Which pre-war switch eats pickup rollers; 222 or 223 ?

   It dont know the difference either, except one is non-derailing. So, what type of damage? Pitting from shorts? Wear from striking an edge? It just seems like it wouldn't be too hard to figure out with a good description or picture.

I know this is St.G, but I believe the rollers were softer on earlier lionels that later. Newer replacements might not suffer the same way..?

The damage I'm referring to is a bent or broken pickup roller spring.  On earlier Super Motors this was a flat, hourglass shaped piece of copper to which the roller bracket & roller was riveted.  Later super motors have a thicker, more rectangular shaped flat piece of copper.  As grandpa described it, the roller would drop into a gap in the switch and get jammed... halting the locomotive.   At slow speeds, this would cause the flat copper piece to buckle or bend, leaving the roller kinked downward at an angle so the locomotive couldn't sit squarely on the tracks after the damage.  At higher speeds ( which was how my brother & I usually ran them when we were kids )  The roller's bracket rivet could be ripped out of the copper strip...  or the strip could be ripped off of the fiberboard plate that holds it between the motor's side plates.   This never happened to his 385 or his 390's because they use a Bild-A-Loco motor which has a different style of pickup assembly.  But the 10's, 318's, and 380's seemed especially vulnerable.  Does this explain the situation I'm talking about ?       

This is the kind of damage I'm talking about...  I hope this works...   FB.

I've taken the liberty of converting the above to a PNG file.  

Here's a pic of a typical pre-war standard gauge switch:

As you can see, there's a fairly substantial gap in the third rail going through the points,  and I can easily see less substantial roller assemblies dropping into the gap and getting hung up on the crossrail.  

I'd say the best way of determining which switches are prone to hanging up would be to set each switch up with a couple of straight sections at all three ends, carefully pushing a loco through each way by hand and observing to see which switch, if any, hangs up the roller.  

 Good luck and keep us posted! 

Mitch 

An old post, but I made wood inserts in about 5 minutes with my bench jigsaw and belt sander to drop in that solve this problem. It helps to have an old switch to disassemble for a template.  These can be used on all 210, 222 and 223 switches.