Well, I just got my layout wired and can actually run stuff for a change. I decided to give a couple engines some work to do switching in the yard. I have used Walthers code 83 exclusively and have a Digitrax Super Empire Builder for power. I have installed Tsunamis in several engines so far including the ones I tested here.
I tried to pull a 12 car string of 40’ freight cars all equipped with KD wheels out of the yard tracks and on to the main using my beautiful little P2K USRA 0-6-0. It moved out nicely and when it got into the curved (#7 turnout) lead heading for the main it started slipping. I pushed the string back into the yard track and hooked on one of my Spectrum Russian Decapods. It easily moved the cars out of the yard track and then did the same slipping in the curved area. I pushed back to ponder where to go next.
I looked over and there, all by its lonesome next to the roundhouse, stood a Mantua Big Six 0-6-0 I just bought on ebay. It hasn’t been run in a very, very long time. It’s an older run with no traction tires and non-RP25 flanges. What-the-heck, I coupled on to the same string and it growled, howled and whined as it pulled the cars out of the yard, through the curved lead and out on to the main with zero slipping. Wow! So I decided to put a little Labelle oil on her and see what happened. This time she performed the same as before but at a noise level you could stand and aso ran a lot slower.
My stock Varney Old Lady 2-8-0 did the same thing with the same train. Curious!
So…maybe we haven’t progressed as far as we think with all the new and improved engines available today. I mean the USRA and the Dec are beautiful engines but if they can’t pull then what good are they really? If a stock & primitive 0-6-0 can pull and run that smooth with that crude motor & flanges then why can’t we have similar performance from the current steamers? I know I can prob
It is a funny thing, why isn’t the new stuff better? It seems it’s all about $. I’m very new to this hobby and find it fascinating! The hobby lends itself insight into reality (in the abstract). I grew up in Texas concurrently with the development of the Interstate highway systems. My history is repleat of trains. So I see it from a relatively unbiased perspective. I recently put together a neat Bachmann EZ track layout on the floor with 2 (DC) mainlines for my sons (and me). We’ve been going to model train shows. I’ve been purchasing new and old rolling stock, buildings, autos etc. for my livingroom floor layout, no dedicated room yet. I just purchased a new Bachmann Santa Fe Flyer train sets. The EMD FT engine is very light and I hooked up a string of 10 or 12 cars and the engine ran but had trouble pulling and would loose contact with the power. I put it on a postal scale and compared it with one of my Spectrums and realized it was really light. I did a search on the web about adding weight to engines. I decided to add weight. I found my fishing tacklebox, found weights, and stuffed some in the empty cavity on the bottom, about an ounce and a half. It worked! It now pulls 20+ cars on the level floor. This in terms of real engines pulling real loads this may be little unorthodox. I don’t know if they ran consists (and I don’t have another one of these engines) but I imagine pulling long strings of cars would require more pulling power. My point? The new stuff is light “I read” because of the lead issues. And the more it weighs, the more it costs to ship. This probably only matters when shipping tens and hundred-thousands of an item, as I’m sure they do. Well, it’s all good! Enjoy your new layout!
The P2K 0-6-0 and 0-8-0’s just aren’t very good pullers. I’ve got a few of them and mine all had a 10 car limit. Any more and the wheels would slip, that is until I discovered Bullfrog Snot. I bought a bottle of it just out of curiosity and it actually works. My little 0-8-0’s can easily pull 20 cars now. I think thats a lot for such a tiny switcher.
Keep in mind, fellas, that prototype 0-6-0 and 0-8-0 switchers weren’t meant to pull 12- or 20-car cuts. They were meant to pull shorter 2 - 4-cars at a time in a yard. So, you are asking it to do something it was not designed for.
With that said, Roger, I’m assuming you have a 1st run of the Proto 2000 0-6-0. The second runs came with traction tires and can pull much more than their earlier cousins.
