performance. Even a brand new unit was replaced already.
For the motor it is a 1 to 1 swap out. The couplings are intergal to the fly wheels. You will be removing the fly wheels to put them onto the new motor, and so will use the same linkage. I did use a gear puller to pul the flywheels, I fabricated a washer so the the puller (way too big) could get behind the fly wheel. (I cut a slot in a fender washer.) But on the last one I did, I found I could pull the flywheels off manually. I used a vice to apply pressure to place the flywheels on a new motor. I but washers between the flywheels and the vice jaws since some of the delicate plastic extends beyond the edge of the flywheel.
One flywheel will be in the correct place before the other. Yse a nut or something to stop the movement of that wheel while applying pressure to the other.
LION has long since ditched the grey plastic insert, it may need some modification if you cannot seat it back exactly as it was.
Open Car
Remove green circuit board
Remove covers to trucks and remove the worm and linkage
unscrew and remove the gray part
Pull the motor straight up, it is only rubber things that hold it in place.
note the orientation of the morot and the flywheels
There is a red dot on the new motor casing next to the positive terminal, the negative terminal is not marked. Negative on the left, positive on the right train goes forward.
Decisions, decisions. I could get the NWSL motor. Walthers actually does carry the replacement motor, including all the linkage and stuff, for about the same price.