Dash9-44CW's
I had been debating for some time about building or modifying some modern power. Finding three Dash-9's at a swap meet seemed to be just the ticket!
I taped off and painted all the grilles on the locomotives. Now they at least look like they've been run in a tunnel, or where dirt might get sucked into the intakes. Things are looking better...or dirty-er!
Handrails have been installed on all the units. I have a few more holes to patch where the stanchions were supposed to go on the front of the pilots, but that will happen here sooner or later...
I burned out a sound decoder on 986. I'm rather mad at myself for that, too. I installed a resistor in the line going to the speaker, and caused the sound amplifier to overdrive itself, thereby leading to burnout. I am not real happy with myself, as that is a stupid mistake. That resistor shouldn't have been there! Grrr...
I replaced the burned out unit with a Soundtraxx Tsunami decoder and the sound is pretty nice. I took the opportunity to swap in a high bass speaker at the same time. The sound improvement is nice, but the fact that the decoder is different means that the "random" sounds that occur are completely different from 1043, which has the QSI decoder. I LIKE THAT!! The two locomotives shouldn't sound the same, shouldn't pop off at the same time, etc. Now they are very different.
I also experimented with speed matching and momentum matching the units. Speed matching is good, momentum matching is a bit of a problem. Works fine on clean rail, but if you find a dirty spot and have a unit drop out, you're going to end up dragging it, and flat-spotting the wheels. NOT good! So we end up with a load of deceleration, and no acceleration. That seems to work well.
At this point I've been working on them for over a year now, and they were just serviced again last weekend. I pulled all three of them apart and made sure I had right and left side pickups hardwired to the decoders. This has been a problem on the club layout, as well as a friends layout. The large (and I do mean LARGE!) #10 turnouts look good and operate well, but they have a dead spot across the frog that is larger than the length of the Dash-9 truck! As a result, the units would occasionally lose power across the frog. Not good with a sound unit.
The units are running on a regular basis at the club. They are speed matched and are used as a DPU set with NREX 9402 on manifest freights. I haven't found much that will stop them, but the nice thing is, the "pushers" usually just barely push, resulting in a very stable train that tracks through curves, turnouts, and such with no problems. Even if the units on the front end go down, the force gets shoved up through the center of the train, thanks to the Sargeant couplers on all cars. They can't shove sideways, because the Sargents are too closely locked together. End result is, the train just stops.
