A First Loook At The Bachmann Streamlined K4

The PRR was my first railroad, since I was born in Philadelphia, and I'm pretty sure my first train trip was from Johnstown to Philadelphia about 1949 or 1950, of which I have vague memories of the Horseshoe Curve. Later, I had one set of grandparents who lived in Manasquan, NJ around 1955, and the New York and Long Branch ran past their back yard. K4s were still active, but the drawback was that every time my mother would hear one starting up from the station, she'd pull me inside to keep me from getting cinders in my hair. This was one reality of steam railroading in the real world!

I have an absurdly low membership number in the PRR Technical and Historical Society, but my relationship with that group hasn't always been smooth. I believe it was the low membership number that caused them not to kick me out a dozen years ago!

I always liked the second Raymond Loewy version of the streamlined K4, but I could never justify spending the money for a brass model of such a small class. Once the Bachmann model came out, it's been possible to get it at a decent price on line. I got mine out of the box today and have given it some test running, so here's a start of a discussion. I'll probably have to post again to cover all my thinking. For starters, here's a video of one leaving St Louis as the lead on a doubleheader. It's in the scene right after the first T1:

Here are two shots of my model:

PRR K4s locomotives 1120, 2665, 3678, and 5338 were streamlined in 1940 and 1941 with a less extreme version of the Loewy streamlining used on 3768. The tender lettering was a sans serif style used by the PRR between about 1938 and 1942. I think the lettering on the model is a good representation. I've seen some complaints in reviews that the prototype had gold leaf lettering and not the dulux gold represented on the model, but the many photos and film images available show that these locos were not kept clean, and the tenders were often covered with a layer of grime. The same definitely goes for the silver handrails.

Film taken by Gene Miller and shown in the Green Frog Golden Twilight of Postwar Steam Volume 1 DVD shows that these locos continued to operate out of Chicago and St Louis until the arrival of EMD E7s. They were doubleheaded, like most K4s, on mainline east-west trains. A big reason for the development of the T1 was to eliminate doubleheading of K4s, along with a hoped-for speedup of main line trains. Dieselization ended the T1 project, and the streamlined K4s were rebuilt as standard locomotives and sent to the New York and Long Branch, the Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore Lines, and the Long Island to finish their service.

I have several reservations about this model. One is that assembly of the loco and tender is fiendishly difficult. I saw a comment on one forum saying there is factory documentation with the model saying how to do it, but I couldn't find this in my box. The best info is on the Bachmann forum here, but even this is poorly explained. The bottom line is that there are two Phillips head screws deeply recessed more or less under the inner tender truck axles. You have to poke down into the recesses with a small Phillips screwdriver and loosen the screws. These are hard to see, and you have to feel around and try several times to do this.

But you aren't done. Once you've loosened the screws, you have to pry the cover plate up where the loco-tender drawbar is meant to go and sort of winkle the thing in while keeping the cover plate pried up. I had to try this several times, and it took over half an hour. In the process, one of the brass contact strips on a tender truck simply disappeared into interstellar space. The rear cab wall also fell off. I still need to figure out how to reattach it.

I would say this is unacceptable for a "ready for prime time" product costing in the hundreds. I don't know if the crack staff at Model Railroader has reviewed this yet, but i believe they should provide the clear step-by-step easiest-way procedure if they do-- Bachmann hasn't.

The TCS WOW Sound feature has a Keep Alive capacitor that lets the loco run for a few seconds after power is shut off. This is especially important for sound-equipped locos, which are very sensitive to dirty track. The Keep Alive means the loss of the pickup on one of my tender trucks is less critical.

Once I got the thing together and on the track, I found that the side rods would bind until I did some running in. If you check the lower photo of the model's right side above, you'll see that the valve gear crankpin is way out of adjustment. I don't know if this was an error at the factory or if I inadvertently pressed it out of position while trying to connect the loco and tender.

I've got to say I'm not impressed with the sound. The CVs aren't documented, so I will need to find out if they're on the web. A DVD of K4s on the New York and Long Branch shows they had automatic bell ringers that rang at a pretty fast rate, which I assume goes for these locos as well. (You can in fact hear the correct bell in the YouTube above.) The sound of the bell on the model is more of a hand-rung slow rate. The blower and generator sounds are inadequate. It may be possible to increase the voume on these and decrease the chuff volume, which would help. Meantime, I like SoundTraxx steam much better, at least without tweaking.

In the 1960s and 1970s, I was able to travel to Germany and elsewhere to ride behind steam and see it in the flesh. Steam locos simply do not sound like DCC sound units. Models with DCC sound on YouTube produce a very monotonous CHUFF chuff CHUFF chuff, up or down hill, lightly loaded or working hard. TCS claims to modify volume based on BEMF, but I'm simply not impressed. Maybe more research on how to tune the decoder can help. And a good part of the time, steam locos drift without chuffing. The TCS decoder seems to do this at very low speeds just before stopping, while retaining a siderod clank. (You can hear the T1 doing this in the first scene in the YouTube video linked above.) Possibly this can be adjusted with CVs.

