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Last train season I picked up an orphan tender with a sos/whistle sound board. I'd like to identify the board and tender if possible.
The tender is  6026 style (Santa Fe) with the speaker mounted to the underside of the deck. It is lettered for "C & O" in gold lettering.  Plastic trucks and the rear couple is non-operating.

The sound board has five wires: two to the speakers, one to the chuff trigger, and a pair of wires for a roller pickup and ground (outside rails). I have speaker wires and trigger wire positively identified. If someone can identify which wire is to the pickup and which wire goes to the axle wipers, I would appreciate it.
Some of the numbers are hard to read, I think the back of the board is marked: 518501023 rev. 1
A photo is below.

So: when was the board used?
Which wires to center rail pickup and axle wiper (ground).
What engine did the tender go with?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Sound board

 

 

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Sorry Lou, but Chuck is right.  There were no C&O locos with gold markings catalogued in the '80s, and Sound of Steam with Whistle was only used from '72 thru '75.  I have firsthand experience with this board.  Unfortunately it's at my parents' house in Penna so I can't look to see where the wires go.  Not 100% sure but I believe the single pin connector near the middle of the board is the chuff contact switch.

Could one of the EE's on here infer which wire is which from looking at the components?

Ted Sowirka posted:

Sorry Lou, but Chuck is right.  There were no C&O locos with gold markings catalogued in the '80s, and Sound of Steam with Whistle was only used from '72 thru '75.  I have firsthand experience with this board.  Unfortunately it's at my parents' house in Penna so I can't look to see where the wires go.  Not 100% sure but I believe the single pin connector near the middle of the board is the chuff contact switch.

Could one of the EE's on here infer which wire is which from looking at the components?

I'll take your word for it.  I do remember working on one of these around '83.  Maybe old stock.

Lou N

C W Burfle posted:

The wire that I believe to be the chuff trigger has a small tongue connector, identical to what Lionel used on early SOS tenders. The whistle sound is not very realistic at all.

Brushing the tongue against ground does produce the chuffing sound.

The whistle is a two note phase shift oscillator.  It had to be a sine wave source so as not to create lots of harmonics.  To tune it use a blower whistle.  Tape off one port and blow the whistle and turn one pot to try to match the frequency.  The do the same thing with the other pot and the other blower whistle port taped off.

If you have a frequency meter or scope I believe they were 534 and 746Hz.

Lou N

Thank you to everybody for your replies.

I had the tender in my pile of stuff to go out the door, then I decided to find out about the sound board.
It so happens that I have an 8206 that has a tender with the wrong sound board in it. It's a 2046 style modern era tender, but it only has sound of steam.  I guess I'll be switching sound boards sometime in the future.

Funny that I was even considering the sale. Normally I keep odd tenders, just in case.

As to adjusting the pots: Maybe I will mark their current positions and play with them a bit to see if I can get the whistle to sound better.

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