Bought one of these at a Estate sale for $6, and I am wonderring what everyone thinks of them? It’s in prety much mint condition on the outside, don’t have anywhere to try and run it yet, but I wanted to know a few things about it anyway.
How do they run on Modern Layout electronics?
How easy are they to detail? (Mostly is it possible to put more realistic plows on them)
How easy is coupler replacement ?
How vintage is it?
What scale?
Split frame no doubt.
What do you mean by modern layout electronics? DCC? If it is old vintage, no doubt not DCC ready and the motor contacts connect to the frame.
Open it up and do some research. Post a couple pictures.
Rich
Maybe this might help.
http://www.spookshow.net/loco/bachu36b.html
Does it have the horn hook couplers? That would be really vintage.
Kadee will have suitable coupler. Look at the Kadee site. Kadee has a lot of suggestions.
Rich
The HO Seeker website has old Bachmann catalogs and I see in the 1979 catalog that the U36B cost $18 when new, which is the same as their F40PH and GP40. I think it is safe to say it is train set quality engine. A friend of mine had the Bachmann GP40 and after replacing the plastic handrails, it became a good looking engine. It ran quietly and smoothly but did not run at very slow speeds and I think he eventually made a dummy out of it -because again it looks pretty good once it had the thin handrails.
Dave Nelson
I have a few of the N scale version. I repowered them with Atlas GP40/40-2 drives. They now have dirctional lighting and I added descoeders and they run pretty well.
Ira
Bachmann had two versions of this loco at one time.One had a single power truck with self contained motor.the other version was built like the N scale version complete with 8 wheel drive and center mounted motor.They are easy to tell apart simply by picking them up.The split frame version was very heavy.as the other was plastic framed.I’ve been looking for a good shell to put on a Athearn blue box U boat chassis but so far no luck.
One other thing of note Bachmann was the only maker of the U36-B loco.
It is an HO Scale loco, The Layout I plan on building is small and would be DC, so refitting it with new Electronics is not a worry. I was worried it might not work on newer DC.
DC old or new is still DC. If it’s capable of running it’ll run on it pretty much from any DC pack. My question would be how well does it run? I had one of these at one time. It had the pickup wheels in the front truck and a cheap pancake motor on the rear truck which also had traction tires. It knew two speeds. Dead stop and wide open. After a year or two it still knew two speeds. Dead stop and creep while smoking. If yours is like that one it’s not worth putting money into unless you’re gonna put a modern chassis under it. I did that with several 80’s era Bachmann GP40’s. They all have modern GP38-2 drives in them. The modern GP40 drive is a bit too big.