I ended up picking up 3 items from the last Cabin Fever MTH warehouse auction that ended on New Years Eve 2021: A Premier Chicago & Northwestern E4 Hudson, a Santa Fe 5011 class 2-10-4 https://ogrforum.com/...c/169374064469330137 , and the locomotive and tender shells of a Southern Pacific GS4 Northern https://ogrforum.com/...c/169374064469124643 . The CNW E4 Hudson was the easiest of the 3 to get running. It was cosmetically mint and unrun, just missing the pilot truck , had its motor and drive line installed, and had about 2/3 of it's wire harness intact. I scrounged around in my parts box and found a pilot truck and pivot bar that fit perfectly.
After making the locomotive cosmetically complete I had to wire it up to run. The only missing wire harness was between the locomotive wiring and where the MUX board would go. I could have duplicated that harness but I have a limited supply of boiler MUX boards, and since they are NLA I wanted to save them as spares for my factory PS2 3V locomotives. I needed independent control of the warning light on the front of the locomotive so I got creative with a standard PS32 board. I reconfigured the harness to match a PS3 steam upgrade kit harness but I eliminated the chassis ground wire through the harness. I grounded the board through the tender trucks instead of the locomotive through the harness. That freed up one wire in the 10 pin harness. I connected that wire to the interior light ground on the PS32 board. It was now just a simple matter of connecting the positive voltage wire for cab light and red warning light on the front of the locomotive to the PV line in the locomotive and the ground for those two lights to the wire that now ran back to the interior light ground on the board connector. The interior light and red warning light can be turned on and off from the interior light softkey (LIN) on the DCS remote independent of the headlight. The headlight, MARS light (a Evans MARS simulator I changed the LED on to match the headlight LED), classification lights, and firebox light are connected to the headlight circuit. The wire harness I built has enough slack to be able to easily lift the shell off and disconnect the shell and chassis wire harness.
This was the last version of the CNW E4 Hudson MTh produced, which was PS2 3V. I wasn't about to put the PS2 sound file in it, since the PS32 board can use PS3 sound files. I started with a Premier PS3 Empire State Express sound file as a base and added a 5 chime whistle (quillable) to the sound file using the ADPCM program. I also changed the station announcements to the Minnesota 400.
Came out pretty good. This was a pretty quick weekend project for me. The other two Cabin Fever locomotives I picked up require everything, including paint, so they'll be a little more involved.
