Wondered if any other of you might have discovered that the Milwaukee Road S-3 had a rather anemic tractive effort. I know that on mine, as soon as I got it out of the box, I backed it up to a 16 or 17 car train and took off with it. Only, when I got to a grade the engine just slipped like crazy and wouldn't pull the train up about a 2% incline. I began to remove cars and finally when I got down to ten cars, the engine did make it all the way up the grades but would still slip a bit at certain location. I checked the traction tires, which are on the rear pair of drivers, and they looked pretty good, too.
Finally another thought hit me today: Could it be that some of the engine weight was being transferred to the tender drawbar? Checking, that is exactly what I found! When I would physically lift the front of the tender, the cab of the engine moved up right along with the tender. There was no slack in that connection at all. So I simply took a pair of pliers and, carefully, bent the front of the tender drawbar down about 1/8". You have to be a bit careful doing that because Lionel's tetherless infra red sender is located right there and you don't want to dusturb the mounting for that.
But once done and that interference with the movement of the back of the engine was removed, what a difference! The engine walked off with a new train of 20 cars, never even hesitated at the grade and just stormed right on up.
I'm not sure if my engine was unique with that problem or if others of you have had the same experience. Simple fix for a knotty problem.
Paul Fischer
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