Moving forward, Equipment needed for Lionel 6-18043 C&O (Yellow Belly) Semi-Scale hudson ERR upgrade

Mike......As shown Your yellow Belly has a AC pullmore motor. No cruise available.  AC commander will give you 100 step control,which is a large improvement. Pat (Harmon Yards) can likely set you up with a Pitman dc motor. Frank Timco makes a dc conversion using a smaller motor. Depends on what type of performance you are looking for.

Richard

Funny thing, I'm in the middle of a conversion of my Lionel Yellowbelly!

First thing, I sent it to Pat @harmonyards for the Pittman motor upgrade.  Since Pat is a mechanical wizard, I also sent along the Vision Line Hudson cab interior and he also neatly fit that into the shell!

Next I tackled the boiler shell to fit the lighting, a total of 19 LED's are used for the full lighting package.  It has ground lights, cab lights, flickering firebox, lighted gauges in the cab, lighted number boards, and of course, a nice LED headlight.

The cab lights and ground lights are automatically controlled based on motion, as is the Rule-17 LED headlight intensity.

Moving on to the frame, it got fan driven smoke, the ERR Cruise Commander, the Super-Chuffer, and the Chuff-Generator.

I put the shell on and tested all this stuff, everything worked great.  One last task for the locomotive, I still have to add the IR transmitter LED to the drawbar, that will finish the locomotive.  I'll be using an AD-20A in the tender to interface the serial IR data to the sound boards.  The tender will need rollers added since it'll have a wireless drawbar, and of course the sound, coupler control, and backup light control.

John,

is there any thing special needed when using the chuff generator?  Will there be any compatibility issues using the chuff generator with the cruise commander, older railsounds board and the hardwire tether?

Nope, the Chuff-Generator is compatible with existing TMCC stuff, I use them all the time to upgrade older TMCC to 4-chuffs/rev.  The build I posted uses the Chuff-Generator and Cruise Commander.

I chose to put the Cruise Commander in the locomotive as it fits and allows me to have a wireless tether.  Even if I used a wired tether, having the Cruise Commander in the locomotive makes for a lot fewer wires to the tender, so you can have a more cosmetically pleasing tether design.

Thanks John,

Excited to see when you are done.

I have had mine for a long time and these days it mostly sits on the shelf with because of no cruise.

Ever since 3rd rail announced theirs, I have been thinking about how might the Lionel one be updated enough to breath new life in it and want to run it more again.  I went through an exercise last week where i updated coal loads on several of my steamers with cast or molded coal.  This engine was one of them and it was such a drastic improvement on the appearance it got me excited to explore this upgrade option again.  I really like the scale pilot that was added to yours, another huge improvement.

Mike, I seen you had emailed me, I’ll answer you in a few,….but I wanted to add for the rest of the viewers in TV land, …..there’s no question the 3rd Rail model of the C&O’s Hudson will be stunning, ….Scott builds a very detailed model,…..but the Lionel Yellowbelly can be a very close second place. I have no clue why Lionel touted this as a “semi scale” locomotive, when it is very very close to scale proportions. They didn’t do a bad job at all on this engine, given the technology available at the time. You can add the Pittman, the electronics, good lighting, and some add on exterior details, and still never get close to the cost of the brass model……these shrouded older Pulmor steam locomotives are great candidates for massive upgrades. Usually out of the box, they can be had for what I’d consider small ( ish ) money …

Pat

@Hump Yard Mike posted:

Excited to see when you are done.

I have had mine for a long time and these days it mostly sits on the shelf with because of no cruise.

I'm excited to see it done as well!   I popped the shell on it and dragged the inert tender around, it looks great with all the lighting working, and the cruise works well, smokes great, can't wait for the remaining parts to be done!

I decided to move forward on this and have made some progress on it over the last month.  I have been going through this internal debate about making permanent changes to this engine, as in some ways I view it as a turning point at Lionel being the first near scale engine with TMCC.  I almost put it in the same camp as the 700E when it came out, as it was hugely revolutionary to o gauge trains.  With that in mind, for now, I am only planning changes to this engine that do not require permanent changes.  

All the changes you see here were completed for ~ $200 of equipment and making the modifications myself.

