In the article on installing a DCC decoder in this locomotive's tender I showed how to disassemble the tender. On this page I am going to take it a step further to gain access to the trucks. The reason for this is the engine's stuttering performance. I had been in storage for several years since it was last run. I couldn't get it to move but maybe a quarter inch at a time. It was horrible. The track is clean, and I cleaned the wheels, but it made no difference. After researching on the Web, and reading many others' similar problems, I learned that the wheels of the tender may need a deeper cleaning. They looked corroded. I figured they needed to be polished. It made a tremendous difference. What I don't know is if this is something that has to be done on a regular basis, or if it is a one-time thing. I don't remember what the wheels looked like when I bought the unit.



I started by removing the decoder and PC board (remove the two small screws), then unclipped the weight in the bottom of the tender (see the parts in the photo above). The rear truck is held in place by a clip. Use a small screw driver to punch one side of the clip back down the hole. The other will fall through. The front tender truck is held in place by a screw. It also holds the drawbar and the electrical connection between the tender and the engine (shown in the next photo).



Here's the Dremel polish "bit" that I used. I started with the softest bits, until I got to this one. This polisher actually worked. After removing the wheels from the truck, I gently polished the wheel thread until it shined. Watch out for the plastic parts on the inside of the wheels.



Every part in the tender seems to be excessively lubricated, even the parts that are supposed to make electrical contact. The brass bar shown in the next photo is how the track power is transfered from the wheels to the contact strip inside the bottom of the tender. I cleaned it off. The two wheels in the photo show the before (left) and after polishing (right). Quite a difference.



The locomotive started running right away. The front truck of the tender doesn't make good contact with the rails, but when I put a temporary weight on the front of the tender, the engine ran without stalling. I didn't polish the engine's wheels. I have not looked, but from what I read on the Web, there seems to be only minimal electrical contact in the engine itself. These models really get their track power from the tender. My project here seems to confirm that.