A Couple Of Bachmann Projects

I mentioned that seeing on line videos of John Tews's Timber River Railroad rekindled my interest in ore operations. I've had two chances to railfan the former DM&IR, about 10 years ago. Looking for videos of current operation on line, I note that not too much has changed, but there are new locos, and most have CN paint. Among the locos now working the DM&IR are rebuilt SD40-3s. It's possible to find Bachmann CN SD40-3s on line for less than $50, and I got one.

This is a nice-looking loco. Overall detail is comparable to the 1980s Athearn bluebox SD40-2, and the price is comparable, especially considering it comes assembled, has LED lighting to the headlight lenses, and it has an NMRA 8-pin DCC socket. I was a little frustrated that no review on line, YouTube or elsewhere, showed the chassis. Here's a photo:

The biggest plus is the DCC socket and LED lighting, the biggest problem is no flywheels. However, if you insert a DCC decoder, as I did, you can program acceleration momentum CV 2 to 1 and deceleration momentum CV 3 to 1, and you'll get an effect almost the same as having flywheels. This should allow this loco to multiple in a consist with flywheel-equipped locos.

CN's SD40-3s in the 6000 series are actually rebuilt from SD40s. For now, this doesn't bother me, this is a good loco at a very good price. The CN emblem on the hood seems small, so at some point I plan to cover it with MicroScale black trim film and add a larger CN emblem. The photo below shows the loco with the trucks and fuel tank sprayed grimy black, decoder installed, couplers replaced with Kadees, and DCC CVs tweaked. Also shown is a new River Station CN hi-rail and a Custom Finishes set of detail parts for CN snow shields that I plan to add.

A while ago, I got a Bachmann WP GP7 on a special sale.

This is another nice loco at a reasonable price, more than comparable to the Athearn bluebox GP7 or other low-end geeps that have come out now and then from AHM and such. It doesn't have the detail of the Atlas-Kato or Atlas Classic locos, but it's less expensive (unless you can find a cheaper Atlas-Kato on eBay). The biggest problem is it has a Bachmann factory DCC decoder integrated into the electronics, and this doesn't support the NMRA CVs, which makes it nearly impossible to adjust speed settings and so forth.

I wasn't aware that NCE makes a BACH-DSL decoder that's a near drop-in replacement for the Bachmann electronics on this and other Bachmann locos that have their compulsory DCC decoder. (As you can see with the SD40-2, some do have an 8-pin socket.) Here is the WP unit with he BACH-DSL installed:

It took a bit of tweaking, but I got the loco to start smoothly at speed step 1 by increasing CV 4, the start voltage. Even as a solo operator, I can't say enough good about the ability of DCC to get locos to run at comparable speeds at comparable voltage.