Great Northern railway

Milwaukee F-7 4-6-4 Hiawatha decoder install (cont):

This install had a multitude of problems, most of them created by me!

Videos:

Tye:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNeiTreZr00

Hillyard:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zDzTi9LwQc

Cut a hole in the bottom frame instead of the front of the tender....

as there was no tender deck plate to hide the hole. Also, in this case, the wires would not interfere with the front truck. Also, the hole was easy to cut since it was at the end of the frame plate so only 3 sides needed cutting.

A piece of tubing to hold the draw bar onto the tender pin.

Wires without the decoder installed. No tender lights on this model.

Here's where the first problem started and took 3 decoders and about 4 hours to resolve.

After using decoderpro to check out the wiring, I inputted the engine number 100 into the 4 byte address and nothing would work over on the mainline. I figured the decoder was defective so tried another decoder. Checked with the original address of 03 and worked OK. Back to decoderpro and input address 100 with same results. Noticed that I didn't heat shrink the ground wire and it may have shorted against the speaker. Third decoder and same results. Then it occurred to me that the address is binary and 100 is only 2 bytes (short address, ie: 01100100). I didn't know a short address will not take on a long address selection.

After getting the engine assembled, the air hose on the observation car was bent down and touching the rails. Had to close off every other passenger seat to keep them 6' from each other!

Plus the tender coupler was touching the rails on turnouts. The tender treads, also, had some kind of clear coating on them and needed cleaning.

One of the passenger cars derailed at a turnout.

The wheel was bumping over the frog so I cleaned it out with the NMRA track gauge and there was a lot of crud in the frog.

Basin tunnel exit.

West of Waverly.

West of St. Paul.

St. Paul.

Passenger car derailed a second time. While removing a truck, the bolster screw has a nut on the inside so it fell in the car resulting in disassembly. Found that the truck was slightly racked so, slightly, bent it (brass construction).

Thought 3 screws along the center sill would allow removal of bottom frame but the frame screws were, actually, under the coupler pocket: fortunately, I didn't try to force the frame off the car!