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I happen to own this locomotive. Didn't even realize, but out of all of the bicentennial locos, this one is fairly rare. It's in pretty good shape, but is missing the yellow horn from on top of the cab.
Here's my loco.
It runs well with no cars attached to it. As soon as I put 4 or 5 cars behind it, it runs but sounds like the wheels are slipping on the track. After a closer look, the wheels are not slipping. At some point between the motor and wheels, I have slippage. After doing some research, I learned that my loco has the "PowerTorque" drive.
Questions: Can someone explain how the PowerTorque drive works? Is there a clutch that is slipping? Any way to rebuild or adjust it? It's a nice engine, and I've seen video of others (same model) pulling way more than 4 cars.
The Tycos from those years used a pancake type of motor that wasn't well know for its pulling ability. There is one motor on each truck. The usual reason for even worse pulling ability than average is that one motor is either not working at all or the gears have cracks or become misaligned. The only way to tell is to take apart each moror and inspect it and test it.
There's information on the Bicentennal units that can be found at http://tycotrain.tripod.com/tycotrains/id22.html. Some are fairly common and not collectible but others are rare and are moving up in the collectible market. Before you start doing anything drastic to that locomotive, I suggest you find out of you really do have a rare model. If you still have the original box and handrails, it might fetch several hundred dollars on e-bay. There's really no point in spending money on this locomotive if it is one of the common models since they didn't run well when new and the passing years haven't helped. I'd put it on display and then buy some decent modern locomotives like Atlas, Walthers/Life-Like, or Bachmann if you want well-detailed, good running locomotives for your layout.
The crossover is a 25* unit. It fit almost perfectly with 4 snap switches. Here's a better pic of it on my bench. You can see the short pieces I had to use to connect the straight tracks. I think they are 1.75"
You can also see the orange insulator joints. I did that so that I could add a second powerpack in the future and run the outside oval and inside oval independently. Right now they are both wired together.
Thanks alot. I've been trying to figure that out for the longest. I won't have to use the orange insulators since I use DCC. Sorry to hijack your thread.
Oh! I'm glad you said that. Ok so what would I connect to them, feeders? Also if I was to find one of the Shinohara double crossover I'd have to do the same right?
You would have to insulate the crossovers and wire each up so your loc's don't go dead going across it... Doug, you mind posting a How-To on how you insulated the crossover?
There's not much to it. As you can see in the pic, I have one powerpack that is connected to both sets of track. I put insulating connectors on 4 rails (where the x-over connects to the turnout). The insulators are shown in blue.
I do plan to add a second powerpack so that I can control the two tracks separately. At that time, when I want to use the crossover, I'll just need to set both powerpacks to the same speed. DCC would be nice, but I'm not quite ready to take that leap yet. Someday...
