The center pick up roller on my friend's Lionel SD-40 #952 gets jammed on the straight through leg in the switch right after it leaves the center rail. It appears that the pick up roller is not quite wide enough and drops down and jams against the intersecting rail on the other leg rather than passing over it. This only happens on his left hand 7.5 inch high speed switches and only with this particular engine. Has anyone experienced this particular problem and figured out a cure?
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The center pick up roller on my friend's Lionel SD-40 #952 gets jammed on the straight through leg in the switch right after it leaves the center rail. It appears that the pick up roller is not quite wide enough and drops down and jams against the intersecting rail on the other leg rather than passing over it. This only happens on his left hand 7.5 inch high speed switches and only with this particular engine. Has anyone experienced this particular problem and figured out a cure?
I had three Lionel steam locomotive models that experienced the same problem on more than one of the Atlas turnouts on our layout. I changed-out all those Lionel "too-narrow" pick-up rollers, and replaced them with Sunset/3rd Rail pick-up roller assemblies. End of problem!
I thought about replacing the pick up assembly but didn't know what to get. Thanks for the quick response. Were you able to simply swap them out?
Dennis: Please see my response to "ironman's" thread about the same issue-maybe you won't have to swap rollers....
D&H 65,
Thank you! I had completely forgotten about those plastic inserts. Do you or does anyone have a photo showing their placement?
Are you coming through the frog end? Main or diverging doesn't matter. If you are catching rollers coming in through the frog, the ramps can help. One of those can be seen just to the right of the engine..
Dennis: Don't have photos of the 7.5s, but here's a pix of some 072s I had for sale and placement of the plastic ramps is similar...
P.S. I did find one 7.5 photo after all....
Thanks Norm and D&H 65. That's exactly what I needed to see. That should take care of the problem. Thanks again!
What is really interesting about this issue is; the subject was brought up at one of those York meetings and the response from Lionel was something to the effect that, "Lionel products work just fine on Lionel track.". That was also the same response concerning those massively oversized flanges on their diesels, some years ago.
When my friend asked if he should call Lionel, I told him that was a likely response.
Ah yes...my early days with out these plastic frog ramps cost me some fuses.
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