MPC rants & raves

Railroaded,

It's Christmas time. Not the time to be bummed out. A good Lionel repair person could get all of your units up and running again. If you do not know a good repair person let me know and I will supply you with names and phone numbers.

Yeah, thanks. All set. They nailed me $25 for the Trainmaster gear repair at my local place so I got parts on line for the other 3 & fixed them myself. They were average Joe repairs, nothing too complicated & not real easy. I'm just dissapointed that this stuff seems to have a "shelf life" & it's almost like some sort of "planned obsolescence" when all this plastic starts to give problems at the same time. Was happy to find a brass replacement for one gear, too bad for me that there's a lot more plastic ones left to fail on the rest of the equipment I own. The older PW stuff sounds like a meat grinder to me but at least they held up a lot longer & just ran & ran before you had wear issues. My stuff is like brand new & it's got all these stupid problems. That's what I'm upset about.

Most MPC engines can be repaired easily. And most parts are still available.

That can't be said for the new stuff.

You should get rid of all that MPC junk.  Send it to me and I'll dispose of it for you.

:-)

railroaded......I found, especially with plastic type gears that lubricants had something to do with the parts failing or breaking down over time.  All these can be replaced with metal gears now I believe.  I'm glad you are getting everything repaired, great trains.

 

TEX

Steve

If they were modern engines you'd be spending way more for fried boards, weak smoke units, and poor sound, with no parts available to fix them, or no answer to calls or e-mails to the manufacturer.

 

I was a kid in the 70's and did exactly what you are doing, bought the items I wanted but couldn't afford. My purchases have all worked out quite well, so far no problems. The MPC-era was a long time ago, so even new in the box requires some extra work right out of the box to make operational. The grease has long ago dried up on gears and worm drives, the oil has all soaked into the packaging, traction tires have dry-rotted off, etc... We're not young anymore and neither are the trains. We're lucky they're still available "new-in-the-box" just like we wanted in the 70's and 80's.

i had exactly the opposite experience.  Today my brother brought over my old 8850 Penn Central GG1 vintage 1979.  This one has all metal gears, but it hadn't been out of its box in at least 10 yrs.  It started right up and cruised around easily with 5 passenger cars in tow.  By the way, the MPC era officially ended in 1985 or '86.  Richard Kughn took over and changed the name to LTI in '87.

Where are you storing your trains?  i wonder if different expansion rates of metal and plastic are the culprit here?

once lee gets his sons  3-D printer going maybe he can make replacements parts.

Yeah Ted, I should qualify that on my OP. The MPC-to-early-LTI era stuff is what I'm talking about here. 

Hi 

just to let you know that the problem may have been were you stored your trains for the 

last few years.

we find these problems when there put up in an addict. 

The addict gets very hot in the summer and cold in winter the plastic and die cast parts expand at deferent tempuras there for parts brake.

it is not the trains just how there stored.

i have a lot of MPC in my collection with no problems. 

Yeah I thought about that but it's pretty much constantly between 60 & 70 degrees where they are kept, its dark, with a normal humidity & I have the silica packs in with them to trim any moisture. For the most part it's fairly ideal. It just seems like the nylon or whatever they are made from is just drying out, shrinking, or whatever it is that happens to it over time. The brush plate cover crack was weird. Never seen that happen before. Was fine last time we ran it about 2 years ago. No one has ever messed with it & that one was new in the box too. Like I say, all these engines have very light run time. 

$25 does not seem too crazy for a repair.  The guys that tossed all the old stuff for new and fancy will have to pay alot more and have rarer odd-ball parts to deal with.

It took me two seconds to realize what an "addict" was and how to store things in one. Funny slip.

I love the old MPC NOS stuff that collector/horders were buying. It was the Lionel equivalent of beanie babies.

I'm sorry to hear of your troubles...I hope they get resolved!

 

--Greg

I'm sorry to hear of the mechanical problems. I have seven MPC locomotives, and they've always worked fine. They're are stored and run in the basement, which is usually cool year round, and I try to keep the humidity at 55-60%

They're resolved for now, until the next piece of nylon decides to fail. Lets see, with about 6 or 7 locomotives like this & about 6 to 8 plastic gears in each one, I'd say at my rate so far I should be into 2 or 3 more of these repairs by New Years Eve....Just kidding....not really.....

FYI common silica packs can become saturated with moisture over time and become ineffective; A few years to several at most is what you could be looking at, depending a lot on humidity levels,   Although the gels inside the packs can be "regenerated" to be able to trap moisture again, it typically requires heating them for a couple of hours at around 120°C to accomplish this, and what's the likelihood of any of us taking the time do do that to all those packets we accumulated?

 

I wouldn't rely on those alone to keep stuff moisture free indefinitely.

Glad you got it fixed. Hope you enjoy your Christmas.

Happy to hear everything is up and running. From 1984 to about 1993 we ran MPC locomotives on our layout.

Not all silica packs can be regenerated. 

Railroaded, sorry for your unusual travails, but if you want to feel better about that $25 repair bill, see the thread "I think I killed it. Help", concerning a $300 bill for a fried MTH board.

Do what I do. Pray for Jeff Kane the Train Tender's good health and prosperity and you'll always have good parts available at very reasonable prices.

Gentlemen,

   I think you will find that storage was his problem, it sounds like the place he stored his trains was very very hot.  He was actually lucky that he had minimal damage.

If you are going to store your trains in an attic here in Pa, install roof vents, and a auto thermo controlled fan.  If you live down south do not store your trains in the attic unless you have a cooling system for it, sooner or later the heat will damage your trains. 

