I bought this 1940s or 50s-era Varney F3 for a few bucks on eBay a couple of years ago because I liked its classic looks. It’s been on a display shelf ever since. This Christmas season I decided to put a small circle of track around the base of the tree, with MEC and Great Northern cars providing the green and red colors, and thought the old F3 might want to get called back to active duty for a while.
This video consists of two clips spliced together at about the minute-twenty point. In between the clips I gave it a little more throttle since I thought it might stall otherwise, so it’s running a little faster towards the end of the video. Other than that I didn’t change the throttle setting at all. I don’t know why the train slows down at the same place around the back of the tree every time, and then speeds back up as it comes back around in front again, but the sound of that lugging engine just strikes me as perfect. Hats off to the folks at Varney who built this solid old beast such a long time ago.
Wow, at certain locations it sounds pretty much “real”.
My recollection is that Hobbytown drives had a certain soft oily sound when they ran. Back in the day, a really quiet loco was pretty much unheard of, except for the Athearn rubber band drive.
Try tightening up the rail joiners around the back, but more likely you should just add a second pair of feeders. It doesn’t take much sectional track to end up with power loss.
I had a 4x8 oval of Bachmann EZ Track for a test track, and even though I had 4 sets of feeders equally spaced around the oval, there were slowdowns. Constrast to my actual layout at the time, an 8x12 layotu with flex track, for a test run I hooked up just one set of feeders adn everythign worked perfectly, although I did finish off the bus runs and had a feeder drop for each section of flex when I was done.
Thanks, Randy–that makes sense and must be it. The slowest part of the track is the section immediately before the one with the feeders, so that connection no doubt needs some attention. I still like the lugging sound of that old Varney, but I’ve replaced it with an InterMountain F3 set for normal Christmas-train duty so it’s possible to hear something else in the room…
??? Am I not hearing this right. To me the locomotive sound is drowned out by a very loud gratting sound closer to the microphone that seems like one of those Halloween noise maker.
Reminds me of the old Flyer HO 4 wheel diesel switcher I used to have, it would run at amazingly low speeds and had a very interesting chugging growl sound to it.
One Tyco F unit had a deep growl, the other more of a whine - it had a turbocharged engine refit.