Last week I was at a train show and talked to a man working with a modular layout. I told him about the Rivarossi engines I bought 35 years ago, and how I’d like to add DCC to them. He said that Rivarossi engines will run for about an hour, and then stop.
Has anyone else had this problem with them?
This did not happen 35 years ago when we club members ran them. Do the motors dereriorate with age?
He must be someone who had a bad experience. Once in a while, the plates on the commutator might not be even, causing very quick brush wear. But they’ve usually been very good in my experience. I once talked to a guy at a train show who’s opinion of Rivarossi was that they were the “Cadillacs of HO steam engines.”
I would go ahead with adding DCC. All that has to be done is to clip off the grounding strip connected to one of the brushes (except for the large motor used in the Big Boy, Challenger, and I think the FEF-3), and that will isolate it from the frame. If a motor goes out, there are plenty of ways to replace the motor that people have found over time.
Back in the 1980s, I remember asking an old timer at a LHS about the the life expectancy of the motors Rivarossi used in their N scale engines. He replied, “fifteen seconds to fifteen years.” Apparently there were some quality control issues with the original Rivarossi motors. I got the impression the original Rivarossi motors didn’t enjoy a very good reputation, and I’ve seen a lot of material about remotoring old Rivarossi engines.
I posed the question to the old timer because I had acquired some very inexpensive (and already old, but never used) Rivarossi engines from a closeout dealer. All three of the motors burned out on their maiden runs around my layout. When I called the closeout dealer, he told me that the engines were lubricated and tested before they were shipped, Then the dealer asked what kind of power pack I was using.
“Troller,” I answered.
The close out dealer blamed the power pack, and pointed me to an article in a recent Model Railroader article showing that Troller’s pulse system tended to produce a lot of heat in very small motors. Shortly after that I got an MRC power pack.
I don’t know much about DCC, but I wonder if similar issues might arise. And I thought I’ve heard that DCC really requires good-quality can motors.
Older AHM/Rivarossi engines had cheap 3 pole motors in them. I had a Big Boy from around the 70’s and the motor burned out after running several hours on a local club layout. I replaced it with a somewhat better 5 pole can motor and it ran fine for several more years. I can beleive super pulse power can do them in, Most of the current motors in HO models are far better than the stuff from the 70/80’s. I have never burned up a motor on my DCC layout. Usually it is the ‘coreless’ motors that overheat with some of the pulse type DC throttles.
Jim
I had a Troller twin pack and yes it messed up my Rivarossi locos.
I’ve had many Rivarossi locos over the years, and they were all very nice runners, even the 3 pole motor ones ran nice and slow, even with the old Scintilla and MRC rheostat power packs we had. Of course that was mostly relative to Tycos with their self-contained power truck. The Rivarossi locos were always near silent. And 40 years later they still work, although being the old pizza cutter flange type, they don’t like Code 83 track very much. The only pulse power I’ve ever subjected them to came from an MRC Tech II power pack.
DCC won’t hurt them, all but some of the cheapest (quality - the Bachmann motor decoders cost more than the NCE D13’s and is a very much inferior decoder) decoders have high frequency drive to the motor which won;t even hurt a rather delicate coreless can motor. And you don’t need such fancy motors for DCC to work - if it runs well on DC it will work fine on DCC.
–Randy