Rolling Stock: Flatcar (BN 623250)

The latest addition to the PE&A rolling stock roster is a Burlington Northern flatcar. Some assembly was required—the trucks were not attached to the car which is fine with me as I wanted to swap out the wheels and couplers so it would match my other cars. I've done this a few times before so now it only takes a few minutes.

Burlington Northern flatcar, BN 623250

The components are laid out and I'm ready to start. The provided trucks have hook-and-look couplers which I'll remove and replace with Kadee 909 truck-mounted couplers. I'm also replacing the provided plastic wheels with metal wheels.

The first step is assembling the Kadee couplers.

The next step is removing the existing couplers and then sawing off a small plastic tab from the bar which attaches to the coupler. Some coupler types use this support but it's in the way for Kadee couplers.

With the tab removed, the Kadee coupler slides right on and is attached with a single screw from below. This picture shows the completed truck in the upright position with the new metal wheels in place.

The trucks are then attached to the car body.

And the last step is attaching the decorative pieces that came with the car. In this case it only came with four step ladders and a brake wheel. There were holes drilled for grab irons but none were provided, so I found a few extras I had on hand.

In other PE&A news, I took advantage of a dry and partly sunny day to clean up the railroad right of way and test my recently converted locomotives outside. I filled up a 32 gallon container with yard waste from the train area alone, mostly dead scales from the redceder. I ran both locomotives simultaneously on the track first independently and then operating together as a consist. It is unlikely that I would operative these two locomotives together in a consist but I wanted to make sure it would work and I knew how to do it.

Next I wanted to do some load testing and see how many cars the locomotives could haul now, both independently and together as a consist. But I ran out of time so that will have to wait for another day.

A sunny day on the PE&A. As I don't have a second designated battery car yet, the UP battery is being hauled in a gondola.

Installation of Airwire G3 in AristoCraft U25B

With the successful conversion of my NW2 complete, it was time to move on to BN 5406, my AristoCraft U25B. The decoder I installed was an AirWire G3 which is their generic decoder for use on most locomotives that are not manufactured by USA Trains. Unlike the NW2 install where I was following an instruction manual designed specifically for that locomotive, here it was up to me to figure out exactly what to do and where and how to install the decoder card. Fortunately my previous installation gave me the confidence that I could do it.

Removing the existing wiring was straightforward and I found it especially satisfying to disconnect the power pickup leads, given how much trouble I had with them earlier. I kept the original switches behind the back door so I could use one of them as an on/off switch. I also removed the smoke generator as I wasn't using it, it appeared the blower fan was no longer working, and it was taking up space that I wanted to free up.

The most difficult part was figuring out how to mount the board. Unlike the board for my NW2, this one didn't have any holes for mounting screws. And the board was so small and tightly packed that I couldn't see any safe place to drill holes. The instruction manual suggests somehow mounting the board vertically to allow air flow, but this locomotive doesn't have enough vertical clearance to allow that. I didn't want to lay it flat on the floor either, so I decided to build brackets that would hold it above the floor at an angle so it would still get some air circulation. I don't know if this is the best solution but I think it will do for now.

Both locomotives are now operational on battery power and I've done some testing inside, but I need to get outside once we have some nice weather and do some real world testing. I'll be able to operate both of them from the same remote control and should be able to operate them in tandem as a consist. I also want to do load testing and see how much they can pull now.

A view of the as-is wiring, some of which was original and some of it modified by the previous owner.

After removing most of the existing wiring I decided on a location for the decoder.

The decoder after wires were attached. The blue/green wire pairs provide power to the trucks. The red/black pair on the left disappearing through the floor is the power cable that will connect with the battery car. And the other wires in the upper right go to the front cab/headlight/number board and to the rear headlight/number board.

Since I had to dismantle the cab anyway, I took the opportunity to clean the interior so the locomotive engineer will stop complaining about all the dust.

When I was testing I noticed the interior cab light was working but the headlight was not. There was some corrosion around the wire connectors so I cleaned it up and replaced some of the wire.

Cab reassembled and mounted back in place.

A happy engineer with a clean cab and a working headlight.

Solution I came up with to hold the decoder in place, at least for now. We'll see how well this works.