Aberdeen and Rockfish 205 on the Carolina Northern

[Carolina Northern]

Thanks to a tip from @davefoxx, I won a hard fought bidding battle to get 205 off the Evilbay. The seller said they didn't know if it ran. That should have been a red flag, but I really wanted a copy of the 205.
I saw a DC plug in one of the pictures, so I assumed there may be a decoder in there.

Well, when it arrived, I found that all of the handrails on the right side had been broken off and glued back with tube glue and broken again. This is a mess I'll have to clean up later.

I tried it on DC and nothing. Then I tried it on DCC with the cab number. It tried to move, but couldn't. Next, I took off the body to see what was going on.

Next surprise was that the body was glued on. Yes, I said glued on with more tube glue... a lot of it. I worked it off, we all know tube glue doesn't stick well to engineered plastic, like the deck. It came off, but it left a mess of the walkway - globs filling the pattern on the walk. May be able to get it out of all the details - we see.

I found a TCS T1 decoder - the 9 pin version with an 8 pin conversion cable, plugged into the Atlas board. All the wires were gathered under one side of the board and held in place by several wraps of oozing black electrical tape - thick enough that it was rubbing on the flywheel. There is a black mark around the flywheel, which leads me to believe it ran at least once after the installation. Removing all the tape, the loco ran. I found the wires from the trucks and the motor wrapped around the terminals on the board - no caps, no solder, just wrapped. The wire from one side of the front truck was not attached to the truck.

It seemed like the smartest thing was to just gut it and rewire. I happened to have a TCS A4X in my box that I decided to use. These are nice decoders. It just replaces the Atlas board and you're done.
This one was left from when I converted my whole fleet to ESU Lokpilots a couple of years ago. The A4X has decent motor control and is still a Railcom decoder, so it will stay for a while.

Rewiring - soldering this time and the chassis is pretty decent, like all recent Atlas locos.

Examining the body, I found why the body was glued down. the previous owner had broken the hold down tabs off the body. I have idea that they broken the handrails when they openned the loco for the first time.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do about the handrails - matching the color will be hard, even if I can find a new set. The chassis may have to be replaced because of the walkway, but at least it's black, so there will be some availability.

Not the perfect outcome, but at least I have the 205 running around on my layout. I'll address the remaining problems at some point in the future.

Don

[davefoxx]

@Carolina Northern,

Damn.  I'm really sorry that I even came across that auction and pointed it out to you.    At least you have a working mechanism now, but I know it was the shell that you were after.  I do not recall the auction listing mentioning anything about damage, and it certainly wasn't obvious in the picture(s).

Sorry,
DFF

[John]

There are some people who should not be in model railroading -- that owner has to be on that list

[Carolina Northern]

John,

Funny, I was thinking there are some people who shouldn't be allowed to work on rare, limited edition locomotives.

Dave,

You were doing me a favor and that's how I look at it. I wrote the message because I didn't want to wait any longer to let you know the outcome. I had a bad spell about the time it got here and I'm sure yo wondered what happened. I have it at least running. Everything in waves, I'll address it further down the road.

Since the move, I've had little time to play trains and the new layout is slow to be built. I have a genuine plywood pacific for the east coast, but at least I can run trains when I when I'm too stressed to work.

Don

[Ed Kapuscinski]

There are some people who should not be in model railroading -- that owner has to be on that list

Hahaha, I was about to say "some people just can't have nice things".

[davefoxx]

The lesson in all of this is why haven't they banned tube glue?  I just bought an old Walthers bay window caboose on eBay, and when it came it had also been assembled with tube glue that was all over the place.  I did the best I could, which wasn't to my satisfaction, and, in my frustration, I (thankfully) found another Athearn bay window caboose online and trashed the Walthers caboose (I did save the wheelsets and trucks).  Fortunately, the Walthers caboose was inexpensive; I wish I could say the same for the Athearn caboose.  But, at the end of the day, all is well again, no thanks to tube glue.

DFF

[Carolina Northern]

Dave,

I'm not so sure the problem is the tube glue. I have a feeling that no matter what the tools were, these examples would have been mangled by the "hobbyist".

Don