Weight - with more plastics and less die-cast, a lot of today’s locos aren;t as heavy as the old ones. This obviously hurts tractive effort.
plated wheels - plated wheels give far better electrical pickup, but at the cost of tractive effort as they end up being more slippery than other methods such as sintered metal. Look at an old Athearn Blue Box loco, notice the wheels look rough, compare to a modern RTR or Genesis or a P2K. Those old wheels needed a lot of cleaning, but they gripped the track better.
I sometimes have the feeling that the locos we buy nowadays are more made to show off than to perform. Yes, the level of detail is much bigger than it used to be and the sound features add value to operating, but when it comes to performance — [V]
My Athearn Genesis MP-15 with factory equipped DCC & sound is one example and the forum is filled with complaints about ill-performing locos. Are we just expecting too much? As we pay top $$$, we are entitled to get what we pay for.
The car I drive is a 15 year old Mercedes. It does not have any of the frills that you get today - no ESP, no A/C, no adjustable steering column, no power seats, no nothing. It is a plain old piece of machinery, well engineered and built like a tank, that does exactly what I want it to do - perform!
Is it just age - or was everything really better in the past? [swg]
I had an old Mantua 0-6-0T that would outpull nearly anything that did not have a traction tire. Alas it pulled so well that when it stalled on a grade the wheels did not slip and the “engineer” (my friend’s 4 year old son) didn’t cut back on the throttle and the motor burned out.
Keep in mind that a well-seasoned Mantua or Varney engine has had years to roughen up the smooth plating on the driver treads. I know that is the case with brass. A new out of the box Mantua 0-6-0 would often pull less well than a veteran engine with identical specs. Also there is a chance that the newer engines have a bit of lubricant on the drivers. And lastly, the Mantua and Varney locomotives almost undoubtedly have the “old” NMRA wheel profile, with a nearly flat wheel tread. The newer engines might have the RP25 profile. I am not a mechanical engineer but I have to wonder if there is actually a greater amount of wheel to rail contact with the old profile. I suppose there is also a chance that the deeper flanges on the older engines might not “grip” the rail sides a bit more on curves.
I have to disagree there. I’m an iron ore modeller, I’ve learned that in the steam age the ore mining companies regularly used 0-6-0’s to push 8-10 loaded ore cars out of the open pit mines, often at a 2% or greater grade. Obviously, they could pull/push more on level track. 0-8-0’s were used in mining and in ore dock operation, moving 20-30 loaded ore cars at a time up to the docks.
On regular freight railroads, 0-8-0’s were often used in transfer service, pulling long cuts of cars on level ground between rail yards.
Wait, MB made plain jane cars? My flippin Cavalier has more options than that! Well, before I got my hands on it anyways. It no longer has A/C aboard, but it still has an adjustable steering column. Now if its an SL500 convertible from about 15 years ago I wouldn’t care what options it was lacking, I would still take it. Them were some of the nicest looking cars MB ever made. That and the '55 Gulwings [swg]
I had two Bachmann GS-4 and they ran fine and where well made, there strong point was prices. Big GS-4’s could only pull 12-14 cars. I did add weight and got one of them up to 20 cars and other to 22 cars. I really like my Proto Diesels but never bought one of there steamers because of the reported lack of pulling power.
Do all newer steam engines pull badly? No. I have quit a few of BLI steam engines and they all pull well. My smallest steam engine is a BLI Heavy Mike and the weakest puller will drag 25 cars. BLI M1a will drag 35 cars. On the BIG STEAM like my BLI / PCM Y6-b has pulled 90 cars at K-10 model trains layout.
As Randy pointed out the new wheels don’t pull as well as the old steel wheels. I have all so found they will pull better with some run time. Case in pint is my SD 7 Proto 2000, when I got it, it would only pull 15 cars. After around 10 hours or so it started pulling much better and will drag 25 cars with no slippage.
Tight turns will all so hurt the number of cars a engine can pull.
