Con-Cor / China Hudson tender pickup

[nickelplate759]

I have a Con-Cor China Hudson tender that just refuses to pickup electricity.  Mechanically it's fine - the problem seems to be the wheels.  They are blackened, and they pretty much don't conduct electricity at all.   The rest of the pickup system- the bronze strips in the truck and in the tender frame - seems OK (but not great).      I've tried buffing the wheel treads and the inner "spool" like thing that contacts the pickup strip, but it barely helps at all.   Replacement wheels are pretty much the same as the original with the original problems.   Anyone have a magic spell for getting these wheels to pickup electricity?

Once I get that solved I figure I can add a Keep-Alive to the system to deal with spotty pickup, but right now I pretty much have no pickup at all!

[mmagliaro]

Two possible suggestions.

Find an older mid 1980s Con-Cor Kato-built Hudson  with the polished silver wheels and the nicer phosphor bronze pickup strips (the metal in the later China-built Con-Cor ones was junk).

Get rid of the trucks entirely and replace them with current production new Kato GS-4 trucks.  You will probably have to cut some holes in the tender floor and do some fiddling with where the truck strip "thumbs" poke up inside the tender, but they are axle-point pickup trucks with an excellent floating finger on the center wheel which gets you true 12-wheel pickup that is far better than any of the old Hudson trucks.  If you have trouble getting GS-4 trucks, look on the Kato parts site for replacement trucks for the UP water tenders they sell.  Those also have the excellent pickup system in them.

[nickelplate759]

Hmm....

I happen to have a pair of those Kato UP water tender trucks.  The wheelbase is a little longer than the Hudson trucks, but I can live with that if.  Mounting them on the existing Hudson tender frame looks iffy - making a new frame might be a better way to go.

I'm amazed at how bad the original Con-Cor / China trucks are - what kind of metal did they use for the wheels and pickup strips?

[thomasjmdavis]

I've only had my Hudson for a couple years, and I've only test run it.  But in the test running, I did not encounter any major issues with its running.  My only read concern was that it feels very light weight for a loco of that size, and I'm wondering if it will pull a passenger train long enough to be believable behind a Hudson (I need to get a test loop together...).

That said, after reading this, I figured I'd put the tender wheels on a meter and see what there was to see.  According to my 2 decade old cheap multimeter, the wheel treads are conducting as well as dry concrete or a ceramic coffee cup.  I got better continuity from the face of the wheels than from the treads.