Lionel, MTH, and Williams Smoke Units

I think you have to take this on a case by case basis.  FWIW, most of my Legacy smoke units work fine.  Lionel has a much greater variety of smoke units than most makers, and some are simply better smokers than others.

If you can't get smoke performance better than the Williams Seuthe units, something is seriously wrong!

LOL that is true!

I like the smoke amount that the MTH steam engines put out, almost smokes you out of the house.

As for Williams steam engines, with the Seuthe unit, just getting it to smoke properly you are doing great!

I don't have any Lionel smoking engines so I will leave that one alone, no comment either way.

Lee Fritz

I have mostly MTH and one Lionel Legacy, all diesels. They all smoke about the same and I have to blow into the stack on all my MTH engines after refilling smoke fluid as well. I have made that standard practice after a refill. Either blow into it or a couple squirts with an empty smoke pipette. If I forget, sometimes smoke starts coming out of strange places on the engine.

I do have one older MTH PS2 SD70ACE that isn't smoking like it once did. I suspect the wick is burnt and needs replacing. I have some replacement wicks on order from MTH. Hoping they arrive soon. Mike Reagan did a video on Lionel's site showing how to restore a smoke unit to produce more smoke output, I think wick replacement was also part of the fix on that one.

My experience with smoke units has been that they are like snowflakes -- no two are exactly alike. Some of my PS2's blast out smoke without a sound from the unit fan. Some produce barely any smoke with all kinds of fan noise and some are in between. The one Legacy GP9 I have with twin stacks was a constant problem until the unit crapped out entirely.

If anyone out there knows how to get a wimpy smoke unit to perform better I would love to hear about it. I recently purchased one of the MTH repair kits and it's loaded with resistors, fan wheels, motors and wicks. Can I do an overhaul?

The MTH parts, other than perhaps the fan motors and wick, are not much use for Lionel smoke units.

As you say, they're all different.  Lionel smoke units come with a number of different value resistors, some you can change in value, some you can't.  Generally, if the engine has a voltage regulator module for the smoke, you MUST use the value of resistor specified, normally either 6 or 8 ohms.  If they have the standard 27 ohm resistor and no regulator, I routinely change these to a 20 ohm 2W wirewound resistor for much better results.  Obviously, drilling out the intake, replacing the wick and packing it properly, etc. also help with smoke volume.