More On The TCS AS6 Decoder For Old Atlas Alco Switchers

I used my share of our tax refund to send for another TCS AS6 decoder, this one for a favorite loco, an older Chinese S-2 lettered for CP Rail. I think this dates from about 2000. Once Digitrax and TCS discontinued their earlier Atlas Alco switcher decoders, I wasn't sure if I would ever get to converting this one to DCC, considering the level of difficulty a wired DCC decoder was in thee locos without specialized versions.

Here's my CP Rail S-2 some years ago as an analog loco:

A new drop-in decoder would go in this loco. I was delighted that the eBay seller for the new AS6 got it in the mail right away, and although major retailers are shut down with quarantine, I got it in the mail within a few days.

The PC board for the new AS6 is lettered "Rev 1".

One thing I discovered installing this new example of the AS6 was that the piece of plastic under the rear headlight LED is not a casting, it's a piece of foam. In this case, the foam was slightly dislodged in shipment, and I wondered if it was meant to be just a protective insert and not a permanent part of the decoder. So I removed it. Here's what the install looks like without the foam:

However, when I re-mounted the hood and cab, it became clear that the black foam is intended as a light block, and without it, the rear LED lights up the whole cab:

So I went back, retrieved the piece of foam, and reinstalled it:

Here is how the foam light block works with the cab in place:

I find that there are actually several variations on the early Atlas Alco switchers. This one is very smooth and quiet, with a skew wound armature. I think it's the best one of those I have, and I'm delighted TCS reissued the AS6.

Again, the TCS AS6 install is fairly quick. The most time-consuming steps are cutting the tape to insulate the two frame halves and soldering the power leads from the trucks to the decoder board. Total time is probably less than 20 minutes.

Scenery Work

With lots more time on my hands, I've been working on scenery, for which I have enough material without the need to run out. I certainly hope our local train stores survive this crisis. Meantime, I'm working on time-consuming projects that I hadn't been doing when I had others that nevertheless required trips out.

The biggest one is installing trolley-interurban tracks in Lake Street in Zenith. When I built it, I used modular cast plaster city street products from Easy Streets. I don't know if they're still around, I started the whole city scene here 35 years ago. The point of Easy Streets was that the modules extended from the sidewalks (indluded) to the center of the street. The streets in turn were sized to allow you to lay track in a space between the facing modules.

I fully intended to do this when I first started Lake St, but soon enough I realized that HO trolley models won't take the curves you would normally have at city corners -- in HO, maybe 6 inch radius at the outside. So although I glued the City Streets modules down with a gap between them that would have allowed a single track down the middle, I shelved that idea and instead filled the gap with Sculptamold. Then a couple of years ago I rethought the idea and realized that although I couldn't put in right-angle turns at the corners, I could in fact using 15 inch radius sectional track run something down the middle of Lake Street and transition it off onto private right of way.

So I began chipping away at the plaster and Sculptamold. Here are progress shots.

When the track is laid, I'll surface it with spackle, clean the railheads, and carve in flangeways. This will wind up allowing me several feet at least to run a few trolleys.

I also put some finishing touches on the road crossing and surrounding scenery at Sunkist:

The house is a farm house kit that was briefly available from Walthers about 1990. I think it was made by the German firm Faller, and I don't think it was ever reissued, although similar houses are also now available from Walthers.

New TCS AS6 DCC Decoder For Older Atlas Alco Switchers

Not long ago, I turned my attention to the remaining Atlas Yellowbox and Classic Alco switchers in my collection, hoping to convert the rest of them to DCC. These were great locos, good runners with a lot of weight, and pretty inexpensive, especially at discount. Their defect, as I've posted here, is that they had no DCC socket, and DCC conversion was the installation from heck.

There were three options, none of them good, all of them with the potential for smoking the decoder. NCE and TCS both had decoders specifically for the Atlas Alco switchers, but the procedure involved removing the motor, insulating it from the frame with tape, replacing the metal motor mount screw with a plastic one, reinstalling the motor, which included reconnecting the universal shafts, insulating the top weight, and then reassembling the chassis before mounting the new decoder.

You could find instructions on the web for installing a small wired decoder in the loco without using a specialized one, but you had to cut the traces on the PC board, and all the other steps were the same.

In every case, if you weren't careful and reinstalled the motor upside down, you smoked the decoder.

Although both the TCS and NCE decoders provided LEDs for lighting the rear headlight, you had to bend the leads to reach the rear headlight at the top of the cab, which was one more crazymaking step. Both NCE and TCS withdrew those decoders pretty quickly, I'm sure because they had so many warranty claims.

Wile I was searching on the web for any new info on DCC installs in the Atlas Alcos, I discovered that TCS has issued a new AS6 decoder. I sent for one, but the icing on the cake turned out to be that they'd revised the install procedure for the new decoder, and you no longer need to go through the business of removing and insulating the motor and reassembling the drive train. You just remove the top weight, insulate it, and install the new AS6. A 30-minute job at most now, easy-to-intermediate, about the same as installing a drop-in decoder in a Kato N loco.

