For Christmas we bought my 5 year old son a lionchief Union Pacific flyer set. We also purchased additional new track and some used track from eBay.
for the first few days the train operates fine. Roughly a week in we started having issues with the locomotive not getting power. The red light would still be on on the connection track but the light/sound would be off on the locomotive and unresponsive to the remote or lion chief app. A slight nudge would seem to get the locomotive working. I cleaned the track assuming that possibly the used track was the culprit. I also cleaned the rolling contacts on the locomotive. This worked for a day or two and the issue came back. Nudging then locomotive may get it to move a few inches, a few feet. Or maybe remedy the problem for a short period.
we fell into a routine of cleaning the track twice weekly. Something I’ve never had to deal with in nearly 30 years of running HO, on30 and N scale trains.
we also followed a tutorial from lionel and slightly bending the middle Rail connectors on the fast track as this issue seemed to happen 90% of the time of straight tracks.
fast forward to two weeks ago and the locomotive lost all sound. My wife contacted lionel who said we could Either send them the locomotive and expect it to be gone for 4-6 weeks, take it to a local hobby shop that does repair work but is over an hour away. My wife ended up contacting amazon and they offered to replace the set. So we received a new set and sent off the old one.
One week later we’re back at square one. With a new locomotive. Some new track. New power pack we’re having the exact same issues.
Anyone have any suggestions on what route to take? What could be going wrong? Is it a track issue? Quality control? My son has loved the train and when it’s running properly he runs it approximately 20 hours a week. O scale has been the perfect fit for him but kinda turning me off to the scale or lionel in particular
