I've just diagnosed a very strange and annoying problem with my Lionel Milwaukee Road S3, and I'm wondering if anyone else has run into the same thing. My Lionel S3 4-8-4 runs fine at home, on 0-72 tubular track. However, it derails on much wider curves on the Gargraves track at our museum. After a lot of work diagnosing the situation, we figured out that the problem was the third (center) pick-up roller. The center roller on the locomotive was slipping off the knife-edge center rail when the engine went around a curve, and the engine would lurch as the roller jumped back onto the center rail coming out of the curve, or derail if it didn't make it. This was happening on curves substantially wider than 0-72. The edge of the Lionel roller is quite sharp, which makes it harder for the roller to get back on the center rail as the curve straightens out. The roller is also narrow at 0.38". For comparison, a Weaver roller is 0.46", and a 3rd Rail roller is over half an inch and has an oval shape that eliminates the sharp edge. MTH rollers are about the size of Lionel.
The solution is obvious. Either replace the roller with a 3rd Rail part, or remove it altogether. However, there's a problem with removing or replacing the roller. To remove or replace the roller assembly, you need to take off the boiler. Now, according to Lionel, removing the boiler for any reason whatsoever voids the warranty - and the last thing I want to do is void the warranty on a high-end Lionel product. So, it's a Catch-22. I bought this engine to run it at the museum, but I can't run it at the museum unless I take it apart, which voids the warranty.
I think what I may do is get rid of the center roller by cutting off the hinge pin. That will leave the bracket in place, eliminating the need to remove the boiler. I can't imagine why a Northern even needs a third roller; I've got lots of other big steamers and they all seem to work fine with two. Maybe the distance between the rollers is such that they hit the gaps on a particular switch.
Has anyone else run into this problem running the S3 on Gargraves track? That layout has been running for over ten years and we've never had an engine derail in this fashion before. I've never seen another steamer with a roller in the middle like that, and I have three or four Northerns, a 4-12-2, and some large articulated engines. I have no idea why Lionel thought the third pickup was necessary, but it seems they didn't bother to test it on Gargraves track.
That's about it for me with Lionel. I've made about one major Lionel purchase per year for the past four or five years, and I've had some kind of annoyance with each and every one of them. No DOA's, just silly nonsense like this, and the oversize flanges on some of the diesels, the circus-wagon paint job on the Hiawatha, etc. etc. I feel like Charlie Brown with Lucy and the football. Every time I anticipate something really good from Lionel, there's a disappointment. Enough.