Oil tenders to which engines

[LarrySmith]

I am looking to purchase two(2) Vanderbilt oil tenders, med. tender SP 89903 and Hicken tender SP 89912.  Which engines will they hook up to and run.  I know tenders must be matched to specific engines to run, but do not know which engines will run with which tenders.

Engines I have are 2-8-0, 4-8-2, 2-10-2, and 2-10-0 (do not run, svc. dept will not respond to email or phone calls).  All engines look great and all except 2-10-0 run very well.  I want to convert to SP oil tenders for these and future engines.

Thank you for the help.

[Yampa Bob]

All the separate Bachmann tenders I've bought have a post sticking down for the drawbar, and MALE connectors at the front. They are all DCC ready with the 8 pin plug, and come with the jumper plug installed. I installed Digitrax DH 123P which has a 3" adapter harness from JST to 8 pin medium.  The extra long harness allows more flexibility in decoder placement.

I only have the 2-8-0 Connies, which have female plugs on the locomotive wires.  I have been told that some Bachmann locos have a male plug on the loco, with the tender harness hard wired with female plugs at the end, check all of yours to confirm. 

If you use the Bachmann decoders from your other tenders, you don't have to cut the capacitors on the board. I recently changed a couple of my Connies from Vandy to USRA medium.

One more thing should be checked, as per the following article by Jim Banner.

http://members.shaw.ca/sask.rail/dcc/2-8-0/index.html

Some tenders may have the first release board, so you may have to switch out the entire board, plugs and decoder.   Since my old boards worked fine, I transferred them to the USRA,  not wanting to take any chances. Jim may add comments about this.

I hope this is the information you needed.  If I can collect all the information about the varied Bachmann wiring methods from other members, I will draw a diagram to post, as this topic comes up frequently.

[BaltoOhioRRfan]

on your 2-10-0 Take the bottom plate off to explose the driver axles and pickups and look at the copper pickups, if they are bowed out, glue or tape them down so they DO NOT make contact with the axles. I found that to be the problem with mine and it now runs.

[LarrySmith]

Thank you for the info.  On the 2-10-0, I did remove the bottom plate from one and installed an insullator which allowed it to run.  Then it stopped with the motor running at high rpm.  It sounds like the motor is disconnected from the drive gear.  Is this something I can fix or does it require a factory fix?

I have not insulated the other two (2) yet as I want to get the first one running.  These two engines ran less than ten feet before stalling - after being returned from the factory as "no problems found" - I do not have have much confidence in their ability.

[Atlantic Central]

Larry, the following is an old post about tender swaps. it is long but you need to read and understand it before you try to swap any tenders.


Tender Swap – Bachmann medium Vanderbilt oil tender (Item #89905) with 63" driver 10 wheeler (Item #82307)

Initial test using jumpers provided with the tender – dead short, no operation.

Original plan – move 10 wheeler circuit board into new tender. This proved unworkable for several reasons, 10 wheeler circuit board too large and wires too short to fit into Vanderbilt tender without major modifications to both the tender and the circuit board.

New plan – can existing circuit board from Vanderbilt tender be rewired to work with 10 wheeler. A simple examination of both circuit boards revealed that while different, they both have the same basic connections, so the problem must lie in pin assignments in the connectors.

Tracing wires and a few simple checks revealed that the two wire connector simply brings the loco pickups to the circuit board. Reversing the wires on one end of the two wire jumper corrected this. Now the loco runs but in the wrong direction.

Two of the wires on the four wire plug are the motor leads. Reversing them gave us correct operational direction.

This only left the front headlight. The circuit board in the Vanderbilt tender is for the 2-8-0 which has 12 volt lamps for lighting. The 10 wheeler uses LED's, this is the main reason the circuit board is different. Rather than trying to modify the circuit, I simply replaced the loco headlight LED with a 12 volt lamp.

Additionally I added weight to the Vanderbilt tender bringing it weight to about 5 oz. and replaced all couplers with genuine Kadee #148 on both the loco front and tender.

Result – loco now converted, runs well with original 10 wheeler draw bar and looks great. 

This issue seems to be tied to what tender cam with what loco in the first place. I do not have all of the Bachmann spectrum locos, but from what I have seen, read and experienced, the following may be a good beginning of a compatibility chart:

Light Mountain & Consolidation will work with all of the "medium" tenders.

Heavy Mountain and 2-6-6-2 will work with the long coal tender, hicken tender and long vandy tender

Russian shares same tender with some 10 wheelers, so I am guessing they share the same circuit board.

The 10 wheeler is really a wild card here because it comes with three different tenders, depending on roadname. Some have the low, small "pre 1900" looking tender, some have the small tender from the Russian and one has the same tender as the consolidation, but obviously with a different circuit board.

But again, I think most of these differences are just the pin assignments and the type of headlight.