Running smoke "on" without smoke fluid?

you can try adding smoke, but most likley you have bruned the wicking.

you should watch this video;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZlvekT67ws

Can't hurt, I suppose, to give it a try. If the smoke unit wick has been damaged or dried up, you'll know soon enough. Just apply a small amount of smoke fluid (check the owner's manual) and let it soak in before attempting to operate the engine.

And do remember to turn the smoke feature off--any locomotive--if you don't plan on using it and checking on it regularly.

What about Williams, they don't have a smoke off switch?

The instruction sheet kind of implies that it may be OK to run dry, they say "if you want to use the smoke feature add fluid"

I opened up the engine and unpluged it.

Williams uses the Seuthe smoke unit, which is completely different from other units. Unlike other units, it has no wick, just an open reservoir. Apparently it is designed not to burn out if it is run without smoke fluid, as I have an old brass Right-of-Way caboose with a Seuthe unit and no on-off switch. Like Kevin, I pulled mine apart and disconnected it since I don't want to bother putting smoke fluid in my caboose.

FALSE ALARM !!

Last night while running on a club members layout, a friend kevin Rumple suggested he run my genset to see what was happening. He found the smoke switch was on, but that one also had to turn on "smoke" on the CAB2 to get smoke again after power had been shut off to the engine!!! So the smoke unit had not been on the past few weeks.

How could this happen??? I never run smoke because my wife has half a lung removed and I haven't read the manual for at least 1 1/2 years. Sorry
stan.

Somebody could write an article about this (if it hasn't been done already). Anyway, I think that the operational status of various Lionel smoke units should be more clearly explained than it has been in the past.

I understand that in most TMCC engines, after you shut down using AUX1, 5, if there is power to the track the smoke unit actually stays on in that there is power to the resistor although the fan is not spinning. In this case, if there's no smoke fluid in the unit the wicking can get charred.

Equally important, with these engines, if you want to turn off the smoke unit while the engine is (for example)on a powered siding, the shutdown sequence alone won't do it; you have to use the AUX1, 8 command.

Not so it seems with the Vision Genset and maybe some\all Legacy models, where the smoke unit goes off completely at shutdown. This is the case with my Genset and the manual describes it.

I think that the same applies with late-model Legacy engines but I am not sure about my Legacy FEF-3, where I can detect heat rising from the stack after shutdown if it's on a powered track and there appears to be smoke in the chamber beneath although it is not of course being pumped out.