BEAS:
Good points. Still no word on engines or wheel arrangement.
I’m going to guess it’s the lack of electrical wheel pickup on the one engine over the dead frogs. You?
So much for ‘Dead frog’ turnouts and engines with rubber tires for more ‘pull’.
I couldn’t agree more about the rubber tires. I yanked mine on my newest loco, a little P2K SW8 because it stalled more often than I liked…okay, way more often than I was prepared to put up with. Now, zero problems.
In am not so certain, though, that the dead frogs should be the ogres that folks make them out to be. That same little four axle diesel, and all other locos of about six different types and manufacturers have no issues at all with my Fast Tracks #8s, nor any of my dead Pecos and Walthers/Shinohara curved #7s and one curved #8. I can always trace my problems to poorly supported track that twists and lifts and sags, dirty track, dirty tires, or dirty/worn pickups. I think I may have had some dirty points not contacting their stock rail partners, but I can’t be sure since I take the broad brush approach to correcting apparent continuity problems when I encounter them and do a whole bunch of fiddling…which, not surprisingly, always seems to work.
Let’s break it down even further…
1- BLI does not make anything smaller than a 2-8-2 in steam
2- Let’s leave off desiels for now, if there is going to be a problem at the switch, it will happen to steam first.
3- I used a Roundhouse 4-4-0 MRC decoder for a time until scrapped. That engine really only had the tender pickups and the one drive axle pickup… very poor method of pickups due to traction tire. That engine did not give me any trouble on the katos.
I do use a NW either by itself or paired with another NW. That does not give trouble either. It is the shortest BLI Desiel I own. If it is going to hit trouble it will do it at the frog of a switch.
Assuming for the moment that there is no flaws or change in horizonal or vertical planes of the switch and nearby tracks large rigid wheel base engines SHOULD make it across these switches at any speed.
Assuming that we are dealing with a switch without a powered frog… at some point below a certain speed the engine WILL stall.
With these truths self evident, what are we left with Gentlemen?
1- Plastic or non powered frog.
2- Flaws in track work
3- Steam engine wheelbase too long for the switch.
4- Wheels shorting on another rail like what happened to Selector on his switches.
What I dont know is the WHAT ENGINE?
If it’s a steamer, then I’d say the problem is a short. There are just too many wheels providing pickup for them all to be out-of-contact at the same time. On the other hand, a long set of drivers in a row might brush against the wrong rail when taking the curved path.
Which brings up another questions: Does this happen on both the straight and curved path, or only one? Which one?
For a small 4-axle switcher, particularly with traction tires, then I’d say poor power distribution to one of the rails. Either that or just really bad luck that the wheels are all spaced wrong and they all hit on plastic at the same time.
Better take your own advice. No he didn’t. Check the edit date. That was added after the numerous posts, and he even says, “Sorry for the incomplete information,” before the text he added.
Ah, good catch. I didn’t get to this thread until later in the day, after his edits. I’d say “I stand corrected,” but I’m sitting down.
Yeah, It is so hard to catch everything in this mode of communication. There have been times I’ve read and reread a message and still didn’t get all the info before I stuck my foot in my mouth anyway.