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.