jeffrey-wimberly
Dr Frankendiesel
I've got my antique Bachmann GP40 converted to DCC and running like a dream. I didn't know if I'd be able to, being that it's what I call an 'old school' locomotive, with the motor grounded directly to the frame. It was easier than I thought it would be. The piece that the motor grounded to was just a thin metal tab that stuck up from the frame. All I had to do was break it off. From there it was a simple matter of just soldering a ground wire to the motor and soldering the other end to the decoder. From there, everything else was a snap. After about 20 minutes, I had the decoder wired. I put the locomotive on the programming track, sent a command to it and it responded. From there, it was to the main line, where it performed flawlessy. Before the conversion, it had no crawl capability and ran like a scalded ape. Now it'll crawl with the best of them and runs at a believable speed. My oldest locomotive (30 years old) is now a DCC runner. I also swapped out the old GP40 shell for a GP40-2P shell that I had laying around, just to update it a bit. Maybe some day, I'll get around to putting a can motor in it and get rid of the old open frame motor that's in it now. But as long as it works, it'll stay in there.