Having been playing with trains since the mid '50s (HO since early '60s), I tend to agree that so many of todays locos are built for show rather than go. There are exceptions of course, such as the Stewart Fs and some of the BLI locos. Of course (as mentioned earlier), some of the model locos represent prototype locos that didn’t or couldn’t pull a lot of cars (i.e. small steam switchers).
That being said, It really is a bummer to have a model loco that represents a prototype freight mainline loco, that can’t pull but a few cars/
As an aside, I remember as a young teen, hooking together a couple of Athearn rubber band drive locos and trying to see how many cars it would take to stall them. Ha, as all the cars were Athearn and were especially free rolling, I don’t recall ever being able to stall them.
My BLI Blueline SD40-2 is a strong puller and a good performer - thanks to the decoder I installed. In DC mode? Well, that´s a different story…
It is like with my old Merc, they just don´t engineer them anymore the way they did - now you need all those electronic gimmicks that tend to fail… [V]
[#offtopic] MILW-RODR - yes, MB made plain jane cars, without all the frills and gadgets, infact, all MB´s are still rather simple, but the “Extra”-list is more than a mile long. To my knowledge, they sell ´em fully equipped in the US.
I also have to disagree here. If you’re only moving 2 or 3 cars at a time, you’re doing a horrible job of switching the yard. Ideally you want to pull a whole track and sort it, which could easily be a 20+ cut, but on level ground and slow speed. A switch engine needs to be able to move cuts in a yard, but has no need to bring them up to any sort of speed on a mainline.
Trust me, we HAVE progressed from the “good old days” of pot metal steamers and Penn Line, Varney, Mantua, et al.
If you’re a fantasy modeler and have no desire for fine details, slow speed switching performance, DCC, sound, etc then by all means enjoy the old stuff. I’ve had a lot of it over the years and still keep some around for kitbashing bait. But essentially NONE of my engines will be purely stock antiques.
Why? Several reasons. Essentially none of it looks anything like a real engine, especially for my prototype (please: check my Railimages account before you accuse me of not being able to redetail engines. Then come to my clinics in April!). The stuff runs horribly as a stock engine and they MUST be remotored and usually regeared for superior slow speed performance. All-metal engines are far less than DCC
Don’t forget the material manufacturers have to use these days too. The days of zamac, bronze or lead boiler castings is LONG over. Thanks to the EPA and a general increase in the awareness of pollutants they have to use FAR lighter metal in models. That has a HUGE bearing on pulling ability.
So it’s really our elected officials that are to blame. If you’d like to see better pulling model trains and lead tainted water, please complain to them, not the model manufacturers!
My thoughts exactly! “The good old days that never were and are no more…” Can’t say that I miss the old locos (still have quite a few) even though they could pull a lot of cars, first you had to get them to run more a a foot at a time before they stalled and had to be helped along by the 0-5-0 “helper”…
A little extra weight goes a long way to improving pulling power. Personally I love my PK2 0-6-0 yard goat. It can pull 15 40’ cars out onto the yard lead where it will start to slip… That said If I use that many cars behind her, I have to foul the main to be able to switch so I stick with 8 to 10 cars max. But it is still the smoothest runner I have and will crawl very slow when needed.
… I would not want to put my signature under this statement - most of the stuff that populates our layouts is made in China and they don´t care at all about their or our environment. The main reason is cost. Plastic is much cheaper and a pattern for plastic parts also.
I was jsut thinking about Bullfrog snot when I read the original post. I’ve ehard so many good reviews of it, I think it would get those locos pulling like crazy.
Ya needs ta hit them purty plated wheels with a good ol’ fashioned abbrasive pad and give’m a bit of a tooth to grab the rails with, sure them wheels dont look quite as purty with a satin finish vs the stock shiny finish, but whadda want, purty or workin’
BTW you CAN always pull them light engine weights and recast them in lead or white metal its not that hard