Awhile ago in *Bay I saw someone selling his entire set of trains.  He put all his rails inside what look like a tool box with compartments. Each compartment he stores specific type of rails: one for straight, one for curve, one for longer straights, etc.

I wonder if anyone can recommend a good carrying case for rails that the rails can be organized inside the case, as opposed to dumping all my rails inside a paper box. 

There is a chance that I will be moving in September, so I need to plan ahead.

My set is in N scale.  You can see my layout from my website to estimate the amount of rails that I have and hence what kind of carrying case I might need.

Thanx

About the specific turnout....I notice that all locos jump up a little bit, then back on the track, while running through the turnout.  But the GP50 jumps, and then derails.

I've ordered the inspector car and a gage..thanx for pointing out micromark...they seemed to have a lot of useful stuff!

I have a GP50 that consistantly derail at a specific turnout.   Other locos that I have have no problems.  I turn the GP50 180 degrees and then run it in the same direction, but it still derails.  Anything I should do?

I have seen two allegedly Bachmann rolling stock on Ebay. One is a Pabst Blue Ribbon reefer, the other is a Nestle.  I have a lot of old catalogs, but I cannot seemed to find these two.  Are they truly Bachmann, or someone else painted them into the current scheme?

Oh...but MKT is a fallen flag under UP, not BNSF.

The other fallen flags (post WWII) under BNSF are Northern Pacific and Spokane, Portland and Seattle Railway.  But Bachmann does not make any trains for them, in N scale.

What is Katy?

Another word of addvice, coming from someone who learned the hard way by frying his own decoder:

You need to create a programming track to avoid frying the decoder.

You basically hook up your DCC system to a short piece of track with the loco on it.  Whenever program the loco the loco will move a little bit to acknowledge the success of the programming. 

There is one differenmce between a programming track to a normal track which you merely hook up your DCC system.  What you need to do is to put a resister between the power supply and the track itself.  The resister, according to Bachmann, shouldbe a 100 ohm 10W Wirewound Resistor (or Radio Schack #271-135).

What I did is that I bought a terminal rerailer track.  Then I cut the red connecting wire of the DCC and solder the resistor in between one side of the wire (+ve or -ve it aint matter).    After that, you plug the doctored red connecting wire to the terminal rerailer track (now the newly made programming track).  Now you can safely program and test your DCC loco without the risk of getting it fried.

I also solder the cut side of the redwire back to one side of the resister, and then solder a contact fork on the other end of the cut wire.  After that I solder another contact fork on the end of the resister which does not have the re-soldered half red wire.   After that one uses electric tape and taped up everything, leaving just the two forks exposed.  Put a couple of  rubber caps on the two forks.

What all this does is two folds. When the red connecting wire (now with the resister) have the two contact forks covered, it can then serve as a connecting wire for your terminal track.  But when you take off the rubber caps and then put a screw and nut to hook up the two contact forks, the red connecting wire reverts to being a normal connecting wire, and you can use it back on the layout.

Of course if it is too much work, then do not bother with soldering contact forks and stuff, adn merely use a normal, undoctored redwire for normal operations, ie. one wire for programming, another for normal operation.

Hope this is helpful.

The webpage is completed.  You can now see the layout: It consists of overpasses with one inner and outer loops.  The yards are for decoration only.  There are actually four tunnels.  I only keep one of them so that I can show the layout.  The other one is actually the night stand, as the track actually goes underneath the bed (hence what you see in the picture only accounts for 2/3s of the layout, the other 1/3 is underneath the bed), which is very convenient for Buzz to attack or monitor the trains. 

The layout actually has four power zones.  The inner loop is one zone, the outer another.  The two yards have their own individual power packs. 
The turnout in front of the nightstand is actually where I put the trains together..you can see the red rerailer.

I usually can run two consists, one running the outer, the other the inner loops.  But Buzz does not like it.  Too hard to track down and he would lose interest.  He likes it best when there is only a single train, running on low speed, so that he knows he can attack the cars or the mice whenever he likes it, without the need to chase.
You can see Buzz takes his job seriously.  Those mice on the flat cars are eternal captives!

I got into trains because my cat loves it.  He could watch them for hours and sometimes like to batter them.  He would sometimes pick up one of the rolling stocks and takes it with him to go to sleep....my entire set up basically has him in mind.  Hence, the only scenaries that I set up for my layout are tunnels, and crossing gates.  No buildings because he willnot understand it.  No little people, freight, cars or signs because that might be hazardous to him.  No blinking bridges because the light will not be good for him.   Frequently I would put a train of flatcars with toy mice on them and run it, and he loves it.  Whenever a toy mouse drops off the train, he would get on the layout, sits around the mouse, telling me that a mouse has escaped!

http://www.cygoth.com/~buzz

I will take more pictures of him and the trains, plus the layout.

But the webpage is also a good demonstration of the program RRTrains.  The webpage was automatically generated by it.  It is a free program and it is great!

http://www.gregorybraun.com/RRTrains.html

I have around 75 cars and I cannot imagine some of you not wanting to have a program.  I am a computer person and even I would rather use this program than programming a RDB program myself.   I know many of you have cars in the hundreds of different scales and makes.  So a program like this is very helpful.