 

PCRR/Dave

Nope. Basement. Pretty even 60 to 70 degrees. The nylon failures were all different. One gear just stripped out, one fell off the end of the stub shaft, one had a crack that came out from the center line to the gear teeth, & the brush plate cover had a fine line crack down through the top along the side. 

I seem to recall those gears being a problem way back when.  I had some strip out in the late eighties almost right out of the box.  My dad left me a bunch of MPC shelf queens that were worth a bundle when he passed in 97.  Boy were they pricey back then.... the good old days.

Think positively and be grateful for competition. When we have "little kid" guests over, I take out the proto1 MTH stuff (because I've got it). Once you've dealt with the 3 clangs of death issue, that stuff is bulletproof. So is Williams. And because of the competition, Lionel makes some really great stuff now.

 

These are the best "old days".

 

Gerry

I have a couple of RTR sets from 1986 both were stored for some 15-20 years and both ran 100 % after new grease and oil was applied. both stored at room temperture .

 

Merry Christmas to all

 

Brent

 

$25 for that repair is actually pretty reasonable. My friend who runs a LHS once asked me why folks gripe about paying a reasonable amount ( say $25/hour) for train repairs but pay over $100/hour for appliance repairs, auto repairs, etc, without fussing. Really, what is the difference? Train repair people need to make a living, too.

quote:

$25 for that repair is actually pretty reasonable.

 

I believe the worm gear is mounted on one of the drive wheel axles. So at least one set of wheels need to be pulled and remounted in order to change the gear.
$25 seems like a good deal to me too.

 

Not certain about the FM's, at least some of the replacement gears are available in metal.

$25.00 IS very cheap. Most places charge considerably more than that. I know one who gets 100.00 to fix any engine PLUS parts..

Rob

1987 may not seem like a long time ago to you, but it's been 26 years. That's like 63 in kid-toy-years (kinda like dog years).

 

If you don't have a few aches and pains and malfunctions, and possibly pieces falling off, at 63, you're doing well.

One thing I don't believe anyone has mentioned is oxygen.  Virtually everything organic (and I include all plastics here since they are carbon based ) is subject to some sort of oxidation over time.  Unless you store things anaerobically over time everything will oxidize.  Regardless of temperature (except at zero degrees Kelvin) and moisture which obviously affect the rate of oxidation and formation of other dysfunctional chemical compounds (e.g., rust).  So this is an additional factor to consider. Unless you're talking platinum underwear, everything will oxidize over time.  Even postwar trains. Thus it is unrealistic to expect a complex electromechanical device like a toy train to experience no problems over a quarter century or so of storage, particularly at higher temperatures, variable temperatures and in the presence of water vapor.

quote:

 Thus it is unrealistic to expect a complex electromechanical device like a toy train to experience no problems over a quarter century or so of storage, particularly at higher temperatures, variable temperatures and in the presence of water vapor.

 

Yet it's common for a toy train that was stored for twenty five years or more, to run fine when taken out of storage.

 

Not all trains run fine after being taken out of storage after 25 years.

 

Not all trains fall apart after being taken out of storage after 25 years.

 

It's common for them to run fine, and occasionally one will fall apart. When a bunch in one location fall apart, logic says it's a function of the location or perhaps the owner, not necessarily the product.

 

If you ran the snot out of these trains years ago and wore them out there's a much better chance of things falling apart, for example.

I went out & bought an arbor press at Harbor Freight on sale for $49 & started doing these things myself. A $25 plastic gear reapir on a train that has 2 of that design plus 6 more of a different design on a train I payed $125 for? I don't think so. I'll gladly do them myself. 

From my experience Lionel used a white grease on there loco's in the eighties and nineties and it will dry up and congeal like glue and this would cause stress on the gears. Before running you need to pull the armature and clean the gunk off and lube with a quality grease.

Merry Christmas,

franktrain

"Yet it's common for a toy train that was stored for twenty five years or more, to run fine when taken out of storage."

 

There really are no such things as oxidation, rust and entropy.  I'm sure if the Egyptians had stored prewar or postwar trains in their tombs, they'd be running just fine in 2013 after dusting off a little sand.

quote:

You're right. There are no such things as oxidation, rust and entropy .  I'm sure if the Egyptians had stored prewar or postwar trains in their tombs, they'd be running just fine in 2013 after dusting off a little sand

 

Are you writing from experience?

Are you claiming that trains that have been stored for twenty five years or more are all going to be rusty or otherwise oxidized?

 

I forgot to mention something. My theory on the plastic/nylon drying out comes from my experiance over the years with a similar problem on HO gauge Bachmann steam engines with the "Split Frame" design. They have been using a nylon axle tube for insulation purposes for over 30 years going back to the days when Lionel even had their sytle design in HO. These tubes crack & split open on the end where they press over the wheel  hub. This causes them to spin out of quarter & is a near fatal failure without a major $$$/time reapir. Again, this is not a wear issue but more of an age factor. In this case I can almost say for certain that it's a "planned obsolescence" because it's well known & documented (just Google it) & yet the newer designed Bachmann driveline has no improvement in these axles whatsoever & I was shocked to see that now they even manufacture them THINNER than they used to. 

It was not my intention to suggest that every single train stored for whatever time period would experience failure.  It was my intention to note that oxidation, in addition to temperature stress and humidity will inevitably affect some or even many trains stored for decades.  I am puzzled why that point would be either controversial or objectionable.