New member intro and 2-10-0 question

[Woody Elmore]

There was a thread posted here a while ago about the Russian decapod. The real ones were not that big - they had lots of axles to distribute the engine's weight over poorly maintained Russian track.

Your HO model may be performing the wayu the real ones did.

As for grades, it has been my experience that the gentler the rise the better.

[wjstix]

I seem to remember reading that a 2% grade could limit the number of cars an engine could pull to something like 40% of what it could pull on flat ground. A 4% grade is going to really cut down the number of cars. Also, it seems steam engines are more affected by this (models that is) than diesels.

Plus as noted the real Russian decapods were pretty lightweight, they were built to run over swampy soft ground in Russia. I have one (with Tsunami) that I decorated for the Minneapolis Northfield and Southern, who bought some of them after WW1. I've pics of them being doubleheaded so I'm guessing they were fairly limited on what they could pull.

One thing about Spectrum engines as far as "binding"...I've had a few where in shipping the siderods got pushed in a tiny bit and touched the frame every rotation of the drivers. Lightly applying pressure to bend it out in the offending area results in a very smooth running engine.

[Thomas1911]

I had about 2 hrs total run time on it when I posted this question.  I've run it a little just about every night since and it seems the more I run it the better it gets.  Guess everything is still wearing in.