Lionel 6-84067 Milwaukee Road S3 #260.
The smoke unit is not working. First off, I get 3 blinking cab light.
Removed the boiler. The fans move without any issues. I checked both fan motors with a battery and they work perfectly. Both heat resisters look good and show 8 ohms.
Here is the issue: When I start-up, the cylinder smoke motor comes on for only about 4 or 5 seconds. When I start moving the engine, the smoke stack motor does not come on.
#1 testing fan motors with anything other than a regulated voltage and current source is ZERO proof a motor is good. Because the motor in the engine is limited, controlled, monitored and powered from a limited source- it easily can fail in the engine vs your higher power testing method. Again, you ideally use a regulated voltage source of 5V, and measure current, and you need to pulse it to check startup to ensure no dead spot in the amature- yes, it happens!!!
#2 I would not even bother with the stock motors. If I get this fault on a recent Lionel newer engine, I toss the Lionel smoke fan motor and insert an MTH sourced replacement. https://www.mthpartsandsales.com Edit- caveat, sometimes the short motor is all that fits and you are stuck using the oem shorter style motor- however, this is rarer and often the "standard" motor can be used.
Yes, it makes a difference, yes, I've done this to a huge swath of my own fleet of Visionline and recent Legacy engines.
Done playing games chasing failing big L smoke motors. Just had to fix my EM-1 for basically the same reason and yes, I have this exact model of S3 in this paint scheme.
