With some extra time at home these days I've been making progress on the pile of toy train projects. This weekend I resurrected my Varney-Sirius made repro of the famous Ives 3245 standard gauge "Olympian" loco. I got this some years back on Ebay for a great price. When it arrived I found out why; it was a dead short on the track, and also the front and rear trucks would derail when you pushed it by hand around any kind of a curve. But it looked great, so it was relegated to a display piece.
The electrical short turned out to be the reverse unit having its drum loose inside the enclosure. For a quick fix I simply removed the whole reverse unit and reconnected the brush and field wires. The drum looks like it may have lost one of the pins on the ends that hold it into the frame, so fixing that will take more time.
The derailing problem was simply a lack of clearance between the frame and the pony truck assemblies on either side of the drive wheels. In-other-words, the frame sat too low and prevented these trucks from pivoting, The odd part is that it was apparently made that way. It wasn't hard to temporarily raise the frame up relative to the drive unit, but there does not appear to be any corresponding holes in the drive unit frame for this new position. For now it's held up with some cable ties. I've included some photos of the chassis.
With those two fixes and some lubrication, it runs and looks great. This thing is a beast. I tried it out with two different sets of Ives passenger cars that I have.
