I have a Lionel horse coral car from the mid eighties that uses the horses with the rubber feet. No matter what I try, the horses will not go up the ramp on their own without coaxing them with my finger. They will travel around the coral and through the car fine. I have tried different voltages and adjusted the nut on the bottom, with no real change.
I have seen toy train videos shown the same car in operation and the horses seem to fly up the ramp with no problem.
It sounds like they aren’t making it over the small gaps created by the doors lowering into the ramp position. How is the alignment, both verticle and horizontal? Those vibrating accessories can be pretty fussy. Are the little fingers on the bottom of the horses getting caught in the cracks?
In my experience the horse car is very tricky to get working. The horses are taller than the cattle were and tend to tip over rather easily. To help your problem I would try to shim the back corner of the corral up slghtly (<1/8") so the on ramp isn’t as steep. Or you could do what I did and pick up a 80’s cattle car with fuzzy American Flyer type feet, they work much better than the rubber fingers and the cattle hardly ever tip over!
I did exactly what IguanaMan3 did with the shim. In fact I used a single piece of balsa all the way across the back to prop the corral up. The cattle(mine is the C&NW car from the late 90’s) now go in and out and up just fine.
I’ve never tried American Flyer shoes on my horses feet. I thought “S” gauge shoes might cause blisters on “O” gauge feet!
Thanks guys! I will give the shim a try. I did not realize that the cattle and horses had different feet, I might try and get some cattle to use in the car instead. [:)]
I received a Lionel Horse Car for Christmas (modern post-war celebration series) version from 2000 or so. Got it all wired up and it seems the same thing is happening with mine. The horses won’t go up the ramp and many times fall over as they move through the corral. I have the corral hooked up to a CW 80 transformer (accessories terminal). I have set it at 11 volts. Any higher and it’s just too much. My layout is with fastrack and is on carpet under the Christmas tree. I’m using the fastrack operating track. Do you know if this accessory will work on carpet? I might try to shim this on the back like you suggested. Also, it seems the horses don’t move very quickly through the horse car. What track voltage is required to make the horses move through the car effectively?
This problem may have something to do with the non-sinusoidal waveform of the CW-80.
If there is a CW-80 setting that will work, it may give a very different reading on a voltmeter than the setting that works on a simple transformer.
The usual way of measuring AC voltages is the root-mean-square (RMS, the square-root of the average of the square) voltage. Any AC voltmeter you are likely to have will measure the correct RMS voltage only if the waveform is sinusoidal. Unfortunately, the CW80’s waveform is not sinusoidal. So its voltage can be measured accurately only with a rather special voltmeter.
Here is a table that converts the voltmeter reading of a CW80 to RMS volts: