My name is Art, and I’m a newbie to this board. I have a low-end, Santa Fe Special 6-11900 (8644 on the engine) set purchased in the late 90s. I only use it at Christmas and it gets stored in the box in a dry area. This year, the original 40 watt (w/ plastic control box) went bad so I bought an 80 watt Atlas with whistle and bell controls. The engine ran fine but the mecanical whistle in the tender wouldn’t work; although I could hear it straining. I took it apart, got the motor freed up, and reved up the rpms to give it a good cleaning. Now the motor seems to spin too freely and it whistles continually while running. When I push the whistle control, it just sounds a bit louder so it would appear that the problem is with the tender. All wiring is good and the foam under the circuit board is fine. Could I have over-reved the motor and reduced the resistance or is the controller too much for the tender?
What exactly do you mean when you say you, “reved up the rpms to give it a good cleaning”? What did you disconnect from what or connect to what in doing that?
Hi Bob, thanks for the reply. Once I got the motor freed up, I let the tender sit on the track alone and turned transformer up all the way up, allowing the motor to spin freely for 30 seconds or so.
This is just a guess, since I don’t have any documentation for the circuit involved. You mentioned a circuit board, which tells me that you definitely do not have a traditional whistle relay. There is likely some sort of “pass element” to connect the whistle motor to the track voltage in place of the old relay contact, or to a rectified DC version of that voltage. It seems like you are getting the effect of half the AC waveform all the time, to which the circuit is adding the rest when you operate the control. Running the motor for that unusual length of time may have overheated whatever semiconductor was used, which failed shorted, as they typically do. The bottom line is that you will need to replace the circuit board.
It is conceivable that we could reverse-engineer the thing and figure out what component to replace, but that’s a long shot. It’s also possible to put in a traditional relay; but that may also require adding a rectifier if the motor is DC.
If anyone on the forum can provide a schematic, any technical description, or even a photograph, that would be a big help.
As I said, I don’t have any documentation of it. If you have the same kind of whistle that he has, why not just buy the Lionel board? If you have a postwar-type WS-125 or WS-175, just use a whistle relay.