For now, I decide to go with the ERR cruise commander/radio board, and a timko motor upgrade.  The timko motor is a bolt in replacement.  When in, it did a decent job of pulling my 6 aluminum 18” mth passenger cars around my layout with out grades and using O-72.  The aluminum cars were much more work for the motor than the 7 car train of plastic 18” cars from mth.  I ran the engine non stop for over 30 minutes originally with 7 aluminum cars and the motor seem to get warmer than I liked, so when dropping to 6, seems thing alright.  Before running the 7 car aluminum test, I forgot to lubricator the cars, and they may have played into the motor getting warm as well.  The Pittman upgrade from Pat would be an awesome upgrade to address this but required the chassis to be permanently upgraded.  I may pursue this option regardless down the road.

I also added real coal to the molded coal load using diluted white glue, big improvement.

I also really liked the wheel modifications Pat did on John’s C&O hudson with the scale trucks, cutting the knobs off  and then painting the wheels.  I was pleasantly surprised when I found in the original box a scale truck I didn’t know was there.  I ground the knubs off with the dremel and spun the wheel and ground the edges at the same time with my dremel cut off wheel, results below.  I forgot to take a picture before I started on this so I have an image of the non scale truck showing the knubs.

For a reference, the link below shows a picture taken at the B&O museum of the front pilot.

https://www.redbubble.com/peop...d-hudson-yellowbelly

I picked up a spray can close in color and painted the wheels.  It’s not a perfect match, but pretty close.  I used:

I also added LEDs for the headlight and number boards.  Funny, before this you wouldn’t even know the number boards were designed to be lit as they were so dim.

I ended up adding a reed switch and magnets on the first axle of the trailing truck to trigger the chuff.  It seems to work pretty decent except at higher speeds it is not what I expected.  I will update this post with another video to demonstrate it.  Not sure if this is from the sound board or the reed switch magnet approach.

I stayed with the original sound board and wiring harness.  Gunrunnerjohn had a really helpful post showing how to wire this older board to the Cruise Commander.  I really appreciate this being posted and linked it below.  Staying with the tether really limits the options on a potential back head install in the future.

https://ogrforum.com/...and-err-dc-commander

I left the smoke alone for now, so it only will do one puff every 4 chuffs.  To upgrade the smoke is at least another $100 dollars and I rarely use smoke any more.

An issue I ran into was how to prevent the tether harness from hitting the flywheel as is exited the engine.  I ended up using one of the mth tach sensor mounts with a small piece of wood to hold it just away from it.

Things I would like change if I committed to making permanent changes would include:

-Pittman Upgrade

-knocking out the jewels and adding lit class lights

-putting back head in cab

-attempting to cut the casting to add real window cab openings for sight down the boiler.  In the meanwhile, I may try to 3D print some and see if they can make enough of an improvement on this.

Again, ~$200 in upgrades listed below gets what you see in the videos:

-$50 for motor

-$140 for cuise commander and radio board

-$7 grey paint can

-$5 magnets and reed switch

-< $5 in LEDs and resistors

-$10 for coal

Now I am using this engine again regularly and really enjoying it.  In the last week, I have probably put over 5 hours on it.

@Hump Yard Mike posted:

The Pittman upgrade from Pat would be an awesome upgrade to address this but required the chassis to be permanently upgraded.  I may pursue this option regardless down the road.

Given the poor performance of the small Mabuchi 3xx motor, I'd strongly recommend the Pittman upgrade.  I have no issues with motor power, when I got my locomotive back from Pat with the Pittman installed, I did a little pulling power test.  38 freight cars around the layout, including the 2.5% grade.  The motor didn't even get warm.

I'm different I guess, I have no compunction about modifying one of my locomotives, I really doubt any of them are going to reach high priced collector's status in my lifetime.  I did consider drilling out the jewels and installing another set of LED's, I may yet do that.

Mike, nice work on the upgrades!……and good work keeping the budget on the down low!….although my swap is permanent, it’s no hack job. Every chassis is carefully run through the milling machine to get good clean cuts and a precise finished product. Nothing wrong with the DIY Timko product, except as John mentioned, the choice of motor is extremely whimpy …..if you had grades, you’d struggle with 6 heavies…..the mods I do to all these Pulmor locomotives may not be the best for collector value, but the play value shoots through the roof!….I have an ex-Pulmor 18056 Hudson that can pull 12 heavies from sun up to sun down and not even let out a whimper,…..good thing is, you’re through the worst of it, so you can upgrade to a large Pittman, and get right back at it,…..that Timko special will have some resale value to another DIY guy down the road if you so choose to go my route….but again, nice work!!….looks and sounds great!!..

Pat