Also, I buy vintage stuff, so if you pay closer attention you basically see a lot of rolling stocks from different eras of Bachmann.  "Standard Hong Kong" means they are the old ones, made in Hong Kong, came in white or blue or black and clear cases.  Standard China means the ones that came from white paper boxes.  Standard, Spectrum, Silver, those are self explainatory.
Promotion Hong Kong means those are special or promotional items that were made in Hong Kong (thus gave one a perspective of its production dates).

PS.  You will also notice that I collect mostly BNSF (In Bachmann N scale, that means Santa Fe, Burlington Northern, CB & Q, Great Northern, and Frisco)..well, I live in New Mexico, what can I say!  The only UP car, a boxcar, that I have I use it as a spare part...although Buzz one day did manage to rip the car apart: took the box part off the chassis, rip the trucks out, etc.
He must have really hated UP! 



Enjoy

This loco is not DCC ready.  Is it possible that they insert the H0 version of the insert?

Here is the H0 version:
http://hoseeker.net/assemblyexplosionbachmann/bachmannh1644diagrampg2.jpg

I once was thinking about putting a decoder in the old spectrum dash 8, there was no instructions.  I think the safest way that I thought of at the time was simply bypass any boards, PCB or not, of the loco, and directly solder to whatever applicances the loco has (motor, lights, etc).  Desolder the lights from the PCB, and get rid of the PCB.

But eventaully I dropped the idea and simply get a DCC ready version of the loco instead.  Not exactly plug and play but at least everything is clear, even without looking up the insert because the PCB has wire numbers printed on the places (contacts) where you need to solder.

I still messed up and fried the decoder.  I ended up asking Ginny to send me a replacement because the PCB also broke.  The contacts between the PCB and the motor are extremely fragile.  Word of advice to anyone who works on the Dash 8: the scotch tape that Bachmann put on for taping the PCB to the chassis is actually very important.  If you take the tape off and not be careful, you can simply break the copper contact of the PCB to the motor.  That's why the scotch tape is there, to prevent the PCB from moving.

Fianlly, why not ask the Bach man to upload the correct diagrams?

Very true...but that seems to occur since around 2000.  When it comes to minor changes, I am concerning about things such as colors and letterings...

Since I only collect N scales, and especially older stuff, I am looking for older catalogs so that I can have a better idea of for what to hunt.  I am currently lacking the following years:
78, 83-84

Notice that the earliest one I have is 1968, because Bachmann did not enter N scale (or trains for that matter) until 68.  H0 scale started in 1970.

If you have some extras to spares to give or willing to sell, please let me know.  I will pay a reasonable price for them. 

Now that I have checked the 98 and 99 catalogs, I noticed that the UP # is 86073.  In fact, with the exception of the undecorated dash 8 CW, they all started from 86070.  Dash 8 C are 85XXX.  That means that 86061 has to be made in 96 or 97. 

Quote from: Franz T on June 12, 2007, 07:54:57 AM
The first series of Spectrum Dash8's appeared in 1996.
I have 5 of them and although they are generally decent engines, quality control at that time was a bit spotty, to be polite about it.
More than likely, B'mann will no longer have parts for the older models; however they generally replace a loco sent in under warranty with the current production model. IIRC the handling charge or a N-scale diesel is $10. Contact them for exact details.
To learn more than you ever wanted to know about N-scale locomotives, try this link: http://www.visi.com/~spookshow/locos.html
HTH


I cannot find the Dash8's in my 1997 and 2001 catalog.  Did they pull out during those two years?  Or do they have separate catalogs?

Franz T.

I owned two of those.
I don't have all the catalogs, but I know that GE-8-40CW Spectrum did not exist in 2001, in fact, there were very very few products in 2001 for Spectrum N scales.  I also know that in 2006 the Spectrum GE-8-40CW are DCC ready.
So the best guess would be between 2002-2005.

There are lights, and they are directional.  If you open the shell and look inside, the lights on both ends are connected on a very simple PCB, stuck inside the inner top of the shell.  The split chassis has no lights.

The rapidos are truck mounted.

Pretty good performance actually, I would have kept both of them but I rather got a DCC ready one instead.  But I would have to say that the old
DASH 8-40CWs actually have enough space and convenience in engineering that you can convert it to DCC without too many problems, ie, you do not need to do drilling and milling and all those stuff.

Try conduct wires from either the power pack or the track to contact directly with the lights, or its PCB, to see whether they are defective.  Make sure you test both, ie. both the lights, and the PCB itself, to isolate the problems.
If the lights work, then it is a matter of contact between the case and the chassis.  Adjust the case, or adjust the chassis (lossen or tighten the screws that hold the two halves of the chassis to adjust conductivity).

If all else fails, depends on what you plan to do, the loco can either be serve as spare parts, or you can send it back to Bachmann.  Older Spectrums values have not been great (around $20), so it may not be worth the (legendary waiting time of) returning, and you may as well get another loco.  The chassis itself can pretty much interchange with the newer Spectrums, so you may actually want to keep it as parts.

Did you buy it MIB, or used?