@RSJB18 posted:Pulled an engine off the shelf today that needed work. It's a Lionel MPC era (I think) Deleware and Hudson RS-3. Base model with the motors in the trucks. It has a really bad horn too.
I had re-wired the motors in series a while back and couldn't get the engine to run. I hit the proverbial wall with it so before the engine hit the actual wall....I closed it up to live to see another day.
So I pulled it apart today and started dissecting the wiring. I had a dead short across the power side so I went to the beginning and worked my way up. Dropped a truck and found the problem immediately. The motor leads and power leads are reversed from what I expected. The trucks have 4 wires, red, black, blue, yellow. Typically for all engines I've done before, red/ black are power, and blue/ yellow are the motor.
Well leave it to Lionel to reverse the pairs.......
So with that sorted out, I corrected the splices and put the engine back together. Quite a mess of wire for such a basic engine.
Runs reasonably slow at 8v for a conventional engine.
Bob
Lionel's "cheap" RS-3 is one of the more under-appreciated basic locos around. Excellent body shell tooling, OK handrails if they are the metal bversion (but oh, those pilots need some love), excellent "Alco" ( AAR) truck side frames - reasonably durable, too, if not PW anvil-tough. The motors are more prototypical in their location than any other platform of which I am aware - traction motors mounted low and transversely at the truck axles. I have owned a couple, and still want to ERR one of them (I have done a Lionel 0-4-0 with ERR, and its motor is similar to the RS-3's).
Unless I am misinformed (say it isn't so!), old Lionel PW transformers start at 6 volts, which makes it hard to run many of the basic can-motored modern locos at anything like low speed. I can run one of these conventionally at less than light speed using my Lionel Powermaster, which does not start at 6 volts. It won't creep, mind you, but it doesn't have to fly, either.
Your D&H behaves very well.