Working With Some Alcos

I've found myself working on some Alco projects over the past week. One has been trying to get a pair of Broadway Limited Missabe Road DL600Bs to operate reliably on my layout. People have begun to recognize that sound-equipped locos are much more sensitive to dirty track or current variations than ordinary DCC. I tend to prefer DC-only for this version, but also because a sound-equipped loco is about $100 more expensive than a DCC-ready loco, and in addition, more than one or two sound equipped locos on a layout, even at idle, start to drive me up the wall.

The problem with a lot of Broadway locos is that they come only with sound, and that includes these DL600Bs. When I got mine on the layout, they tended to stall and hiccup quite a lot, and I wasn't sure how useful they'd be, especially in low speed service, which is where I tend to operate much of my equipment.

But these are fascinating locomotives, especially because the Missabe was almost completely EMD, but these are big, beefy engines that look good in the Missabe paint. But these were on the Missabe for only about five years, and they were sent to the sister US Steel railroad Bessemer & Lake Erie in 1963. Also, for much of their time on the Missabe, they were upstaged by the last of steam, and photos are pretty scarce. Here's one that was recently posted on Facebook:

I've kept plugging at getting them to run reliably on my layout. I've worked on keeping the rails cleaner with an abrasive pad, as well as running the locos back and forth with a track cleaning slider under a boxcar, putting Wahl clipper oil on the rails, and finding that with more running, the wheel bearings seem to get more polished, which improves contact and current conductivity.

So this is encouraging. I'm going to try running one of them on a local switch job in the coming week.

I've also begun installing decoders in some Atlas RS-1s. I'm not sure if the most recent runs have DCC sockets in the PC boards or LED lighting. I don't believe any in my collection, and I have a fair number of Classic Silver Series RS-1s, has any DCC friendly PC boards. I just installed a Digitrax DH165A0 in this Long Island unit:

I have two more RS-1s to go. Replacing the incandescent bulbs with LEDs from a DCC decoder gives a very satisfying bright headlight.