For some reason, Lionel has always had problems with smoke unit fan motors. Back around 10-15 years ago, the subcontractor they got the motors from didn't bother to make sure the red wire went to the positive terminal and the black to negative, so half of Lionel's smoke unit fans ran backwards. It got so bad that one of the magazines ran a two-page photo article on how to fix it. I fixed a dozen or so. More recently, they have had an enormous number of warranty claims for Legacy fan motors. The Legacy USRA Light Mikados appear to have gotten a bad batch of motors; there were numerous threads on this forum about motor failures on those particular engines. My Mikado was among them; it's been fine since I got it back.
I just had my first MTH fan motor failure in the 40 or so MTH engines I own that have smoke. I've had at least a dozen fan motor problems (including backwards running and motor failures) with half the number of Lionel engines.
