K-line Cruise Control

Jim, have you taken off the shell and verified it has a cruise board. Many K-Line engines have a "cc" suffix and don't have a cruise board. My NYC Mikado is that way. It did not have cruise until I installed it.

Pete

Jon Z at Lionel told me that K-Line's cruise control system was crude and ineffective. I have that exact engine without cruise and it runs slow and steady. I'd recommend replacing that cruise board with the ERR cruise board. I have found the ERR board to give excellent slow speed results. Jon Z. Spent an entire year tweaking the algorithm in the ERR cruise board.

More than likely the cruise is off.  Check the instructions for turning it on.  As for Jon's opinion, he's intitled to it if he said it but in my experience the Kline cruise was almost as good as EOB. For the time it came out.

on another note my Kline mike didn't come with cruise I had to install.  As stated above make sure it has it first.

 I believe Pete nailed it. I don't think they came with cruise. They offered upgrade kits for the Mikados and Hudsons. The Berkshires were the first engines to have it. Adding cruise with an ERR board is pretty straight forward. As far a K-Lines own cruise. It was probably the best one in it's day for TMCC. certainly better than anything Lionel had. No striped tape on the flywheel like EOB.  Later on you could add selectable chuff by moving a few wires around. I know a lot of operators added EOB to Lionel to smooth out the speed steps and get 4 chuffs versus 1 or 2. Unless you were switching over to DCS. The K-Line worked well enough to leave alone. I've had one go up in smoke. I see no reason to replace them till there's a problem.

Gary may be right. My K-Line 4449 with K-Line cruise performs ok at slow speeds. 

IMO, the ERR Cruise Commander is clearly better than the K-Line cruise, but the version 4 K-Line cruise worked pretty well.  The problem is, they seem to be vary fragile and when they go, they tend to go in a big way with smoke!