I have a couple of maintainance questions that I hope you guys will clear up for me. According to my MTH manual, every 50 hrs, or one year of operation, which ever comes first, the engine should be completely greased, and lubed, thats means the complete underside of the engine, and takeing the boiler off, and takeing the grearbox cover off, and greasing the gearbox!! Well I play with my trains for a few hours every day, does this mean I should do all that maintainance once a month? Because I’ll get 50 hrs of operation on it easily every month!!!??? Also I try and keep my track very clean, I clean it well with rubbing alcahol, but within a few days the tracks are filthy, I can see the two outter raild being dirty, because of the tires on the drive wheels, but why does the center rail get so dirty, so fast?
do you like to run with a lot of smoke? I find that when I run with smoke (fluid that is, not lionel pellets) my rails get dirty faster. All three rail as well. It’s basically oil and settles on everything so cleaning becomes more frequent.
Just remember when lubing your Locomotives that LESS IS MORE, do not over do it, it only takes a SMALL amount of oil on the axle bearings, side rods and pick up roller axles. It is very easy to adopt the “if a LITTLE is GOOD, the MORE is BETTER” philosophy, but it is WRONG, just MESSSSSSY. I don’t know what to tell You about the center rail, I haven’t had that Problem. I use MTH RealTrax, but if you use it, make sure you look at the contacts under the track as you put it together to make sure that they are making good contacts. also using track clips helps, if you do not have the track screwed down( Like on a floor layout, babe whaddya mean, I can’t screw my track down to the hardwood floors, I got plenty of track screws [%-)] [swg])
I would say if the manual states to lube every 50hrs, that you probably should. If you find that once a month is too often, or not enough, change your maintainance schedule to match your finding.
Remember that clean track isn’t everything. All those wheels on the cars are dirty, too. Smoke fluid residue is probably the culprit on your center rail. I’ve noticed when I clean track, that I get 3 black lines on the rag, not just 2, even when I have been operating diesel engines with no smoke. It just happens, I guess.
if you haven’t over oiled the engine than the smoke is the culprit for the dirty track. as for lube, I would check the gearbox before I run the train for the first time, I have found that whoever does this task at the factory just puts a blob of grease in (hopefully) but doesn’t necessarily get it onto all the right places. as for oiling use a synthetic oil. I use a toothpick that I dip into the oil and place the drop where I want it. I have found that with needle oilers it is easy to put too much oil. with the toothpick it is one drop at a time.
I use a curved tip syringe, like they give you when you have wisdom teeth removed to flush the holes, to grease my gears. Just remove the plunger and pack in the grease. It makes adding just enough between the gears easy and less messy.
As for why track gets dirty, smoke fluid is a common culprit, but I get dirty track even when I run low-end Marx engines with no smoke and no traction tires. Arcing causes dirt, and more dirt causes more arcing, which gets your track and your wheels dirty, causing a vicious circle.
You can minimize the issue by keeping your track clean, and cleaning your wheels when you do your other maintenance, but you won’t eliminate it.
I’ve even seen the effects of arcing in fixing old computer devices, where the amount of power tends to be a lot lower. It usually doesn’t cause a problem… Usually.
Doug’s right; messy is bad. In fact I stopped oiling my pickup rollers. While they ought to spin very freely they should do so because they are clean not well lubed. Lube collects dust and dirt and leads to conductivity issues in the roller axle when it gets too dirty. Plus all the oil in your roller axle likely winds up on your center rail anyway, which then gets dirty, which then leads to conductivity issues, which then leads to arcing, which pits the rail/roller, etc… I use electrical contact cleaner to remove all traces of oil and dirt from roller axles.
Smoke fluid residue from my PE berk does get everywhere…so I can see this as a source of center rail contamination as well.
One thing not to overlook is the wheels on your frieght and passenger cars as these get dirty over time and will keep putting dirt back on the track unless cleaned up. I had some post war hoppers that I was going to replace the wheels on but all that was needed was a really good cleaning! If you have accessories that use electrical contacts clean wheels are a must!
Also a post war tender that has a whistle will whistle at random with a dirty track without the whistle control on a transformer, like a post war Z.