I come from the old Lionel days were you just dropped a white pellet down the smoke stack and the loco made smoke. Want more? More pellets [:P]
More recently I’ve acquired a number of steam locos (all BLI P2/P3). They produce smoke just fine at first. And then the amount of smoke they produce seems to go down to nothing or close to it. Adding 2-3 (or a few more) drops of smoke fluid doesn’t seem to change things. I’ve noticed this on my O gauge MTH Zephyr as well as some of my friends O gauge. What gives?
I know many of you don’t care about the smoke or even dislike it. To each his own. But I want more “consistent” smoke.
After ripping out several “cooked” smoke units it seems to me that the element gets crusted with “gunk”— or impurities — from the smoke fluid. Without routinely removing and cleaning each smoke unit I don’t think there’s any other way to avoid the gradual buildup of crusty stuff.
The element is just like an incandescent lamp filament, a coil that gets very hot. Eventually, the metal (Nichrome wire?) gets thin at a certain place and where it gets thinner it also gets hotter. That leads to eventual failure, also similar to an incandescent lamp.
Perhaps you could contact BLI and buy a few spare smoke units to have on hand when they go bad?
Thanks for the link Rich. I guess I’m not alone on this one.
As for some of the other posts mentioning an oily gunk buildup on the trains/layout/room, I’m not sure about that. Most of any residue I see on my locos are white powdery stuff. Yes, there’s always some “oily stuff” around the stack because that’s a fill area. But the stuff I’m seeing reminds of the same thing that happened with the old Lionel stuff.
I guess the way to look at it is what the OP on Rich’s link said. If these locos didn’t come with smoke I would have bought them anyway.
Ed, no problem. You’ve always been very helpful. I read that in some other posts. More specifically, one regarding G scale trains at a show. Said even the floor around the layout developed an oily, sticky surface from all the smoke. That is probably an assumption on the observer’s part and seems kind of extreme but I wasn’t there.
Needless to say, I’m about to concede to not bothering with the smoke thing if it’s this much trouble. It appears that the smoke generators, at least in smaller scale locos like HO, are highly unreliable and have a very high failure rate and short lifespan, even on the best, most expensive models. I might as well just physically switch them off so as not to incur any other damage.
I model in HO but I belong to a modular group that has both HO and O scale on it. I see the O scale guys periodically blowing sharply down into the smokestack as the loco goes by…something about the puff of air clears out a blockage? A few members have modified their smoke units to put out more smoke (I don’t know the specifics of how they do it) but the smoke coming out of them is incredible (although it seems like it only lasts for a few minutes). I don’t know about scented oils and if they leave behind more gunk, but I have heard different brands of smoke make a difference too.
You might want to check out the Toy Trains magazine section of the trains.com website?
