It's probably very solidly glued in. So if I were you, I would probably buy an extra boiler shell to try this.  You probably need to tap it from the inside, pushing it out. I suspect that some kind of extension like a long screwdriver with some padding on the end of the blade might be needed.


I haven't seen this boiler, but I suspect that trying to get a knife blade between the smoke box door and the smoke box would probably ruin them both.

No , it is not normal. Call the Bachmann Service department.

The answer for engines like this is, as usual, the era of spare parts for Model Railroad engines is long past.  Most of the time you have to buy another model to be a sacrificial animal to get the part you want.  In some cases, you might get one that runs that has a shell you don't care for, so you swap shells to get the road number and name you want.  Then you keep the defective mechanism for parts, minus of course the one that has let go.

We don't have winter down here on the Gulf Coast. I had no idea what a winterization hatch is until Jeffrey told us.

The J class discussion really ought to be on another thread, not one about an F9 diesel locomotive. 

But. Here goes.  Wheels locking up on a steam engine usually means that the wheels are not accurately "quartered."


http://ibls.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=Quartering

From what you are saying, I would be fairly certain that you bought this locomotive as a used item.  New engine usually don't have such defects.  Used locomotives have unknown histories that often can be abusive and terrible, that's why I avoid them unless I really know the person I'm buying it from.

Is it a Bachmann product? If so, an exploded diagram ought to be in the parts section of the website.

Spare parts are not a reality in today's Model Railroad world, and I have to say that Bachmann has done a better job than most everybody else at keeping at least some of the parts stocked as best they can.

Back in the Model Railroad Jurassic when most everything was American made, you could very easily get parts from all of the American manufacturers. There was no limited run this and Limited run that, engines stayed available forever, like the diecast offerings of Mantua, Varney, Roundhouse and such.

That world is long gone. People have to get used to the idea of buying another model to be a donor for the parts.  Those heavy mountains come around from time to time, I've seen them, and you might get lucky and find one without a tender or something broken that didn't affect the motor.  Good luck in your quest.

I have plastic road bed track too on the layout that I know is going to last two years or less. So I want to be able to take the track apart and bring it with me to the next house to use on the next layout, this track is not cheap and it would be a shame to pitch it when it's perfectly good.

 I spray painted my track brown including the roadbed, and that improves the appearance a lot, but I still want to put ballast on it.  Unfortunately, I'll have to ballast each piece of track separately or the process of gluing the ballast down will also glue the sections togetHer

I'm surprised that the Bach Man does not offer a suitable nail.

Call the Bachmann Service department. That is what they're there for.

I'm curious as to why you want power routing switches on such a small layout. 

I'm also curious if you're asking about the 18"R plastic frog switches or the ones with an insulated metal frog that can be either powered or nonpowered, depending on whether or not you connect a jumper wire concealed under the road bed.

There's a high chance my thinking is flawed, but I always thought that power routing switches had rails electrically continuous with the frogs, dependent on track gaps for polarity separation, a concept from the Jurassic before more advanced switches were made available, way back in the Code 100 brass rail days.

What you need is a system that has one power supply to the track but allows multiple cabs to participate.

That was a problem with prototype 0-6-0's and other engines without a pony truck upfront.  The whole purpose of the leading truck on prototype engines was to minimize or stop the waddling, also called "hunting."   That is one big reason why locomotives without pony trucks were not used on mainline trains much. Hunting would develop at track speed and would allow the engine to pick at the most molecular misaligned rail joint and possibly derail.  Our models can do much the same.

If you have access to an NMRA standards gauge or something similar, check the wheel gauge on the leading wheel and see if it is slightly narrower than it ought to be. That would permit excessive sideways wheel play and allow the engine to hunt. If it is, there's not a whole lot you can do about it without Advanced tools and skills. You might call the Bachmann Service department and see what they have to say.

One last point to keep in mind, and forgive me if you already know this, but little industrial locomotives like this probably rarely ran more than five or 6 miles an hour in their typically small environment on the company's property.  A lot of modelers don't realize this and run 0-4-0's and 0-6-0's at mainline track speed,  pulling complete trains,  which was rarely ever done on the prototype.  A few years ago I read one of the last firsthand steam era crew narratives, those guys are nearly all passed now,  from a fireman on a Union Pacific 0-6-0 that had been assigned to a local freight during a World War II power shortage.  He described in great detail the hunting that went on when that engine got above about 25 miles an hour, which it had to to maintain a schedule on the main line heavily overloaded with wartime traffic.

The only time I'd think EZ track would not be a good choice for a layout like you want would be if it was in outside coastal air.  I had such a layout and it deteriorated electrically at most contact points in about three years from the salt air. I had to replace the track and I used a competitive brand only because it was smaller code 83 rail and looked better to me. This may not matter to you.

In contrast, my actual main layout is now 18 years old.  I constructed the main line with EZ track because I wantef to be operating in a week or two, I didn't feel like spending six months building something before I could run.  I have not had any electrical issues anywhere in all that time.  I did find that a couple of switch points needed slight adjustment with a file.  Also., I had number five switches with metal frogs that the frogs sat a molecule higher than the adjacent rail.  In particular, steam engines would bump up onto the frog like on a hilltop breaking contact so I had to slightly grind the frog down with a Dremel to a little bit. But if you run diesels I don't think that'll be a problem.

I think your choice is fine.

If all those engines are running on the same address, you can't selectively program individual engines to do different things, they're all running as one.

Plus, you have the speed matching problem.  HO couplers are never very tight, and you'll see those engines pulling away from each other, then slacking and bumping each other the whole way as they fight each other for dominance running at slightly different speeds.

I don't ever run multiple diesels or even diesels at all, but that compounding slacking them bumping is bad enough for two engineers running double headed steam engines.  It was equally a bad problem or worse on the prototype, and coupler knuckles or draw bars were pulled all the time with improperly operated helpers.

I remember seeing photographs of SP steam freights out west with sometimes two or three mid-train helpers, in pre-train-radio days. There were brakemen periodically spaced on the car tops with flags to relay signals back-and-forth between the several engines, which were all large cab forwards, or malleys as the SP called them.  I can't imagine such an operation and would be certain that trains parting out on the line due to coupler or drawbar failure because of heavy slack action was fairly common.