Here is my Reading S-1 with the new AS6 installed:

Another great new feature is that the rear headlight LED is preinstalled with a plastic piece to protect it. Thus the old Atlas Alcos have operating rear headlights with the upgrade.

The new AS6 decoder is in the $50 range. While this is expensive for a non sound decoder, the original locos I think could be found in the $30 range, so a loco with full DCC is still reasonably priced. A check on eBay shows Atlas Yellowbox S-4s in the $40 range, although if I wanted an Alco switcher that badly now, I think I'd go for either a Bachmann or a revised Atlas with a DCC socket.

Running With Newer Technology

My layout is in a semi-finished basement room, and I have a fair amount of track that's hard to access, so dust is a perennial problem. Over the past week, I had a track cleaning campaign on my main line, and I began testing the effect of new technology capacitors like the Digitrax Power Xtender, partly installed in the newer Walthers Mainline locos with helical cut gears. Here are some of the locos I've been running:

All three of the lead locos shown have Digitrax DH126 decoders with Digitrax Power Xtenders installed. In general, I find that a loco with a capacitor can bull its way over dirty track, pulling pretty much any type of track cleaner car behind it, and one or two passes over the main line will get things clean enough for ordinary operation. You can then go over stubborn spots with a bright boy or similar pad.

A second thing I've found is that Walthers Proto or Mainline locos with helical cut gears give you a lot more flexibility in speed matching consists. In the photo with KCS locos, the load loco is a Roundhouse AC4400CW, while the trailing loco is a Walthers Mainline SD50. The Roundhouse loco is much faster than the Walthers. In fact, I find that the Walthers locos run pretty slowly overall, but there's a lot of variation among them,

But helical gears have an advantage over the normal right-angle cut model train gears, since they will coast and won't lock up when power is cut off completely like right angle gears. This means that there's a certain amount of slop available for a faster loco to pull a slower one along. So I slowed the Roundhouse loco down a lot with CV 5 and did the best I could to speed the Walthers up on its speed curve. They don't match perfectly, but with the two coupled, the Roundhouse loco is able to "encourage" the Walthers loco to go faster due to its helical gears.

I find I've also made progress getting my Broadway DL-600s to run smoothly. I find that Broadway locos vary in how much they'll stall and hiccup on any but squeaky-clean track, but I'm finding that the DL-600s improv with running in. Below are shots of Missabe 52 running over the drawbridge between Manhattan Transfer and Jaques. I would not let this loco onto the drawbridge if I didn't have confidence that it wouldn't stall in the middle.

Expanding Operational Possibilities

My friend and fellow layout blogger John R has an interesting post on how he's tweaked his layout concept to incorporate a greater variety of operation off his staging tracks. This is a bit similar to thinking I've been doing -- I've always been interested in both ore and pulpwood operations, though they're a little bit exotic and non-generic to include in many layouts.

Nevertheless, I've worked on both ore and pulpwood projects over the years, and in fact I designed several spurs on my layout that could load pulpwood -- for whatever reason, I never quite got those spurs or pulpwood cars incorporated into my JMRI operation files. I started to do this over the weekend.

The Walthers SIECO pulpwood cars are some of the nicest models and widely-used prototypes out there, used throughout the heartland and the southeast. Walthers never brought out models for all the prototype road names that these cars carry or carried, although I've collected a good many of the available models. Walthers briefly offered cast urethane pulpwood loads for these cars as well, which are hard to find, and they're cast in black material, so they need a fair amount of paint work. Here's a urethane load I recently found on eBay and painted, mounted on a Southern car.

I did a lot with ore car models that were available 40 years ago. Here's a pair of Roundhouse cars that I redid from models I found at swap meets. I added pellet extensions to both of them from styrene following a Bill Schaumburg article in a very old RMC. The C&NW car was done with Herald King decals available 40 years ago. The Milwaukee car was a Walthers special run.

In addition to the pellet extensions, as part of that 40 years ago project, I Dremeled off the factory coupler pockets on the Roundhouse metal underframes, drilled new mounting holes, and mounted Kadee short shank couplers to give the cars a more prototypical spacing. The Milwaukee car has also very recently had its trucks replaced with sideframes from the new Walthers ore car models. You can see the big difference with the CNW car on the right, which has the stock Roundhouse sideframes.

Not long ago I found the C Vision Vintage Iron Ore Railroads DVD, which has one sequence of a Milwaukee Road all-rail ore train in upper Michigan. This had the usual pooled Milwaukee and CNW ore jennies, but it also showed B&LE ore cars that had retained the B&LE heralds but had been restenciled for C&NW reporting marks and numbers. It turns out that in the mid 1970s, C&NW acquired about 60 ex B&LE cars for this service. I had some factory painted AHM style ore cars on hand, and I did my usual modification to body mount couplers and bush the truck mounting holes for screw-mounted trucks.

I touched up the bare plastic parts and patched the paint for decals. I'm waiting for C&NW ore car decals from Circus City Decals to finish the project.

I still need to run some test trains to determine exactly how I can incorporate ore cars in my operations.