Atlas GP20? Vaporidium?

[randgust]

I certainly got burned by it because after years of doing CF7's on every GP7 chassis Atlas ever made, I was looking forward to the next run.  The prior run, with the slow speed motor and the improved universals, was just outstanding excellent.   Going back to the "Classics", those hex nut universals could make a lot of racket, or be dead silent, and a noisy one (even with Beardon Block treatment) could be impossible to quiet down.

So I'd seen the 'new' GP40 for DCC, speaker in the fuel tank with a modified motor bracket, decoder under the radiator.   I'm not a DCC fan but I know my customers are, and if you want sound too, speaker has to go somewhere.   So that's the way it is, waiting for the GP7 to come out.

And it's TOTALLY different this time.   Speaker up under the radiator, decoder board up front in FRONT of the cab.   The DC 'silver' board is tight, but the DCC 'gold' board goes all the way up into the long nose.   For my CF7's that was the end.   Toast.   You can't use that chassis.   And the deal I had with Atlas was to convert GP7's INCLUDING getting a non-dynamic Phase 1 to get the long hood as part of the conversion effort; i.e. you started ONLY with a GP7.

Paul from Atlas couldn't have been nicer, but the big surprise was he didn't appear to know about it either until he saw it.   Draw you own conclusions on that one.

That's what I'm seeing above, as well.   Last time I saw that lack of design standardization was in the Luftwaffe history.

I 'think' I get the truck wires although I don't like it either.   With DCC you loose frame mass, with DCC and sound you loose even more.   With the loss of weight you loose pickup as well as tractive effort.   Hard-wiring the trucks eliminates one point of failure for poor pickup that more weight would have fixed.   As old-school N, in DC, pulling long trains, I reject all that but I also recognize that the 'bells and whistles crowd' now considers that pretty much standard.    I enjoy a handful of DCC+sound models for fun too, but compromising electrical pickup and tractive effort significantly to pull it off for a 'working' locomotive is still too much of a push if you have long trains, grades, and curves.

It's fun on steam when you can dump that stuff in a tender, and I've stuffed all that in a dummy B unit for diesels as well.   My compromise mentality.

We had a period there when it seemed like everything was interchangeable by manufacturer with relatively few deviations and standard parts, now it's all over the map again.

[mu26aeh]

@randgust touches on something that continues to bother me, as well as most of us reading this thread probably, and that's the loss of locomotive mass/weight.  Manufacturers should know that they need to make the locomotives as heavy as possible, yet continue to remove chassis to make room for sound related parts etc.  They might enjoy selling 3 locomotives to me, but I don't want to by 3 locos to pull 10 cars.  And given the prices we pay for them, we shouldn't have to tear them apart and try to find places where we can stuff extra weight into them.

[peteski]

@randgust touches on something that continues to bother me, as well as most of us reading this thread probably, and that's the loss of locomotive mass/weight.  Manufacturers should know that they need to make the locomotives as heavy as possible, yet continue to remove chassis to make room for sound related parts etc.  They might enjoy selling 3 locomotives to me, but I don't want to by 3 locos to pull 10 cars.  And given the prices we pay for them, we shouldn't have to tear them apart and try to find places where we can stuff extra weight into them.

Unfortunately I do not see any good way to take care of the problem.  DCC is here to stay, and nobody wants to use lead as the frame material.  Tungsten could be the miracle solution, but it is hard to deal with and likely expensive to come up with tooling to make the frames from sintered tungsten (which would be likely the way they would be made).  Heck, even brass would be heavier than Zamak, but again, Zamak is cheap and easy to cast.

I thought the best frame was in Kato's GP38-2.  It was a heavy, likely lead-based alloy, but it was less soft than pure lead.  Brilliant engineering, but highly unlikely to ever be repeated.

[randgust]

And because you have less weight the pressure on any pickup tabs is less, reducing their effectiveness, and the response has been to hot-wire the trucks...... physics is a cruel master.

In DCC you at least have the 'modern' advantage of keep-alive to help stabilize pickup, not true in DC.   But physics are still working, it still translates directly to drawbar pull.

I'll confess to removing FOUR decoders out of BLI RSD15's and replacing them with lead for the ATSF layout and the heavy unit coal train, but saving the decoders and putting them into other locomotives that run on my DCC Ttrak modules.   Even with that weight, came nowhere near pulling what an old MRC RSD15 could with the plating worn off the wheels and the traction tires removed.   But those of you that saw my "Fast Mail" at Altoona thinking it was a BLI PA1, wrong, Life-Like PA with a BLI decoder in it!  And that one could afford to loose a little weight to fit in a decoder.

And my Kato GP38 has over DOUBLE the tractive effort of an Atlas GP38, still holds the record DB pull for any given B-B diesel.

[bbunge]

Oh no … this is exactly what I have been saying about Bachmann N scale offerings for the last 20 years, and haven’t spent one penny on that brand in all that time.  It saddens me to see that Atlas has seemingly cheapened its way to being similarly despised, and avoided, by serious hobbyists.  Hopefully they can nip this in the bud and turn it back around.

Whoa.  You've missed out on some outstanding steam locomotives.