I have a question about how to make my Reading 0-6-0 “docksider” switcher slow down a little to be more controllable for switching duties. It is a neat little engine, and I love the detail and the appearance. But it seems to have speed settings of off, fast, and very fast. That makes it hard to run it on a switching yard where it needs to be able to move a little more gradually than I can control it with my modern era ZW tranformer. Whenever I try to slow it down, I get to the stall point, which of course triggers the E unit to cycle. I can turn that off, but what good is a switcher that is locked into a single direction?
My idea is that it sounds like you would be a good candidate for Command control. I think you have a Lionel eng. there & you already have a ZW for power. Now you would need TMCC outfit, a command unit & a cab 1 controller. If your eng. isn’t a Tmcc eng, you would just keep it in Conventional mode. Mine will go real slow in conventional. There may be some other electrical solutions that guys after me here will have, also, I think. Thanks, John
Since you say the e-unit cycles when it stops, it sounds like the minimum voltage from your transformer is too high and that it might run at a slower speed if you could supply a lower voltage. There are ways to reduce the voltage, which have been discussed at length on the forum. But you should see whether reducing the voltage will help before going to that trouble. Do you have any other transformer available? A 1033, for example, has a connection that allows the voltage to go continuously down to zero. If the locomotive’s operation improves in the test, then you can modify it to lower the voltage permanently, so that it can run from the ZW.