Smoke resistor

No, stop.

In a Lionchief engine, the smoke unit uses an 18Ohm resistor and will not support a different resistor. It is driven and controlled by the Lionchief PCB.

It is a puffer unit being a standard 0-8-0 common chassis and a known fault of that smoke unit and chassis is the piston getting gummy and stuck up thus not puffing.

Further, over time, the cam follower can wear down against the cam limiting the length of each puff stroke.

Go to Lionel support and look up the diagram. https://www.lionelsupport.com/...tive-ONLY-6803287001

I often open the image in a separate tab in the browser so I can zoom in https://www.lionelsupport.com/...483710FF04CD7-01.jpg

#57 is the plastic cam follower and does wear shorter and shorter the longer and many miles a given engine is run

I personally would just replace the wick, ensure the smoke unit piston self returns to the down position reliably, ensure the smoke push rod was not worn or just replace it.

https://www.lionelsupport.com/...-PUSH-ROD-USRA-0-8-0

The piston gets gummed up.   Clean it good.  Don’t forget the spring goes in first then the piston

I appreciate the responses and will try these tips. Basically its sounding like the smarter move is to Go up another level and acquire a more capable locomotive. I'm pulling 10 cars including the tender and I think I'm reaching it's maximum pulling power anyways. Still not struggling though! I love it.

So being fairly new to O scale I've got another question. If I upgrade and buy a legacy or dcc locomotive with fan driven smoke and more pulling power would I need a special controller? Sounds silly but they don't come with controllers I'm sure?

@Matts6foot8 posted:

So being fairly new to O scale I've got another question. If I upgrade and buy a legacy or dcc locomotive with fan driven smoke and more pulling power would I need a special controller? Sounds silly but they don't come with controllers I'm sure?

Most trains can be run conventionally. This includes both MTH and Lionel models. Conventional control is varying the track power, and also allows 3 additional controls, horn/whistle DC offset, Bell DC offset, and a momentary direction button that interrupts power to the track.

You happen to have one of the few that does not support conventional control- Lionchief, but all higher level models of Lionel and all engines that MTH has sold to date all operate under conventional.

What about lionchief plus? Can it run conventional also?

@Matts6foot8 posted:

What about lionchief plus? Can it run conventional also? YES