Assuming your track is laid okay, and clean (very important, especially with fancier locos), then other possibilities worth investigating include ensuring the bottom edge of the pilot is not fouling track items (typically points is where that will happen), and that the coupler on the car that is attached to it is not fouling it in some way (another possibility with some rolling stock couplers), especially through curved track sections.

Even though the GP-15 is not a heavyweight loco, more often used in yards these days, your model should still be able to pull about 20 freight cars with a smooth set off without too many problems, even on gradients. If you can eliminate the possibility of any track or coupler fouling issues, then it may indeed be faulty, which would be rare, but it's not impossible for even expensive locos to get the odd gremlin from new.

Al

Nothing I did seems to be contravening what it says in the manual for the EZ Command controller although semantics might come into play as it often does with warranties. That will in any case be something of a moot point and it is no big deal really since making all my locos DCC is the plan. Thus I suspect I'll be going for Jim's suggestion and sticking a decoder in it (and that will too be a Bachmann one). Either way it'd be out of warranty soon, since it has always been my intention to repaint it in ex Providence and Worcester colours to represent NYS&W's No 2300, because a UP loco would be a long way from home on my East coast layout! I'm fairly sure repainting the thing would blow out the warranty.

Of course the motor may still need replacing, and probably will, but in the grand scheme of things I suppose that's not the end of the world since I have in fact got a few locos that I picked up second hand which need similar operations, so I guess I'll be getting pretty adept at such surgery. Like most incidents which initially seem bad, it often ends up turning out to be a good thing, as in this case, because it will probably prompt me to get to work on doing DCC conversions, which I'd been kind of putting off! Time to warm up the soldering iron.

I appreciate the suggestions and helpful comments from everyone - thanks people.

PS: Somewhat ironically, two shiny new Bachmann DCC GP-30s that I bought the other day arrived in the post about five minutes ago. Well, actually not that shiny since they are both black, but you know what I mean.

Al

I have a Bachmann B23-7 (Union Pacific livery), it is pretty new, only a few days in fact and has literally only been run a few times back and forth along one section of track, but yesterday it stalled on my layout, I went over to it and it was smoking (very acrid stuff, made the mistake of giving it a sniff - which is not recommended LOL).

Presumably something fairly essential failed, since it now no longer works. Is there any way to determine what might need replacing to fix it? I presume it is the motor that went up, which is annoying since it is almost brand new, but is there any specific test I can do to confirm this absolutely is the part at fault? I don't want to buy a replacement motor and then find out it was something else that needed to be replaced.

Some additional info - I was using the Bachmann EZ controller with it on '10' to control the loco since that one is not DCC. I do know it says on the info for that controller that leaving a non DCC loco for a long time on the track not running could damage it, although this was mere seconds for the damage to happen, so I presume that was not the issue, but it'd be interesting to know if that actually was the cause of its demise.

Cheers for any help or suggestions - Al