I was selling a Rivarossi steam locomotive at a train show. A prospective buyer asked me "how many hours of service" the locomotive had. I can't print my reply. Does anyone actually keep track of this. If operating a model railroad creates more paper work than my job it's time to quit.
LIRRMAN :P
I can imagine your reply. It's sad to say, but some buyers are not too bright. I certainly don't keep logs on my locos and they don't have an hour meter.
Ever watch guys kick the tires on a used car?
When I buy a used locomotive at a train show, I just want to see if it runs well or not.
I've never been to a train show, but don't they usually have a track set up for testing locomotives?
One dealer I know has a 3' piece of flex with a transformer, mounted on a board for a test track. Now wouldn't you think he could afford to have a small loop track? He said if he ran it around a loop, then he would have to sell it as "used". Give me a break.
My hobby shop tests all locos before handing them to you. i love that and on ebay would rather buy a c-8 that runs great and has been tested than a c-10 which was not tested.
Bob,
Most of the guys who have test tracks have more than one gauge - large, O, S, HO, N normally. It would be hard to make a loop that is easily transportable to set up as a test track. If the engine starts smoothly, stops smoothly, and runs easily well forward and reverse, that's about as much testing that can be done there. I remember buying an Athearn light Pacific off e-bay. I tested it at home, it ran fine for about five minutes and the infamous gear broke. The seller said that since it ran fine for five minutes it was good to go. Then he got my evaluation.
Gene
Couldn't they make a set up of "E-Z riders" in several gauges? That would at least give you a few minutes of running and listening to the thing.
The most questionable purchase you can make at a swap meet is from a woman whose husband just died and she wants to sell off his stuff A friend of her husbands told her it was worth x no. of dollars. she digs it up from the basement and all she knows it is a pile of trains and equipment.Her husband's friend popsup and says yes it is a soan so and it is worth so much. you then dicker it down to a price that both parties are happy with and you take it home .At home you open it up to find the guy had ripped all the insides out and installed an obsolete decoder that will not work with ant current decoder. It happened to me . Bythe time I got it runing I could have bought a new one.
Don ::)
Yes. some of us do keep track of how much our trains run. The group I model with has an H0 layout in the local museum. Knowing how many times the railroad is run by the public is a strong bargaining point when we renew our contract. We regularly rack up numbers over 1500 hours per locomotive even though we start and stop the trains by simply turning the power on and off every two minutes of run time. Incidentally we use Bachmann 2-8-0s almost exclusively. We have tested some other brands and in some cases have had consistent failures at less than 50 hours.
We have debated what would happen if we ever started selling these locomotives when they reached say 1400 hours. Would the average buyer detect that they were nearing the end of their lives? How about experienced model railroaders? Because of our doubt, our policy is to destroy the locomotives when we are finished with them. We feel it would be unfair for us to sell them, knowing their condition, and giving them away would risk their being offered for sale by whomever received them.
where do you get them, i want one really badly in ho and have no luck. in any event my locos never die and i get many on ebay.
Jim
What is the most significant component that establishes the mean time before failure for the locomotive? Even if the mechanics failed, there should be an abundance of spare parts that could be put to good use.
Perhaps you could dismantle it and discard only the worn out parts. Someone who is into serious bashing might use the remains for practice or experimentation.
generally a look at the driver tires should give an idea of how much a loco has run--but unless it has really serious wear, a simple back and forth on a test track should determine if it works.
It MUST be tested on track--I bought an LGB loco (Krokodil) once that had a dead short in it when placed on the track, but ran when tried with test leads. But-- the two motors ran opposite--someone had been into it and screwed it up-- and I got a bargain.
okay so where do you get those 2-8-0's and by the way, what goes wrong with locos after running for 1500 hours anyway.
Frank Ellison, a model railroad pioneer, used to use a measurement on his layout called a "smile." It was basically a train length because scale miles in "O" scale were too long for his home layout. So he'd measure distances in the number of train lengths between stops. It made sense when he did it.
If someone asks you how much operating time a model has ask the person are you talking real time or HO time? Are you talking real miles, scale miles or someother measure?
Most of our 2-8-0s have been purchased from Hobbyworld right here in Saskatoon. Hobbyworld supports local model railroading and train shows and we like to support them in return. The 2-8-0s came equipped with DCC but for our operation it does not make any difference.
The failures in these locomotive, when they finally occur, have been from many sources. The most common has been the side rods cutting off the crank pins on the main drive axles. This is a direct result of our on-off mode of automatic control. We have repaired a number of these for our own use by making up new crank pins, but the effort in time is worth more than a used locomotive would fetch in dollars. Even locomotives that fail for other reasons show signs of cut crank pins. This is one of the reasons that we do not claim warranty on these locomotives.
