I recently purchased a “BLT 1-86” number 8690 trolly car. It sparks a ton at the rollers and sounds rough. I lubed the gears and put a few drops of oil in a hole on top of the motor winding, on the roller ends. Is there anything else to quite it down our is it just the way this is built?
Jim H
Sounds like a “pulmor” ac motor trolley to me. They normally have that coffee grinder sound. If you disassemble the motor and clean out the old dried up grease and grease the worm up again it will quiet down a bit…for a while [:)]
Neil
Those trolleys are, indeed, “growlers.” Always have been. I had a fairly complete collection of all of them, but sold them within the last year or so and now just have a couple of the original #60s left (which also are growlers).
It appears you’ve done most of what can be done to quiet them down, although I recall reading an article devoted to the topic of noisy motorized units some years ago, probably in CTT. The sparking should have subsided to a significant degree if you applied a drop of oil to the ends of the pickup rollers (but keep it off the face of the rollers themselves).
They are great little trolleys, but they definitely do let you know that they’re around!