Bachmann 2-8-0 Consolidation - lost its pulling power

[mmagliaro]

Good news, Bart.
Did you put the decoder in?  Did you remove any weight from the engine (not the tender) to do it?  I ask,
 because that engine should be able to pull a ton
without any additional weight.    You mentioned pulling 4 heavyweights, or a mixed 8-car freight.     Now that the drawbar is fixed,
is that still all it can pull?  That would still be puzzling.

[Bart1701]

Yes, the decoders are installed in the the locomotive. The DZ125 in the boiler was previously installed in there to control the motor and lights, and I just recently installed the TSU-750 and speaker in the tender for the sound. Had to remove the weight section in the front section of the boiler for the decoder, and the weight in the tender to make room for the decoder and speaker.

My layout is not that large and I tend to run shorter freights (10 cars on the average) and passenger trains at about 6 cars long. This length seems to look realistic on my layout.

My layout is in the modern era, so I treat the steamers as "special runs" on a modern layout - so a short photo freight or a short excursion train feels about right. I would imagine that I could probably pull a longer length train, but have never really tried on my layout with my steamers.

I am quite satisfied with the performance of the locomotive - now that I have the drawbar properly installed!

Thanks,
Bart

[VonRyan]

To answer some of the questions that were asked:

I usually would run it with a consist of 4 heavyweight passenger cars, or a mixed freight with about 8 cars. Now, it's lucky if it can manage one or two box cars.

I also thought that the TT going bad so quickly was a bit unusual. I will check to see if something is causing the back of the engine to lift up slightly. It's logical that something like that would cause the 3rd set of drivers where the TTs are located to possibly be lifted up off the rails a bit.

I am getting power from the tender to the engine now - that was corrected before my pulling power disappeared. But maybe something I did to fix that problem is now causing a slight lift in the locomotive.

I may also look into filling some of the voids in the boiler with tungsten putty - With the main decoder sitting the boiler shell, I didn't think there was that much open space - but I may pop it open to see how much space there really is. Is Tungsten putty - available at Lowe's or Home Depot? In what department would I find it?

Thanks for everyone's suggestions around this mystery.

Bart

Are your boxcars made of solid lead? it seems quite odd that even if it lost some of its pulling power that it still wouldn't pull 12 or so boxcars... especially with the known strength of these engines (especially the second run of the DCC-ready version)

-Cody F.

[peteski]

Didn't Bart mention that his layout is one huge 3% grade?    Maybe?

[Bart1701]

As I had mentioned, I usually run shorter trains on my layout - typically about 10 freight cars or 6 passenger cars. But, I did a test by connecting about 20 freight cars to my Consolidation and it pulled them around the layout just fine (even with the constant 3% grade that Peteski alluded to  ).  So, I think everything is now OK with my Consolidation. Here is a short video of it with the sound decoder installed and working. The exhaust chuffs may not be synchronized exactly at 4 chuffs per revolution - I just set the rate to what sounded good to my ears.

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Thanks,
Bart