Day 10. I wasn’t going to do an update today but I figured I’d answer a few questions. The couplers that were on both loco’s were the factory Proto 2000 couplers, I wanted to keep them as close to out of the box as possible thats why I didn’t swap the couplers for the Kadee’s right from the start. The only maintenance I will be doing on these will be adding lubricant when needed, I won’t be replacing any wheels or brushes or anything else that will wear out over time. Once they stop thats it, I will fix them but the test will end. Well its been another 24 hours for a total of 175 hours of running and they have now travelled 5250 miles in 10 days, with only a coupler failure.
SINCE READING THIS AND GIVING MY RESULTS,TODAY WE HAD A OPEN HOUSE AGAIN AND I RAN THE SAME TWO PROTO SD 60 WITH 135 CARS FOR 6 HOURS AND NO WEAR THAT I CAN SEE. NO HEAT BUILD UP . THE UNITS RAN ALL DAY DRAWING 3/4 AMPS . THIS IS A FIRST A KD NO 5 BROKE AT THE FIRST CAR AND THE ENGINE.
Day 12. Well they both have been running for 3 days straight now for a total of 223 hours and 6690 miles over 12 days, and they are still running. I’ve decided to run them until 10 am Monday morning, a 96 hour torture test. Wi***hem luck…
I always knew that Life Likes were some good locomotives, but I didn’t know that they were that good.
It just goes to show how well built the P2K locos are. I’m somewhat surprised that a Kadee #5 broke with only 10 cars weight on it. I guess even the top dogs have a bad day now and then. I’ve been using Kadee #5’s for years. As an aside, both of my P2K locos had couplers with them that were not P2K couplers. They were identical to McHenry’s in every way, including the somewhat dubious quality. Bachmann’s mark 1 coupler is also identical to the McHenry (no surprise there) while the mark 2 is very similar to Kadee. If you’re going to imitate someone, make it the best.
HI Dave, Dave Harrison here and I’ve noted your endurance test. At MSI we’ve estimated it takes roughly 290 days of daily running to accumulate the 2206 real miles represented by Amtrak as the distance from Chicago to Seattle.
We don’t run P2K on our mailine because of the documented gearing and running speed problems. Walthers says they will address this by using a standard gearing in the future.
I’ll keep watching. Good luck.
David Harrison
Might this also be a track endurance test? Is there any chance of switch points or frogs wearing from continuous train running? How about the inside rail edges - in particular on curves?
Yes, At Christmas time I saw some G-size layouts in store windows. There were brass filings all around the edges of the track. The rail was being ground down in a dramatic fashion. I thought it was unusual since I had never noticed any thing like this before. Then two days later I saw it in another display. Upon investigation I decided they were running the trains way too fast, so it was really grinding into the inside edge of the outside rail.
On my only remaining Life-Like turnout the frog has one spot that’s really ground down because often the engines are slipping slightly as they go over the frog because it’s just before the crest of the hill. No wonder cars derail when backing trains into the yard[banghead]
Day 13. Both ended up running until 4 pm today, my wife forget to shut them down before she went to work so the torture test became 102 hours running non stop. I stripped the shells off of them and looked for any obvious signs of wear. Both still appear to be in great shape and all the gears still haven’t developed any cracks. The wheels are turning darker but not showing any signs of wear, I’m going to clean them before I pop them back into the trucks. I did unfortunately break one of the covers holding the wheels onto the trucks, I blame that on myself because when I pryed up on the cover it didn’t just pop off like it normally did so I gave it a extra bit of force and it cracked. The cover still works ok so I’m going to continue using it. I never thought about track wear. I looked around all the corners for metal filings but didn’t see any but some of the black paint used on the frogs have worn off a tiny bit. My track is Atlas Code 83 and all the turnouts that the loco’s are coming into contact with are Atlas #6’s. I guess because I’m only running them at a scale 30 mph its not wearing the track or wheels. Now they have run for 253 hours or 7590 scale miles over 13 days.
Jeffrey Wimberly, it wasn’t a Kadee coupler that broke. It was a Proto coupler that came with the loco. I replaced all of them with Kadee’s after the coupler failure.
It would be great to see some time lapse photo’s of this test.
Day 15. I ran them both for 12 hours yesterday and I just fired them up today at 4:00 pm, they are going to run again non stop until the weekend. Still no problems to report other then the broken coupler. My wife brought home a micrometer from work yesterday. The wearing of the track thing got me a tiny bit worried. I measured both rails and they are the same and I measured the flanges on the wheels and they are the same so at the speed I’m running them they are not wearing my track out. The chrome that was on the wheels face has worn off some though. I checked a few of my higher mileage Proto 2000 loco’s and that seems to be normal wear as they as well have the chrome worn off of their wheels. So far I would say these two loco’s are performing very well for the abuse I’m giving them. 265 hours over 14 days is well above the norm, lol.