Bearing failures, particularly the small bushings supporting the worm shaft, have been the second most common mode of failure. Unfortunately, by the time these failures become obvious, the worm shaft has usually damaged the frame. We have (once) made up new bearings out of Oilite and bedded them in epoxy to make up for the frame damage but the jury is still out on the effectiveness of this repair.
Third most common mode of failure has been worn wheel wipers (power pickups.) The tender pickups fail first. With the tender pickups gone, our reliability drops from about 99.99% (one failure-to-start in 10,000 tries) to about 99.9% (one failure-to-start in 1000 tries.) Fortunately, tender pickups are easily be replaced by new ones cut out of phosphor bronze or brass shim stock. (Phosphor bronze lasts longer, brass shim stock is easier to find.) Failure of locomotive wheel wipers is much rarer but generally more devastating in terms of reliability. Our usual repair for this is replacement with a bottom plate from a locomotive that failed in some other mode.
Other failures include motor failures (usually worn out brushes), lost rivets in the motion, worn out frames letting the axles wobble excessively and ultimately leading to excessive derailing, and other, rarer causes that I cannot remember at the moment.
Eventually, our locomotives are reduced to a pile of useless pieces. However, in the process, we squeeze a few hundred extra hours out of each locomotive. If the initial failure was at 1500 hours on a locomotive that cost us $150, an extra 300 hours is worth about $30. It seems hardly worth the effort when we could sell the locomotives for at least that much after the initial failure and repair. But as I said before, we would rather destroy our used locomotives than sell junk.
As a group that deals with the public, we have seen too many disappointed newbies who's "good deals" turned out to be junk. This is bad enough if the newbie is an adult but can be devastating if a youngster is involved. We do what we can to repair these locomotives, but we cannot make silk purses out of sow's ears. Fortunately, our group fairly regularly receives donations of usable or repairable model railroad gear and are often able to provide such youngsters with a good locomotive and give him/her instructions on converting his purchased one to a dummy.
One thing we rarely have problems with is tire wear. We regularly add oil to our rails to keep them clean and to maintain reliable power pickup. Without it, our reliability would fall below 99% within a few months of rail and wheel cleaning, no matter which methods we tried. With oil, our drive wheels stay shiny and bright and our reliabilty remains high for years at a time.
Jim Banner:
I found your post to be very informative and would love to have you follow up with another along these lines.
As a newbie and one that wants to learn from the voices of experiance, I ask if you have any charts or other information concerning reliability that you would be willing to post for our benefit?
That information based on your and your clubs actual experiance with various manufacturers and types of equipment would be very helpfull to us all.
As a matter of fact I have seen nothing posted anywhere about actual reliability of various products. I have seen many general statements such as "So and so company is better" and then a list of someones idea of how they rank.
Yet, to see how the reliability stacks up from real use on a layout would be great as well as having the ability to know just what fails (the weak part of the design) would help guide me as well as others when making a purchase.
Thanks for the great post!
Redtail67
Jim What kind of oil are you using on the track??
Quote from: Daylight4449 on June 02, 2008, 08:59:30 PM
My hobby shop tests all locos before handing them to you. i love that and on ebay would rather buy a c-8 that runs great and has been tested than a c-10 which was not tested.
My LHS will give me credit only for an item returned due to malfunctions. They advise to send the unit to the manufacturer for repair/replacement.
I only shop there on rare occasions due to that policy.
That policy has led to my using either e-bay or a select few on line model railroad stores/vendors for the vast majority of purchases.
I primarily buy from two sources for two reasons.
If the item is defective within 30 days from date of purchase, they replace it, no questions asked. They will even send me a prepaid shipping label to return the unit, and no shipping charge for the replacement, or give me the option of a refund, in which case they even credit the original shipping cost. I am not out a penney.
If after receiving the item I don't like it or simply change my mind within 30 days, they give me a refund, no questions asked. All I'm out is the shipping cost.
During the first 25 days, I put my locos through the ringer. I won't play games with either the factory or vendor, I demand quality and service. Just like my ranch equipment and support vehicles, I don't pamper my railroad equipment either. If it can't take it I don't want it.
I hesitate to recommend, not recommend, evaluate or review any company's products, including Bachmann's, on any public forum. To do so would be merely giving my opinion as I am not an expert in the engineering and manufacturing of model railroad products.
