I apologize in advance for this long post but I hope you find it interesting to read.
I have a LocoSounds Pennsy L1 Mikado. It's a great loco and I haven't had any problems with it (except with the green classification lights and the firebox glow light - but I'll post separately about those issues later) until today.
This loco has an on/off switch for the smoke unit under the right side of the cab. Because it is easy to reach the switch just by tipping the right side of the loco slightly off the track and reaching under the cab, my habit has been to do that instead of lifting the whole engine off the rails. Note that I only run conventional and I use a MTH Z-1000. Today, once I turned the smoke switch on and applied power, the engine's bell started sounding constantly (and it could not be turned off by pressing the bell button) and the loco would not run except very slowly at 100% throttle; the circuit breaker did not trip on my Z-1000. Something was obviously not right so I cut the power, and since everything seemed in order externally, I took off the loco shell for the very first time (I'd had no reason to do so before).
The wires are like a bowl of spaghetti in there, but I checked the connections and solder joints and everything looked OK. I tested the loco without the shell on and it ran fine. But when I put the shell back on, the same problem happened with the bell sounding constantly and this time the circuit breaker tripped.
I figured the body shell was pressing on something that was causing a short, but it honestly took me a couple hours to find the problem because I was thinking the problem was a wire shorting and instead it was the locomotive's HANDRAIL.
Like a lot of Railking steam engines, the handrails on this engine are bent at a 90 degree angle at the back end and they are run into the boiler just in front of the cab,. I realized that the handrail stub that went into the boiler on the left side of the engine was a lot longer than the one of the right side, and the stub protruded straight about 1/4" into the inside of the boiler
When I tipped the engine to turn on the smoke switch, I must have put pressure on the left side handrail and pushed it further into the boiler just enough more that it touched the wires outside the motor and the metal motor casing itself. As best I can tell, this is what caused the short circuit.
Attached are a couple of pictures:
1.) The first one shows how I finally bent the handrail stub with a pair of needle-nose pliers so that it no longer protruded straight into the interior of the boiler space - you can see above this how the other handrail stub is a lot shorter. Doing this is what solved the problem.
2.) The second one shows a couple things: A.) It shows how I had to put electrical tape around an orange and purple wire that had their insulation damaged by the protruding handrail. B.) It also shows a hole the handrail poked into some electrical tape that I had put over the side of the metal motor casing to try to insulate it, but that obviously didn't work.
The problem is fixed now, and the engine runs fine again. The only problem with the repair is the light bulb for the firebox glow light stopped working. I don't know if the bulb blew when the engine shorted out (it's a tiny bulb and I can't see the filament) or if the problem is something else, but it was working before all this happened.
Matt
