Yesterday, without any prior symptoms, sound stopped coming out of my PRR RTR #421 LionChief tender when I put it on the track after a few days of inactivity. I,found no posts here but remembered that an Amazon reviewer said the tether for their RTR PRR was a weak point and theirs broke down after going through turns on their oval fairly early on in the life of their purchase. I bought mine last fall. Well, my new layout has lots of o-31 twists and turns. Very occasionally yesterday I got a tiny bit of static or an attempt at a bell or chug going around a curve but otherwise silence. So, I ran the train in the opposite direction to try and determine if it was a loose connction at the tether. Indeed, I got more occassional static this way but still very rarely. The wheels are clean, by the way, and I saw no visibile loose connections on the tender to the speaker or truck. I did not open the engine. Next, I looked at which wires appeared to be connected to the speaker and the truck and tried to concoct a way to test whether the tether problem was on the engine or the tender side. (It even involved digging up a old crystal radio kit as a surrogate sound generator :-)
THAT was my BIG mistake. Instead of asking you folks first, like an idiot, I powered my engine (not on any track) with 12 V, attaching the positive to a roller and the negative to the screw on the front coupler (other than the wheels it was the only negative I could find). Then, in a classic "What could it hurt?" move, I connected pins 2 and 4 (looking and counting left to right from an aerial view of the tethers) between the engine and tender and got an encouraging loud bit of static, or so I thought. These pins looked like they went to the speaker although the wires did a crossover so I'm not 100% sure. I then tried to fiddle with the handheld remote to try and get the bell to be positioned on and repeated the attempt at connecting the pins. Maybe unrelated (?) tomthe remote but I got no more sound and now my engine won't run at all. WOOPS. The front headlight light still comes on but that's it. I killed my beloved steam engine.
So, I will do the walk of shame and take it to my LHS. So a few questions now:
1. If it is easy and cheap enough to fix, is there some way to wire the tether differently so that I won't have to keep fixing it on this or any other LIONChief sets I might buy?
2. What the heck did I do to my engine that I promise I'll never, ever do again?
3. Since this is a low-end engine, is it worth fixing? The sad part is I've been planing a fund raising event involving running this and other trains in early fall when the tender proved silent during a test run last night. So, I will need to fix or replace it if I want to have this event.
4. I was going to ask if Lionel warranty applies when you purchase from non-dealer Amazon, but I'm sure my brilliant move with the pins violated any warranty ... Except maybe the tether part, she hopes dreaming.
Thanks, in adance. I may be off-line the rest of the day, but look forward to your replies.
Tomlinson Run RR (self-exhiled to the tender doghouse)
