Happy Fourth of July weekend everybody.
Here's one I've been wanting to do for a while, but haven't had the time to set up.
A while back I started putting McCoy freight cars on my red E2 to see how many it would pull. Things started coming apart around 18-20 cars, but it wasn't an issue of power or traction. The train started to derail to the inside of the horseshoe curves - I think it's called stringline derailing. I tried weighting some of the cars, putting the heavier cars at the head of the train, and so on, but nothing helped much.
Then I picked up the blue E2, and have wanted to try putting the additional locomotive toward the end of the train to act as a pusher, to take some of the strain off the stringline. Set it up last night and filmed it this morning.
The 30 cars here represent a little under half of my McCoy freight collection, picked off the shelves mostly at random. I have no idea what the maximum number could be, I stopped at thirty because it's a manageable number and it's running nice and predictably with no derailments or other issues. The train with the two engines (four standard gauge motors) pulls 8.6 amps on the Z4000 going up the 2% grade, somewhat less on the rest of the circuit.
One of these days I'll learn to put music to the videos, for the moment it's pure tinplate soundtrack!
