About two months or so ago, I bought a NIB Williams 44 ton scale UP diesel. It looks great and runs great. It is a strong puller with great bell and horn sound.
But, as some have recently observed, the rear coupler seems to cause the lead car to derail on 031 curves, unless a really heavy car is used.
As mentioned in a prior post, I tried to solve this problem by taping the coupler all of the way to one side, and leaving it that way for 2 weeks, and then taping it all of the way to the other side, and leaving it that way for two weeks.
This seemed to solve the problem to a substantial extent, and I really experienced no further derailments, so long as I was using medium weight lead cars and trains of three to four cars.
But, in looking at this issue further last weekend, I hooked a light plastic traditional plug-door box car to the engine and ran it around the layout at low speeds. The car derailed on three places in my layout, going around the O 31 curves. In two places, it was where the engine came off of the curve of an O22 turnout and continued in its curve onto an 031 curved section.
This was pretty frustrating, so I spent a long time moving the engine and car by hand over those sections at super slow speed, and looking down at the rear coupler with a magnifying glass.
I was surprised to see that on all three places on the layout, when the rear coupler swung all of the way to one side, the fat vertical post underneath the coupler, which holds the thumb-tab on the bottom, was hitting the side of the pilot. I saw this occur on both sides of the swing. The coupler arm itself was not hitting, just the edges of the fat post.
No problem, I thought, I'll just take my dremel tool and a big reinforced cutting wheel, and "shave off" a really thin section of the pilot on each side of the coupler. I had done this before with two of my BEEPs, and it was fairly easy to do.
WRONG! Holy heck, the shell of the 44 tonner is cast aluminum, and I mean really heavy cast aluminum. You can't "shave" anything. You have to cut a distinctive slice off each side of the pilot, and this ain't easy. It takes forever, and the wheel wants to jump out of the slice cut, and your entire face will be covered with aluminum dust and shavings. I was wearing heavy plastic googles, and the dust even got inside of those and into my eyes, not to mention my nose. When I finished making the slice cuts, I had to "snap off" the metal slices with a small need nose pliers.
I managed to finish all of this, but there are some "Jump scars" on the back edges of the pilot, and a small "over cut" from the wheel, where it went a little too high in the slice in the pilot. So, I've got some slight filling to do with JB Weld putty steel, and a little bit of over- painting to do. (Happily, the only colors are gray and white).
(Yes, I'm stupid. I did all of this with the shell attached to the frame. I should have taken the shell off first, and maybe tried to use a flat file to file back the sides of the pilot. But, I really did not want to remove four screws underneath the frame of the brand new engine to remove the shell, and then hope I could get it all back together again later. Live and learn.)
Having done this, the lightweight car no longer derails going around the layout, so long as I keep it at medium speed and don't take it up to a high speed. At a high speed, the light car still derails, but not because the post is hitting the pilot, but because of the way the car wants to lean and some continued stiffness of the rear engine coupler.
I am passing this info onward, for what it is worth, in hopes that it may help some Members to further analyze or solve any derailment issues with this engine. Check to see if the coupler post is hitting the sides of the pilot.
I've given up worrying about the resale value or even the looks of my new engines. All that is important for me is that the trains run on the tracks.
Thanks,
Mannyrock
T
