Here is some info that may help prevent a meltdown of your legacy smoke unit. Many have had a meltdown of the resistor and voltage regulator. It happened to me and I was able to find all the information in these forums to fix it myself. THANK YOU ALL! While looking at the posts about the G scale Hudson with the souped up smoke unit, I got to thinking about how my little Legacy 0-8-0 smoked way more than that and put out a super orange flame from the stack just before it died, and thought some usefull knowledge could be shared.
Using the switcher in the yard, with all the foreward, reverse, and braking, the smoke out put increases, as I believe Lionel mentions. Some times it will stop on a dead spot where the pickups can't make good contact with the power rail. Just a nudge with my hand will fix it. Following this on rare occasion, the smoke had increased dramatically. So much so that I shut down the unit with number 8 command. When turned back on with number 9 after a few seconds, the same thing, way too much smoke. It had plenty of smoke fluid but I added half an eye dropper and it still smoked WAY too much. So I figured there would soon be another orange flame followed by a parts order from Lionel. But I decided to shut it down and do a reset. But first I just turned off all track power, and then back on. It fixed it! The reset wasn't necessary.
I can't imagine how a simple loss of power could cause the smoke system logic to go beserk, but keep an eye on em' if you see way too much smoke, just power down, and then back on, and you may save yourself some grief.
Hope this helps,
Bill
