Lionel Milw 6-24507 E6

Are you sure?  I love the passenger cars as much as I dislike the engines.

Art

I haven't been able to find color photos of the engine with the cars visible, but the timeline seems right. Note the gray roofs. But, I'm with you Art, not my favorite engine.

Not exactly matching, is it?  The deseils missed the mark by not being able to integrate the color  "kick up " found on the tender of the steamers.

Bruce

Actually, if you want to model the train as it was first pulled by the E6's, the ribside Hiawatha cars made to go with the F7 4-6-4 steamer would be appropriate. The E6 and DL-109 locomotives were bought by the Milwaukee Road to test as replacements for steam on the Hiawathas. Either the Weaver or Lionel ribside cars would replicate the Milwaukee Road's first use of the E6's. 

Beyond that, any set of later, smooth-sided orange and maroon Hiawatha streamliners would be OK. The black roofs would be more correct than the gray, since the gray roof cars were painted for the Olympian Hiawatha and the E6's normally ran St. Paul/Milwaukee/Chicago. 

The E6 is my favorite diesel. I like the look of the sloping nose, much more streamlined Deco than the later GM diesels. The paint job on Lionel's model is a bit unfortunate; the grey looks kind of washed out compared to the prototype. The original Milwaukee Road E6's were later repainted in basically the same scheme, but with a black roof set off with a yellow stripe, like the E7's. The black roof adds contrast to the bland grey. One of these days I'm going to do the black roof and yellow pinstripe on my Lionel E6's.

I don't have a photo of the Lionel E6's with the ribside cars, but here is one with a pair of MTH DL109's and Weaver ribside cars. The Milwaukee ran both the E6 and DL109 with the same Hiawatha trainsets.  I actually did the same thing the day I took this picture, but I don't seem to have a photo with the E6 in front. 

Apologies for taking this thread a bit off track ... I notice your DL-109s have an AA configuration. Is one a dummy? If not, how do you do that voodoo you do do?

The Milwaukee eventually repainted the original engines in the maroon and orange paint scheme. I guessing to better blend in with their Hiawatha colors. Here a pic.

Milwrd

RailKing E-3 I recently got. Has the black roof, obviously. Being RK, MTH downscaled it by, among other things, narrowing the body somewhat, which I wish they hadn't done, but the paint scheme is nice.

I also like the E6 but I have read elsewhere on the forum that neither MTH nor Lionel got the color(s) entirely right and ever since I have been put off getting a set - even though I am not a color fanatic I don't really care for the color schemes I have seen. In the last day or so I spotted a Lionel Milwaukee Road E6 on the auction site with a number of high res photos. Nice engines but frankly I can't see that they are a good match for any MR passenger cars in the maroon and orange scheme:

Long story, but you asked for it so here it is. MTH made these engines with Proto-1, and while they were sold separately, there was an A and a powered B (a DL110 to use the correct ALCO terminology). They were connected with a tether; the A unit had a socket and the B had a plug. Now, the Milwaukee Road never had a B unit, they only had a pair of DL109 A units, and I wanted a correct pair that would operate back to back. The first thing I had to do was get a pair numbered 15A and 15B, the railroad's original numbers. Fortunately, MTH did make A units with both numbers. The first thing I did was to rewire the trailing unit so it ran backwards and disconnect the headlight. At that point I had a Proto-1 pair that would operate back to back, the only disadvantage being that since the e-units were not connected, they could get out of synch. Anyway I ran them for quite a while that way. 

Then I decided that what I really wanted was a powered pair with PS/2. I could have done that with two upgrade kits, but that would have cost me over $300 for the kits, plus a substantial amount of work for the conversion. So I found an AB set with Proto-2, lettered for a different railroad and also connected with a tether. I lucked out and got them cheap. The lead A unit was easy, I just swapped the Milwaukee body and pilot onto the PS/2 chassis. Then I had to do the trailing A unit. I swapped the slave board and tether from the PS/2 B unit into the trailing A unit of the Milwaukee pair. I had to do some fiddling with the Proto-Couplers; I forget exactly what but I might have had to get a different coupler because the one from the B unit was too short. The couplers are different between Proto-1 and Proto-2. This all sounds complicated but it was actually easier than installing two conversion kits. 

Now I had my Milwaukee Road AA pair and they worked perfectly. The lights on the trailing A don't work, but I don't consider that a big deal. The light board for PS/2 is a different voltage from the older PS/1 board, and since nobody is really going to notice that the headlight doesn't come on in reverse, I just left it. The other thing is that the passenger station announcements don't match Milwaukee Road; I just don't use them. If I want PSA I can run the engines with Lionel Hiawatha cars and use the announcements on the Station Sounds diner.

The final step was to get the donor engine ready for sale as a PS/1 pair. I could have just pulled the motors in the B unit and moused up a tether for the rear coupler to make a dummy, but I wanted to make it work like it came from the factory. I bought a slave board that a friend had left over from a conversion, and got a few other necessary parts from MTH. Then I put the whole mess together again and sold it as a PS/1 AB pair. It ran just fine. I was up front with the buyer about it being something I had put together from parts, and it was priced accordingly. Net cost to me for the PS/2 upgrade was about a hundred bucks after I sold the rebuilt donor engine, thanks to having gotten a really great deal on the used PS/2 pair. 

And that's how I got a correctly numbered AA pair of powered Milwaukee Road DL109's with Protosound-2. As far as I know it's the only such pair in existence, but somebody else might have done the same thing or spent the money and time on a pair of conversion kits. It doesn't matter anyway; I'm happy with mine and it was well worth the effort to do it.

As a side note, Alco only made four DL110 B units. Three went to the Southern and one to the Santa Fe.

"The E6 is my favorite diesel. I like the look of the sloping nose"

so do i.

Here for comparison are shots of the Lionel E6 and the MTH E8, with very similar Milwaukee Road paint jobs. The paint on the MTH loco is a mostly accurate version of the Milwaukee E7 scheme, which was never applied to an E8/E9 but is a very attractive color scheme. MTH selected a better shade of gray; the photo shows the Lionel color as better than it looks in real life. On the other hand, Lionel has a more attractive shade of orange. Neither paint job is perfect but both are in the ballpark. 

The Milwaukee later added the black roof to its one set of E6's. As you can see on the photo, the yellow stripe is already there on the Lionel E6, so it would be relatively easy to mask off the roof at the stripe and paint it black, which would improve the appearance considerably. The only problem is finding the time to do it! 

Thanks for the information on how you did the AA configuration. I had considered doing something like that, but never got around to it.

A newbie just joining the forum.... I just purchased a set of AA at an estate sale. When I got them home I opened it up and found several melted wires... does anyone have a schematic of the boards and wiring. The Engine runs okay in run mode and the sound board seems to be okay. I don't have a remote, and would just run it in its simpliest mode. I would like to repair it and just need to get a schematic..