What makes Athearn locomotive "sluggish"


N

nsconductor

Member
I started an HO layout about 10 years ago.....had 10-12 Athearn blue box engines. All but maybe 2 of them were fairly sluggish. Never finished the layout, moved and sold everything thinking it would be years before I could start another one. Well, about a year ago I started planning my current layout, got the benchwork up, amd have slowly been working on it since. Several months ago I bought a few engines. 2 Athearns, and an Atlas. I had 4 Atlas engines before.....all ran like a Swiss watch. The one I have now runs the same way. One of my Athearns, SW1500.......runs "decent"......quiet, good at slow speed, not too jerky, starts moving with a fairly small amount of power, etc. Decent engine, its not an Atlas, but I'm fine with its performance. I have an SD40-2.....that thing is a slug. I can turn the dial a little to get the Atlas moving, up to around 10 or so to get the SW1500 moving.....but it takes around 20 to get the SD40 moving and it takes off and I have to back the throttle off. It will randomly stall some but not completly stop on low speed, very jerky operation. The wheels are clean, its not too loud, the track is clean, good electrical current in the rail, plenty of feeders around the layout, etc. What can I do to "tune this thing" a bit? I know Athearns can do better as I've had a couple decent runners. Any advice?
 
Take the brushes out of the motor, clean the brass contact area and the ends of the brushes. try it again.
 
Go to the NMRA web site & search for "Athearn Tuneup". It's about 10 pages long. It will tell you a whole slew of ways to tune things up. I've been working on engines for about 5 years now & I learn something new everytime I take one apart.
The Athearns are the easiest to work on.
 
If your Athearn SW1500 is a recent (last 3 years or so) release, then it runs better because it has a better motor than the one in the SD40-2.

It sounds like just a little tuning is necessary. Also, I'm assuming you have DCC, and if so, some adjusting the CVs or adding a speed table may help too, but I'd consider the DCC work fine tuning, after you've done all the mechanical things.
 
I just acquired 2 of the Athearn RTR SD45s D&RGW. Nobody else has these.

I'm replacing the motors with Aline re-motoring kits. Because Athearn motors are not only loud, but they seem to fail a lot.

So I paid $80/ea. for chassis and shells.
 
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