I just picked up an HO "Toby" to run on my club's modules for the upcoming season (Thomas and Friends are real crowd pleasers), and during a test run on a 3' section of track set up on the dining table, I see Toby is very slow, he can barely crawl along, even at full throttle. Thomas, James, and Percy are three to four times as fast at the same power setting. He runs quietly and seems pretty smooth, so I removed his shell to see if there was a bind somewhere, but found nothing. I was surprised to find him wired up with a circuit board containing two resistors and a couple of diodes, and even after a short run one time back & forth on the 3' track, the resistors get too hot to touch (this cannot be right). This circuit board doesn't appear to be for interference suppression, and Toby has no lights, so I can only guess that this is a circuit to drop the voltage going to the motor, but given the heat it's generating, it can't be long before it melts the surrounding plastic or burns itself out. I checked the Bachmann parts list and photo of this circuit board on the Bachmann website, and the resistors seem to have the same color code value (red-green-black-gold). Is it normal for Toby to be so slow moving? I can't imagine any kid running his train at this speed, so it seems like this can't be normal operation.
Bill in FtL
Bill in FtL