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I just bought this engine in a sealed carton new set .Engine itself after lubing it works smoothly .The tender however is not.It crackles lots of static railsounds and whistle in and out of. Don't know what to do. Since its an older set despite being new  will Lionel fix it?

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Lionel will most assuredly NOT fix it, they only do warranty repairs.

On the bright side, this is probably an easy fix.  Most of the time for older stuff that has been stored for a long period of time, it's oxidation on the contacts of the two Railsounds chips on the audio board. The fix is to reseat these chips and wipe the contacts to get a good connection to all pins in the sockets again.  The technique is to simply pull the chip up a small distance to move it in the socket and then press it back into place.  It's not necessary to actually totally remove the chip.

See below, the two chips in the square sockets.

Note:  Do NOT try to pry these chips out with a screwdriver or other tool!  You'll almost surely break the socket and then you have a much bigger problem.

The only right way to so this job is with a PLCC chip extractor, typically around $6-$7 at a variety of venues.  A search on Amazon will turn up dozens of them.

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Last edited by gunrunnerjohn

I just bought this engine in a sealed carton new set .Engine itself after lubing it works smoothly .The tender however is not.It crackles lots of static railsounds and whistle in and out of. Don't know what to do. Since its an older set despite being new  will Lionel fix it?

Bob,

Your set is definitely not new, even though the box had never been opened before you did so.  It's actually almost 20 years old.

As a result, most people in our hobby, and most sellers, would describe it as "new -- old stock" instead of "new".

Please realize the difference.  It's important.

As with everything that not really brand new, with new -- old stock stuff there is some maintenance required before you can expect proper operation, including mechanical TLC as you've already discovered, and electrical TLC such as that described by @gunrunnerjohn.

I've used the methods he's described many times with great success.  It's particularly fun to buy things that are reported by their sellers to be "not working" and get them back in operation quickly, easily, and cheaply.  His recommendations are one of the secrets to doing so.

Mike

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