I was just finally reading my January Walther’s sales flyer. The advertisement for the Broadway Limited E8 units says gear ratio 12:1! Whoo hoo does this mean a Broadway Limited will be able to fly past the Empire Builder at a scale speed poperly befitting a passenger train?
I was very disapointed at the 70 sMPH the 14:1 ratio engines were able to achieve. If my calculations are right this means the new Es should get to 80 sMPH much closer to what I expect a 1950s passenger train to achieve. Of course, being a Santa Fe fan, I won’t be satisfied with anything less than 110 sMPH for the El Capitan on the La Junta to Dodge City race track run. But it is a step in the right direction.
I know that internally they have a different construction (truss vs girder), but externally it seems only a couple windows are different from a CZ dome observation. How hard could it be to block out one window and cut open a smaller window on the BLI CZ dome observation car? The window patching would be prototypical.
There would actually be a lot more modifications necessary than that, including removing skirting, removing the large rear light and correcting the roof profile at that point, removing the rooftop antenna, putting in a full length letterboard, changing the interior curtains, and perhaps some interior mods. That’s in addition to the window problem. It’s still closer in some ways than the Con-Cor car (certainly better quality, and with an interior!), but would still take a LOT of work to make it an acceptable stand-in for a CP/VIA Budd Park Car.
I too, would love to see Walthers do a car close to that. However, now that Rapido is making all of the accurate CP Budd cars, there’s no real need to look to Walthers for it!
Quite surprising. For the longest time Walthers was consolodating ALL their drives to 14:1 ratio to make it easier to speed match them.
LifeLike (Before Walthers took over) would have all kinds of different gear ratios for the same model engine. It just depended on which release it was.
Then Walthers tried to make them all the same
Now they are going back to multiple gear ratios.
I’m not sure this is a step in the right direction. You’ll have to swap out gears for leased road power to get them to speed match at the top end.
Not that I’m aware of and I have about 60 various, mostly pre Walthers, Life Like locos.
From what I know - all the four wheel truck diesels used basicly the same drive, all the six wheel truck hood units the same drive and the PA’s and E units had unique drives.
NOW, there are differences in the factory lighting board circuits that make otherwise similar drives run at dramaticly different speeds. AND, as an example, Early SD units and late SD units are one of those cases. Additionally, even though its the same drive, the early FA’s and GP7/9 run at different speeds for the same reason.
Just like Bachmann, these whole circuit board thing has gone through a lot of evolution - that is more the problem - not different gear ratios.
I have rewired my older GP7’s and now they run the same speed as my FA’s - on DC.
And if DCC is the speed matching wonder, what difference does it make?
But it is silly to build an E8 that will only go 70 smph. My older Proto E8’s go EXACTLY 88 smph, just like most of the prototypes, running on 13.5 volts DC. That seems perfect to me - why did they mess with any of the original Proto drives? They missed the class about “Parts left out cost nothing and cause no service problems” and about “totally amortized tooling will make you lots of money”.
In the “olden days” there was no problem getting model locomotives to go fast - heck, some engines probably could hit 200 MPH on straight track It was getting reliable slow speed operation that was hard. Over time, many manufacturers adjusted their engines so they had better motors and gearing so smooth slow speed operations were possible.
Now in recent years, people are complaining their engines don’t go fast enough!!
Keep in mind that our model curves are much sharper than the real railroad’s tracks are. I seem to remember reading that a 34"R HO curve was equivalent to the sharpest curve you could find on a prototype mainline - and that trains would be restricted to about 20 MPH on such a curve. In order to go 80MPH or greater, you’d need prototype curves equivalent to like 10-12 FOOT radius curves in HO.
I totally agree that in the pursuit of slowness, the mfgs have dropped the ball on reality for passenger locos. I have a P42 that at top speed gets to about 70+. Same is true for my Proto E9, Proto PA, etc. I am in the process of identifying a faster motor (more RPMs). I spoke with the new guy at NWSL and he wasn’t sure if one of his would be fast enough. I bought an infrared RPM meter on ebay–I think I got took–so I could confirm the RPMs without a load as that’s how most motor specs read.
I could turn up the voltage but that’s good only up to a point.
Nothing in that post is any different than what I said - Yes, six axle hood units have different gear ratios from four axle units, which are also different from E units and PA’s - BUT pre Walthers ALL four axle units use the same truck design and gear ratio, ALL six axle hood units (SD whatevers) use the same (but different from the four axle) truck design with a diffeent gear ratio. ALL E units (6, 7, 8/9) use the same truck and gear ratio, and finally the PA’s had their own yet again different gear ratio.
