Lionel Erie caboose SKU 6-27683

Is there enough slack in the wire coming from the center pickup roller?  I've had this issue before where the wire did not have enough slack to allow the truck to turn freely.

@C&O Allan posted:

Is there enough slack in the wire coming from the center pickup roller?  I've had this issue before where the wire did not have enough slack to allow the truck to turn freely.

Thank you, Allan, I will check this out when I return home from work this evening.

I forgot to mention that another problem with this caboose is that it has a switch for smoke or no smoke, I added a few drops of smoke fluid, and flipped the switch for it to smoke, but it doesn't smoke.

Any ideas on how I can get it to smoke?

Arnold

I don't know about the smoke, but I know there have been some reports of roof warping due to the heat.  I remember that being on K-Line cabooses, but I don't know about Lionel.

Hopefully someone else can chime in.

Most likely won’t smoke unless running in command. Don’t know if that’s your situation or not.

The switch may be wired in reverse? Try placing it in No Smoke and see if it smokes…

Tom

How about the amount of smoke fluid for the caboose?  Should I add only 4 or 5 drops or more than that before I run it in command at the end of a train?

Good news: Rod Miller's advice worked. I turned the smoke switch on, put one-fifth of a medicine dropper of JT Megasteam smoke fluid in the smoke stack and ran the train in Command mode with 18 to 19 volts of track power, and the smoke unit in this gorgeous caboose worked.

Smoke is one of my favoite features, and this is the only smoking caboose I have, so I'm very pleased.

The caboose now rarely derails moving forward, occasionally derails running in reverse, but I can minimize that by running it slow.

Another problem is that one of the couplers occasionally opens when it's not supposed to do that. So, I used a black wire tie to connect that caboose coupler to the coupler of the train car in front of it. That seems to have eliminated the unwanted uncoupling. Arnold

Yet another problem I had with this caboose is with its little plastic smoke stack. It fell off the caboose onto my layout and I  couldn't find it for 2 days. That's because I have grossly oversized ballast to go with my grossly oversized O Gauge tubular track rails, and a lot of lichen along the tracks that hide little things that sometimes fall off my trains.

After obsessively searching for the little plastic smoke stack, I miraculously found it. Then, it took my a couple of hours to line up the two tiny fragile plastic pieces on the sides of the smoke stack into tiny holes they go in, in order to secure the smoke stack onto the roof of the caboose.

IMO, model railroaders need a lot of patience to make repairs and do the various other model railroad activities. It's satisfying, however, when the patience pays off and one is successful accomplishing things. Arnold

Maybe my initial above post slipped through the cracks.

The original post said yhat the trailing truck of this caboose sometimes derails when running through 031 curves. Any ideas about why these derailments happen and what can be done to eliminate them?

This caboose is supposed to run well through 031 curves.

Arnold

Did you look at the wires?