I am working on a full powered set of PRR FM Erie Builts to cruise the layout. I had a set of these a few years ago in NYC (since sold off) and have been hunting for a set of PRR ones for a while now. I thought these would be easier to set up since these were sold with a fixed pilot with each A unit but they ended up being a bit more work than I expected. I used a combination of Atlas and Kadee parts along with some Deans Micro Plugs.
Here is a quick pictorial:
A quick shot on the bench with fixed pilot and coupler cover:
I ended up sanding the pilots down to lessen the slight gap seen above:
I used Atlas scale couplers on the pilots. I had to make some shims though. Note the front truck 3 Rail coupler mount had to be trimmed off:
I used another Atlas coupler on the rear of the As, mounted to their coupler adapter. Thanks to Bill at Atlas for helping ID the needed parts. I found I could mount the coupler in different ways to get tighter coupling. Note I had to grind the rear truck a bit more than the front:
Here is the B unit front. I had to use a Kadee 805 here to get a good coupling gap. The truck mount centers are spaced a bit differently from the ends. I had to do a full grind on both of the B unit trucks:
The B rear was pretty straightforward:
Initial trial runs led to the discovery of the shortcomings of only having two pickup rollers each on these engines. I think the ground pickup is a little sketchy too due to the trucks having four traction tires each. I used some Deans micro plugs (found in the RC department of your favorite hobby shop) to tie all the units together. I was able to use the sprung doors to sneak them out. With the tight coupling, the diaphragms were able to hide them:
Now I’m able to run them at a crawl through all my switches:
