Smokestack on Praire

[jbsmith]

A True Tale I tells ye.
The other night I was running my Bachman 2-6-2 Praire.
I use a MRC 260 power pack.
I ran that Praire at 100% full throtle for a few minutes.
It is a suprisingly fast  loco for a little guy. It will outrun
my Berkshire and Overland Niagra.

Anyways I brought the loco to a stop.
It Looked Different somehow.
The Smokestack was LEANING against the headlight!
Apparently the smoke unit got so hot it heated up the plastic body
enough to do this!
SO,,,,a few more laps at 100% throttle then stop and VERY quickly bent
the smoke stack back to its proper posistion before the plastic cooled off
back to its normal state.

Lesson Learned: DO NOT run this loco at full throttle for very long,
55% on this power pack is fast enough.

Has anyone else done this?

[GN.2-6-8-0]

Yeh' read a post where a moron overheated a seusse smoke unit in a $400+ Big Boy and destroyed and had to replace the whole superstructure....I can maybe understand doing that to inexpensive $10/15 engine but insisting on smoke units on models now costing in the hundreds of dollars..??  that's just plain stupid !!

[hotrainlover]

You might be wise to disconnect the smoke unit, so it does not happen again...

[richG]

There is no good reason to run a loco at 100 percent. Only children do that. It is a male thing.

Rich