Received yesterday a brand new Atlas RS11 to satisfy my new love of old Alcos. It’s from the latest release from Atlas. I put it on the track and the lights flickered so much I thought I had a decoder, wire or truck pick up problem. Fortunately, before I either returned it or opened up, I decided to clean the wheels. Well wouldn’t you know, after three cleanings it finally runs ok, though it will probably need one more cleaning to be 100%. I’ve always known this is not a rare issue, but the amount of gunk I cleaned off was nothing I’ve seen before. Other than that, it’s a nice model.
Regards, Chris
Yeah, sometimes new locomotives have sat for a while awaiting sale and/or they’re overlubricated from the factory, causing this issue. A good cleaning is generally a good idea as part of adding a new locomotive to your fleet.
DFF
Jason Shron says to clean the wheels of brand new locos when you get them and I always do. I bought two Rapido RDCs and put them on the track, one ran fine and the other would not move. Cleaned the wheels on both and they ran great.
Manufacturing grime is the cost of doing business. When I bought my Walther’s turntable I had to clean the rings and tynes several times in the first month and they have been fine for years now without further cleaning.
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I find that the blackening chemical often used is the curse of electrical pickup. Yes, new locos require wheel cleaning AND a good continuous run-in. I’ve found Athearn Genesis and Broadway Limited engines to be the worst for out of the box pickup problems.
Good Luck, Ed
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Interesting thread. I have bought a lot of locomotives new from a lot of manufacturers and never had one fail to run, out of the box.
Rich
Rich, in my case, it didn’t fail to run, it just ran somewhat erratically. After three or four cleaning passes it now runs fine.
Regards, Chris
Ahh, got it.
I am just amazed that locomotives have black gunk on the wheels straight from the factory. Over the course of the 20+ years that I have been on the HO side of the hobby, I have had some incredible amounts of black gunk on loco wheels but only after extended running.
Rich
Possibly in “the old days” they also accumulated gunk during manufacturing but that they then cleaned the wheels before boxing them up. Today, time is even more money so maybe that just skip that now.
Regards, Chris
That is an interesting possibility. But what during the manufacturing process would cause the wheels to get so dirty?
Rich
The turning of the wheels themselves when manufacturing them? Good question.
Regards, Chris
As I mentioned above, it has been my experience that when there is a ‘blackening’ agent applied it causes poor rail conductivity.
Regards, Ed
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What is the blackening agent, and what is it used for?
Rich
What’s that got to do with dirty wheels?
Rich
How about in layman’s terms.
What is it used for on model locomotives?
Rich
Selenium blackening solution is used to put a very thin “dull black” coating on brass or other metal. The coating was nominally thin enough to conduct electricity reasonably well. I used it for clean brass parts as it blackens with only relatively short exposure and has none of the issues that paint films do. It also precludes the usual sorts of tarnishing on brass surfaces.
The solution type I used was a pale-blue watery solution; you could apply it with a brush or Q-tip or immerse parts in it, and they would blacken within a couple of minutes.
Ahh, thanks for that explanation. Very helpful and informative.
So, if I understand the purpose correctly, it retards tarnishing on brass wheels. But, does that blackening agent cause the black gunk on locomotive wheels that interferes with conductivity?
Rich
No, it’s a thin and hard coating that does not dissolve or soften.
I think some of the gunk is metal oxides formed by microarcing, particularly from nickel-silver rail, but that doesn’t really account for the ‘gumminess’. I had hoped someone would have done an analytical study on its composition by now, to prove or disprove if the ‘gunk’ is related to house dust or shed skin landing on the rails over time and transferring to the wheel treads.
What is dirtying up ‘new’ wheels is another matter. Turned wheels might have used a high-sulfur cutting oil as lubricant (I suspect they are often made on commercial machinery at high speed) but I’d expect this to have been removed with a detergent wash before wheel set assembly. I am tempted to note that if you gleam track, you’d surely want to do some equivalent of gleaming (perhaps omitting the pressure-burnishing step) to the railhead contact patch and effective gauge corner and flange fillet of the various wheels – this also producing a prototype-width simulation of shiny treads if the wheels have been pre-blackened… but that’s different from just cleaning the wheels.
And cleaning the wheels with a solvent is not going to get rid of all the oil; you have to follow up quickly with something absorbent that takes the dissolved material up off the surface before the solvent evaporates and redeposits the schmutz. If you are turning the wheel with a rubber disc on a Dremel or some similar thing, a thin piece of cotton wick or absorbent pad might do, but it has to get the dissolved liquid completely away from the wheel tread, not smear it.
To give you a parallel: the definitive way to polish a bathroom mirror is with your palm and a handful of drywall plaster dust. The oils in your palm make the dust adhere, and the oil and dirt on the glass surface are cut off by the fine abrasive action but promptly absorbed. The result looks blue-white and fully reflective; most people have never seen a truly clean rear-surface mirror…