Quote from: Redtail67 on June 06, 2008, 03:02:35 AM
to see how the reliability stacks up from real use on a layout would be great as well as having the ability to know just what fails (the weak part of the design) would help guide me as well as others when making a purchase.
Redtail67
I wish I could supply such data but most of our early testing, before settling on Bachmann's 2-8-0s, was done on single samples or at most on pairs. To rank any company's products on such small samples would be grossly unfair, particularly so when the models tested may no longer be in production. We selected 2-8-0s because they were commonly used by the Canadian Northern Railway in 1910 in this part of the world, and that is what we are modelling. If I told you that the Bachmann 2-8-0s we originally tested suffered from gear failure and poor pickup, you might well hesitate to buy a Bachmann 2-8-0 today. That would be grossly unfair to Bachmann as the first Bachmann 2-8-0s we tested were the old #530 "sidewinders" with the flat gears. We were fortunate that the mechanism in these locomotives was upgraded at about that time to the Plus version with can motor and large flywheel/worm gear. These were the mainstay of our operation until the Spectrum 2-8-0s replaced them. But if I told you that they picked up only on the locomotive wheels and that those wheels tended to wobble, making the locomotive waddle down the track, you might still hesitate to buy a Bachmann 2-8-0 today. Again unfair to Bachmann, as todays 2-8-0 is an entirely different design. But telling you what I have found to be the strengths and weaknesses of a particular type of locomotive
under the conditions we operate it and in the quantities that we have used them, is fair game.
The only other comment I would like to make on this concerns our brief trial of some brass locomotives. They were ten times the price of the Bachmann Plus and caused us ten times as much trouble. So much for the magic of brass.
Quote from: Loco Bill Canelos on June 06, 2008, 08:57:47 AM
Jim What kind of oil are you using on the track??
Any of the light weight, plastic compatible oils will do. Bachmann E-Z Lube (the Conductive Contact Lube, cat.no 99981, not the gear lubes and greases) or Hob-E-Lube ultra light oil or Conducat Lube & Cleaner or Labelle 108 or Wahl Hair Clipper oil. The last two do not claim to be plastic compatible but experience has shown that they do not attack Delrin plastic wheels.
Do NOT use 3-in-1 oil. It is too heavy. And avoid oils with additives, such as motor oil. Any oils that tend to oxidize will cause grief when they turn to varnish on your tracks. I have tied hydraulic oil and automatic transmission fluid with reasonably good results on my outdoor layout where the trains are heavier. But even outdoors I usually stick to the oils listed above.
Rereading Bill's question, I most often use Labelle 108 on the H0 tracks, both at home and on our group's display layout, and Wahl Hair Clipper Oil on my outdoor layout.
I am planning on picking up 5 spectrum 2-8-0s for my mainline operation, after all, i can get them at 45 bucks each, if you know where to go...
Quote from: Daylight4449 on June 08, 2008, 03:53:13 PM
I am planning on picking up 5 spectrum 2-8-0s for my mainline operation, after all, i can get them at 45 bucks each, if you know where to go...
And the place to go is where?
normaly, keep it a secret because the more people know the higher the price but the ebay store called "The favorite spot" has them and i have seen them go at prices from $30 to $55, they come with full manufacturers garenty and warrenty because they are ma factory athourized dealership and they sell bachmann products. They are 12 dollar shipping to the us with other rates for international and combine shipping. great place. and no i don't work there.
Quote from: Daylight4449 on June 08, 2008, 06:00:55 PM
normaly, keep it a secret because the more people know the higher the price but the ebay store called "The favorite spot" has them and i have seen them go at prices from $30 to $55, they come with full manufacturers garenty and warrenty because they are ma factory athourized dealership and they sell bachmann products. They are 12 dollar shipping to the us with other rates for international and combine shipping. great place. and no i don't work there.
Thanks, will keep an eye on the site.
Jim Banner:
Thanks for your reply.
After thinking about what you said I agree that it would be unfair due to the small samples taken.
Thanks again,
Redtail67
Quote from: Daylight4449 on June 08, 2008, 06:00:55 PM
normaly, keep it a secret because the more people know the higher the price but the ebay store called "The favorite spot" has them and i have seen them go at prices from $30 to $55, they come with full manufacturers garenty and warrenty because they are ma factory athourized dealership and they sell bachmann products. They are 12 dollar shipping to the us with other rates for international and combine shipping. great place. and no i don't work there.
I've done a lot of business with them and have never had even a minor problem. Their prices, at auction or not, seem to be among the lowest you can find and even when they may be a few bucks higher than the lowest price I can find anywhere on the web or Ebay, I know that if I buy from them I'll be in good shape.
Regards