I've long been a fan of Lionel Postwar F3s, but this year I've worked on a lot of early Alco sets and have come to really appreciate them. Recently, I decided to add a motor to the dummies (as well as add some LED lighting to them). The end result looks cool (from the standpoint of illumination) and run like bears. I built a drawbar pull test track and found that these sets now out pull my F3s (and even more so with the addition of lead ballast as you'll see below).
The photos below will show the mods necessary to add the second motor. Besides locating front power trucks and motors for them, it's necessary to take out the front truck pivot plate in the dummies and replace it with a motor plate (a bit difficult to find). The rest is straightforward. After the new motor is mounted to the new truck and to the dummy frame, I decided to connect the two motors in a similar fashion to the linked dual motors in the F3s. I used 22 gauge wire (3) for that and first connected to the front unit motor. Shrink tubing is used to hold them together. The wires are run out the hole in the rear door, down towards the couplers and then up and in the rear door of the dummy. I used a long piece of shrink tube to cover the wires as they emerge from the shells so that they look like a thick cable connecting the two engines. In reality, it's a tether. This way, the e-unit in the front engine connects both motors. As with the F3s, the motors face in opposite directions so you connect the middle contacts together and then the two outer ones together. Looking down.....right and right, left and left.
For lighting, I added a brass tube (3/4 inch) over the headlight lens and put a 5 mm warm white bulb (from Evans) in the tube. I then removed the number boards, then Dremeled away the inside front of each board so that I could drop in a chip LED to illuminate the (formerly) unlit red marker lights. I Gooped all the bulbs in place and connected the leads to power and ground. I kept the incandescent bulb in there.
The last thing I did was to add a 1 lb lead ingot just behind the motor in the dummy to increase it's traction (added about .2 lb of draw on my meter). The photos below show the process. It will finish with two short videos. The first is an Alco set with one motor and the second is a double motored set pulling the same consist. I had each set in neutral and shifted to forward and quickly raised the voltage to 14V. You will clearly see the difference in pulling power (and possibly hear the strain on the single motored Alco). Hopefully the two videos will load with the photos below. If not, I'll add a second post.
Roger
Thanks for the photos and videos.
