I have two of these and one runs relatively quietly, the other is quite noisy.  Enough so that it can be heard over the sound of the sound decoder. 

I've pulled the bottom cover off and applied a small touch of plastic-compatible gear lube, Labelle 106, to all three gears, with no reduction in the noise.  It has had very little run time, probably less than an hour, but as loud as it is, I can't see that more break-in time is going to change things.

Short of sending it to Bachmann to repair, is there anything more that I can do?  I am very hesitant to return it as I have cut off the Forney coal bunker and removed the trailing truck, added an after-market tender, hard-wired the sound decoder after removing the Bachmann supplemental boards, and hard-wired the tender to the loco.

Any help will be appreciated.

Scott Groff

I have an 0-4-2 purchased several years ago for which I am in the process of adapting a Backwoods Miniatures 4-wheel tender.  The kit was designed for the 0-4-0, but I have found that the tender sits unacceptably higher than the floor of the 0-4-2.  Is there a difference in wheel sizes between the 0-4-0 and 0-4-2?

Scott Groff

I've had this loco a couple of years in the box, never run.  When I finally got some layout wiring done, I pulled the loco out to run it on a test track.  The headlight did not work, so I started checking continuity and all was good except for the connection from where the blue and yellow wires terminate on the side of the Bachmann board  to the 8-pin plug.  On opening the tender, a number of very small parts fell out, looking suspiciously like surface mount resistors.  They might explain the dead headlight.

Having done a bunch of hard-wire DCC installs in HO, I decided to remove the Bachmann boards and wire the Soundtraxx decoder to the OEM wiring harness.  Now the headlight works.

In testing the final assembly on a set of rollers, I noticed that the tender "jacks" up and down (an oscillation) with each rotation of the drivers.

Folks on the On30 Conspiracy Group suggested that the drivers are possibly out of round, mounted improperly on the axles, or the axles are bent.

I really don't want to send this to Bachmann to fix so can I buy a set of drivers for this loco? Sorry for the long-winded intro.

Scott Groff