Day 18. Both have been running non stop for 64 hours now. One now has a very slight growl to it, sort of like a low rumbling type of sound. Its hard to explain the sound but it was not there yesterday. This just might be the dreaded gear failure, I hope not though. It hasn’t become jerky or rough running so maybe its just wear. I’m going to wait until 4 pm and give them both a quick look over, that will be a 3 day straight run and then I’ll run them for the rest of the weekend. So as of 4 pm this afternoon they will have run for 337 hours and will have travelled 10110 scale miles over 18 days.
On a side note, one thing I did was add a strong magnet to one of my old Athearn boxcars. I just stuck it on the metal weight under the car and it hangs just above the rails. I was VERY surprised the amount of metal crap that it picked up. This might be something that could be useful for helping to keep your layout clean and help keep crap out of your loco’s. I took the Shop Vac to the layout before I started this test so it was clean 18 days ago.
That growl or rumble might be wear developing in the motors bearings. I have an old Athearn loco that does that. It sounds very realistic, very much like a diesel growl.
Our club layout has always had two “magnet” cars on duty. And yes it is very surprising the amount of stuff they collect off the track.
Day 20. I looked over both loco’s Saturday and didn’t find anything to explain the slight growl that is now coming from one of them. Out of curiosity I installed the wheels and gears from the quiet one into the one with the growl and ran it for a few minutes. The slight noise was still there so it can’t be the gears. I looked over everything with a magnifying glass and can’t see any cracks or damage. Next I removed all of the old oil that was on the gears and checked them again and still found nothing. I installed the wheels in their proper spot, oiled up everything and put them back into service at 6 pm Saturday night. As of 9am this morning they have been running for 39 hours for a total of 376 hours, and still going over 20 days. I’m going to be doing a lot of Hydrocal work on the upcoming weekend, installing my new Digitrax DCC system and doing a lot of soldering so the layout will be down for a few days. I had a old 4x8 sheet of plywood laying around so The Great Proto 2000 Endurance Test will be moving to a new location soon. Besides, all the metal crap the magnet picked up kind of bothered me and it has to be somehow related to the test. Now that they will be operating on a 4x8 sheet I won’t have the room to run 15 cars on each one and because of the tighter radius I might have derailing issues if I MU them and pull 30 cars, that is if 30 cars would fit. I’m only going to be laying one track so I’m thinking I should MU the 2 together, add a ton of weight to some flat cars or gondolas and see what happens.
Dave,While I applaud what you are doing that still doesn’t explain why these units suffered crack gears…I know all of my GP7/9/30s had crack gears and some was cracked from the box.One can’t over look the countless reports of crack gears on forums,at .Train Shows and clubs.Its also inexcusable that several of these engines won’t mu with each other or other brands …
At any rate good luck!
Brakie, they suffered from cracked gears either due to poor quality plastic that was used or because the metal axle when slid into the gear broke or caused a lot of stress on the tiny pocket it slides into. Its probably a combination of both and it should have been fixed very early in the production process. Unfortunately it wasn’t caught until the market was flooded with these loco’s. Back then it seemed that everybody had a GP9 or 7 that had a broken gear. There is still some of that old stock laying around in hobby shops all over the world so the issue is still out there. The problem was fixed by Life Like and now its a non issue, newer built loco’s including GP7’s and 9’s don’t have the problem anymore. I’ve never had an issue MUing any of my Proto’s together. I run Proto SD45’s with GP38-2’s and GP9’s together all the time. I also run Kato AC4400CW’s with Proto SD45’s and they run great together. I also have 2 SD40’s produced by Kato and they run like crap with the Kato AC4400CW’s. I need to reprogram the CV’s in the SD40’s so I blame that on operator error. Sure some loco’s won’t run together very well when produced from different manufacturers but that can be easily fixed by adjusting CV’s. You can’t expect a Kato to run the same speed as an Athearn Genesis can you? It would be nice if every loco could run at the same speed wouldn’t it?
Dave,I think they need to be closer in speed since DCC is use by 27% of the modelers…Glad to hear the gear issue was fixed…[:D][:D]
My biggest gripe about the P2Ks was the gear issues.A quick side by side comparison will show that the P2K GP7 has more detail then the Atlas GP7.
I might get 2 or 3 of the newer GP9s since the gears problem has been dealt with.[:D]
I had tghe same ‘cracked gear’ problem on a P2K GP30 I have. Simple fix! I took the gears out of an Athearn F7 that had a dead motor and put them in the P2K. Instant improvement. The hardest part was removing the wheels from the gears so I would still have P2K wheels on the GP30 instead of the inferior Athearn ones. I don’t think I made that clear before. All that was changed was the gears, everything else is P2K.