Model Railroading Maintenance

About twice a year, I try to put aside some time to do some maintenance on my model locomotives.  They accumulate dust and grime so that is the first thing to address.  They also could use periodic lubrication.  After some cleaning and lubrication, I look the entire locomotive over to see if it needs any other work.  

Yesterday morning, I worked on some of my O scale locomotives as well as a couple of HO scale locomotives.  One of these O scale locomotives could still use some more work so I might try to tackle that tomorrow morning.  It is one of my older locomotives so I'm thinking there is some caked up grease on the gears.  It is not running as smoothly as I would like and the likely problem is some old, hardened grease on the gears.  Hopefully, that will be a fairly simple job.  (See the edit added at the bottom of this blog entry for more information on what I thought would be a quick and easy task.)

This morning, I pulled out my largest locomotive.  I had purchased this very large steam locomotive a few years ago at a train show and I wrote about it in this blog entry.  It was used...  very used, actually...  and was in non-running condition at the time.  I purchased the entire set for just $40.  I figured that if it couldn't be fixed, then it would still make a nice model for a long shelf so would be well worth the $40.  

After getting the new set home, I disassembled the steam locomotive and found that it was indeed still in working order but needed some work.  I put that project aside at the time because I had other things that were more important to do.  Also, I wasn't exactly sure what to do with this very large train in our small house so I needed to make a few decisions on what upgrades to do.  

Well, I pulled this big locomotive off the shelf this morning.  This locomotive and tender measure about 30 inches long and more than double the size of old Lionel O gauge trains.  It is an incredibly large train set.  On the positive side, I find it much, much easier to work on larger model trains than smaller model trains.  Between mildly shaky hands and occasional lousy eyesight (both due to my health issues but my age isn't helping any), smaller models are definitely more difficult to maintain.  Consequently, I now prefer O scale or larger.  This particular locomotive and tender is a narrow gauge F scale train.  It is in Fn3 scale to be exact. 

The first thing I noticed this morning was that the previous owner must have had a white long-haired cat because the wheels were tangled up with hair resembling what would come from a white long-haired cat.  The wheels were also simply dirty...  very dirty.  The electrical pickups were filthy too.  It was no wonder the previous owner thought this locomotive was dead.  

I disassembled the drive train and then I did a quick cleaning of the wheels and electrical contacts.  I re-assembled it and did a quick test.  I couldn't locate any of the track that came with this set (I may have tossed that old track in the trash because it was so flimsy and oxidized) but I was able to apply power to the locomotive using large alligator clips clamped to the wheels for a test run.  It was running very smoothly at this point so I'm confident that I can upgrade the electronics in this locomotive whenever I am ready.  

This locomotive has smoke and sound but the sound is very, very generic and cheap.  It is just a static-y chuffing sound (which can be heard in the video below).  It would be nice to upgrade the sound to a more realistic sound card to include other sounds including a bell and whistle.  I could easily add digital command control to this locomotive right away but I am toying with the idea of adding a battery powered digital command control instead.  Battery power would eliminate the need to power the tracks which means no need to worry about keeping the tracks clean.

I also ordered some used straight tracks this morning so I can test this locomotive on actual tracks.  That should arrive in a few days.  When the track arrives, I'll probably put together another video to add here.  

My long-term plan is to paint this locomotive and add a bunch of detail parts to it.  I want it to be a showcase type of model.  

Regardless of what I end up doing for upgrades, this locomotive is running nicely now. 

EDIT:  This morning's lubrication task on the O scale locomotive did not go so well.  Things are packed very tightly inside this little O scale locomotive and I had great difficulty figuring out how to disassemble it without breaking something!  

I lubed the parts I could figure out how to gain access to but it is still sounding rough like gears aren't meshed together snugly.  I'm having difficulty figuring out how to gain access to the full gearing assembly without completely disassembling this locomotive.  I only want to disassemble it once since it is so complicated and tedious (it is one of my smaller O scale narrow gauge locomotives) so I'd prefer to do that when I upgrade the electronics inside it to digital command control.  

Converting it to digital will require me to fully disassemble it and I really have no desire to do that twice.  If I break something while trying to fully disassemble it now just for lubrication and proper alignment of the gears, then I will have to glue it back together.  Glue will make the next disassembly to convert it to digital even more difficult.  That would just make things far more difficult.  On the other hand, I do need to open it up to evaluate whether the gears are reparable.  

So, this is a project that will be put on hold for now.  Maybe, in the meantime, I can find a video that shows how to disassemble this particular model for lubrication and maintenance...