I recenlty posted a problem that I was having with a MTH loco that speeded up going over a certain switch. The culprit was the switch. Although it is new, the 3rd rail of the Lionel fastrack swith was slightly bent up in the center causing drag on the loco in turn causing it to speed up. There is a similar problem with the fastrack uncoupler. The magnet is set to high for some MTH engines. I have a MTH RS-1 that stalls on the unclupler because of the magnet hight. I hope this helps if anyone else is having a similar problem.
John
Hello John:
I am glad to hear that you rooted out the problem. Are you able to repair the switch? Return it? This is the first time I have heard of rail problems with Fastrack (regardless of the manufacturer of the locomotive).
Regards,
John
John Todd,
Interesting diagnosis. If I understand you correctly, the drag from the warped track caused the speed-control circuity to send the loco extra juice, and when the loco passed the high-drag area that extra juice caused the loco to speed up. So that those of us running “conventional” would expect our train to slow down rather than a speed up. Yes?
I have noticed the extra height on the FasTrack Uncoupling Section. The front coupler on a post-war Lionel 1615 switch engine would not work due to a lack of room for the armature* to drop far enough for the coupler to open. As my grand-daughter is very fond of that loco , I ended up having to grind down both the high spot on the uncoupler track as well as the armature on the locomotive. (There was not enough material to grind just one or the other.) In other words, it was necessory both to “raise the bridge” and “lower the river.” Finally got it to work correctly, but it was a close-run thing. (This problem seems to be confined to the simple uncoupling track (6-12020) with the electromagnet and only three rails; and is not shared by the Operating Track (6-10254) with the magnet and the two extra control-rails – at least in my experience.)
As it comes from the factory, the 6-12020 uncoupling track seems to work just fine with couplers that have a flat armature situated close to the bottom of the truck. The problem seems to occur primarily with certain varieties of the downward-protruding “thumbtack” type of armature, because its necessary downward travel gets impeded by the “hump” of the magnet. At least that’s my analysis.
While I was at it, I disconnected the magnet’s power-wire from the center rail, and added a wire from the "programmable fixed-voltage terminal on the CW-80 transformer. I kept the existing connection of the magnet to the outside rails as a “common-ground” for the "