Is it OK to run a Legacy steam engine w/o its tender?

No harm that I know of.

Not very familiar with all the electronics but doesn't the tender need to be hooked up because of the reversing unit in the tender...........Paul

The electronics to run the engine are for the most part in the engine.  The sound system is in the tender.

I am not sure if you will cause damage or not but I would not run the engine without a tender. Maybe a larger turntable is in order.

Lee Fritz

Yes.

I believe all Lionel engines will run without the tender. MTH, I hear, will not.

If the reverse unit is in the engine I don't see any reason not to run it. Your just turning off the sounds in the tender. I would not power up the tender without the engine though.

Is that true, statement above, that Lionel will run WITHOUT tender, while MTH will

not?  There was a thread on tender swapping, which I want to do to locos that

do not have my desired style of tender, and with Lionel you can easily, with MTH

you have to keep chassis and "guts". and build/replace just the superstructure?

I'd guess if you turned engine alone, you'd need a switcher on standby to push the

tender on and off the turntable?  What did the prototype do?  There must have been

instances in which longer engines were turned on turntables without tenders?

There is no reason of any kind that you can't run a Legacy or TMCC Lionel locomotive with the wireless tether without the tender.  The ONLY thing the tender does is supply the sound.  I test them all the time on the bench with just the locomotive.  No harm of any kind will result.

Powering the tender without the locomotive will not harm it either, it'll just come up in conventional mode.  Again, no harm of any kind will result.

What did the prototype do?  There must have been

instances in which longer engines were turned on turntables without tenders?

Here In Portsmouth Seaboard Air Line had a fairly small TT (87 feet I believe), but they had all their classes of steam come into town, up to 2-8-8-2.  I wondered about this and finally discovered they had a Wye just northeast of the main yard/shop area:

My Williams brass N&W Class J won't fit on my Atlas 24" TT, but since I have a Wye it's all good

The tender doesn't control anything but the sound volume.  The IR interface is a one-way interface from the locomotive to the tender.  The commands for the sounds, coupler, and rear light(s) are all sent from the locomotive.

Maybe the tender was drawing power and reducing the track voltage.   That's the only way I know that it could affect smoke volume.

Thought that too. Might be a sign that the track power feed could be better.

This is sort of repetitive, but to put it another way:

The Lionel infrared tether - TMCC or Legacy - is a Data Link only. It does not transmit any

current, other than that relative to its communication function. Lionel generally puts

the sound in the tender and the motor driver and radio control (command control) in

the loco. The smaller and/or older locos will tend to have a wire tether, as parts were larger

at one time, and some still won't fit in one place.

=========

Legacy boards are smaller than TMCC, to my knowledge. I have an older Lionel scale 4-4-2

(it was NP) with TMCC, RS and Odyssey - and a hard-wire tether. I just got a used Legacy

PRR ("ATSF") E-6 4-4-2, which is the same loco chassis and the same tender - and it

has a wireless tether. 

It depends on the Legacy version you're talking about.  Early Legacy had the same form-factor boards as the modular TMCC, it was hard to tell the difference from a casual glance.  Later Legacy have reduced the size of the boards.

I still will bet that somewhere in our wild railroad history there was a terminal or

yard where there was no wye, and the turntable was too short for one or more

locomotives, with  tenders, that occasionally or regularly came into it.  (of course, I am not sure how big a deal it is to uncouple a tender from the locomotive, and recouple it, on a regular basis?)