BUT there were not two different GP7, GP9, GP35, GP15, etc, gear ratios before Walthers or two different SD9, SD24, SD7, etc, gear ratios before Walthers.
Many of the problems of mismatched speed were as I discribed - different circuit boards with different voltage lowering effects as the circuit board designs changed. I have seen first hand old production SD units vs newer, but pre Walthers, SD units. The boards are different and the locos run at dramticly different speeds even though the mechanical pa
Well but selective compression should (in my mind) affect speed too. If your curves are many times sharper than the prototype, your buildings are smaller than the real ones, then racing your trains along at prototype speed is just going to look wrong. I think it’s all relative, if you run passenger trains at 80 and freights at 50, you can cut them in half and run passenger at 40 and freight at 25. The passenger trains are still going faster than the freights, and the scenery will go by at a more realistic clip.
Being able to go scale top speed is fine - I don;t know why anyone would complain about this. Just don’t open the throttle wide open if you don;t want to go that fast, or if using DCC limit the top speed. Now those old locos that went a scale 200mph or better - and were NOT models of the TGV - that is indeed excessive and I’m glad those days are pretty much behind us.
Sheldon is right about the circuit boards, some of the older P2K locos had a simple system of one diode per light plus a resistor to handle the directional lighting. Later on most of them migrated to a more complex board with 6 diodes in series with the motor to make it direction CONSTANT lighting - and this works simply by dropping voltage to the motor so that the track voltage can get up high enough to turn on the headlight before the motor gets enough voltage to move. This naturally reduces the top speed by reducing the total voltage that reaches the motor. One of each of those together could have the exact same motor, gears, and wheels and they will NOT run together on DC, the one with the old style board will start moving on a lower voltage and reach a higher top speed, all else being equal.
One reason someone would have a problem with scale top speed would be like me – I couldn’t get up to speed in my 12 feet of mainline before it hits the wall or flys off my 18 inch HO curves. So I’m limited to trying to do everything in the lower third of the throttle range. Doesn’t leave very much room for precision control there. I realize there are some who want to crank the throttle wide open and let 'r rip. But not all of us have that option.
So what about the old days when top speed was like 200 smph instead of a prototypical 80? The only thing I ever had that came close to rolling off the tracks was one of those AHM MDT switchers, that went like 200. It would tip off the track on 18" curves and loose power, touch the rails, speed up - all around the curves, if I kept the throttle wide open. Never actually flew off though, not like old Lionels roll off on the curves. Normally I didn’t run it that fast. Limited throttle has always been an issue with DC, unless you have a fancier than basic power pack that allows setting things like max voltage. You can always throttle down, what you can’t do is make a loco that runs too slow at full voltage go any faster.
Funny we are even having this discussion, 30 years ago we would have been complainign that everything ran way too fast. Even more than HO, N scale has made great strides in the past few years with tuning down those speed demons. It used to be common in reviews to see N scale locos that reached prototypical top speed with 6 volts or less, now those are rare goofs.
There is always considerable modeler’s license granted, because pretty much unless you have a barn-size layout you won’t have curves gentle enough and turnouts large enough to actually allow full speed running, but since physics doesn;t scale, we can usually run our models at higher speeds than would be permitted if the track were sclaed up to full size. 30" radius curves? Far too tight. #8 turnouts? Maybe in a slow speed yard. But we don;t all have barns to build in, so max 30" radius and #6 turnouts are made to do for ‘mainline’ railroading, even though it’s not close to what the prototype used. Sometimes there’s not even that much space, so it’s 18" and snap-switches. By rights those are trolley car turns, but it works because most commercial products are designed to work on such curves. And so we cope, and make out compromises as needed.
I don’t know what kind of throttls you are using , but there are lots of good throttles with pluse power and/or other ajustable features to allow you better throttle response.
The best case scenerio would be for a loco to run at aproximately prototypical top speed at max track voltage.
In my case that is 13.5 volts. Interestingly a great many of my locos do that or are very close - so the full range of the throttle is available in a reasonably linear fashion. My fleet includes mostly Proto, Athearn and Intermountain diesels and Bachmann, Proto and BLI steam - all running on DC with no decoders and no sound.
Why is this, because the manufcturers have recognized the problem and from years ago and largely corrected it over the last 15-20 y