I'd love to find an intelligent discussion somewhere on how to get DCC steam decoders to sound remotely like a real steam loco. If anyone can provide a link, I'd love to see it. I'll probably have more to post about this model and other DCC steam locos.

PCCM 56 New Haven Tribute

Our group of model railroad bloggers decided to have a joint session to commemorate the inclusion of the New Haven into the Penn Central on January 1, 1969. Several of us have a real affection for the old Penn Central. I go a little farther back and was able to railfan and sometimes ride the New Haven throughout the 1960s. It's been a major inspiration on my layout. Here ae the blogs of the guys who are celebrating:

New York Central Layout
Atlantic Pacific Railroad
Kings Port Division
Ralston Creek Railroad

Several areas on my layout have specific New Haven inspiration. I was really impressed with Lou Sassi's New Haven project layout in the December 1992 Model Railroader, an article called "Building the Berkshire Division". I was so impressed with it that I stole his plan for one scene. I kept the track plan for the town, "Cornwall Bridge", almost exactly as it was in the article, but changed the name to "Woollett". I made the prototype a more generic New England location. I changed some of the structures and scenery and kept others as they were in the article.

Here's a Walthers DL-109 on a passenger through town:

I have two structures that are New Haven prototypes and another kit under way. The two that are finished are both towers. Below is a Crow River Products model of a pagoda tower:

And a laser-cut kit for a standard New Haven-Boston & Maine wooden tower:

I had a work assignment in Connecticut in 2001 or so. I commuted there each week from California. One of the benefits (if there were any) was that they'd let me off at noon on Fridays to fly home, and on the way to Hartford-Springfield airport, I'd stop at a couple of hobby shops in Wolcott, CT. One, The Caboose, had an amazing assortment of brass. I picked up a pair of Overland FL9s. These have stayed in a display cabinet. I'm not inclined to put them on the layout -- I'd rather put the wear and tear on Chinese plastic locos. But here they are in the cabinet with some of my other treasured items:

The other Wolcott shop had various limited-production New Haven paint jobs on Roundhouse and Athearn bluebox kits, as well as Thomas Yorke building kits. These also made it onto the layout. Here is a G Street Warehouse that I picked up and made into a Railway Express terminal:

Here's an Atlas/Kato RS-11 that was undecorated, which I painted for New Haven close to 40 years ago. I believe the only choice for decals at the time were Champ, and the NH was too small.

A few more photos:

The Roco Crane

A vintage product I've had in the purgatory box for some time is a Roco crane. I'm not sure if AHM ever brought it in as part of its line. AHM did issue a somewhat similar crane that's illustrated in this thread at the Model Railroader forum, but there are enough differences that I don't think it's the same product. Mine seems to be the same as a Roco 46331 in this eBay listing.

I started the project of repainting and lettering it for Union Pacific 900310 a good many years ago.

I got as far as painting the body green with silver roof. But a couple of weeks ago I ran into the project again in the purgatory box, and almost at the same time I discovered I had Micro Scale UP decals and also barrier stripe decals on hand to finish the darn thing. This is great, because the cost of decals has gone up exponentially, and this meant I didn't have to order any. So I added body-mount couplers and attached the trucks with screws.

It sorta-kind represents a 250-ton crane from the steam era that's been dieselized. I don't think it's meant to follow a particular prototype, and Roco in recent times seems to have been marketing it as a European item. But it's fun, and most important, it's now finished!

Another Look At The Walthers Triclops SD60M

When I got a Union Pacific Triclops SD60M, I noticed that Walthers switched the DCC plug to the 21-pin version from the 9-pin. This came as a surprise, but it seems to have gone along with their switch to ESU decoders on their sound equipped locos from SoundTraxx. But there was an advantage that I didn't notice.

Below is a Triclops SD60M chassis with a Digitrax DH126MT decoder installed on the 21-pin socket.

What I didn't notice was that the change to the 21-pin socket means a smaller DCC decoder, and this in turn allows enough room to place a Digitrax Power Xtender on top of the chassis weight instead of trying to shoehorn it into the speaker enclosure. You just have to Dremel off a couple of bosses that now don't seem to serve any function behind the current PC board.

This means a lot less work installing a Digitrax Power Xtender in these locos. The one here is the SOO SD60M:

I'm going to install as many Power Xtenders as I can in new locos for main line service. I've mentioned before that my layout is in a semi-finished basement room, and there's a dust problem. Running a track cleaning extra over the mainline once or twice a week keeps this to a minimum. Both SOO 6029 and SOO 6059 have Power Xtenders and will see this sort of service now.