Diesel Locomotives of the GSL

[De Bruin]

Don't know who painted it ; certainly not me but it is indeed virtually flawless in execution, and a very tricky scheme to boot, more difficult in striping details than anything I've attempted to date, save maybe those GN cars for Jim. Very similar to the B&O's traditional "Civil War" scheme but having that orange pin striping rather than bronze. Confess am considering one or two cars for it, but may "weenie out" and do some Budd "Man o' 'War" facsimile rather than this scheme which is associated with the Nancy Hanks II, Flamingo, general service pool etc.

[up148]

It is a beauty - the inaccuracies would not bother me at all.

+1. No model is perfect and you just have to decide what you can and can't live with. Looks like beautiful model and KEY was always much more accurate with headlights and number board squareness than the early OMI's.

Butch

[sarge]

For the fun of it, here is an unadulterated Kleinschmidt drive:



The model is an old Kemtron RS3, also done many many moons ago for Tony Ambrose.





His signature at the time was a modified USH gearbox; one thing he does is drill and tap the housing so you can actually put a little oil in. The propshaft work is well done.





What has been changed out on the C of G E-unit, and one good reason it wasn't working all that well, is the slipshaft between the clutch and geartower seen here. It looks like someone replaced them with the clear tubing on the E, not something I would expect of Stew as originally done. It also sounds as if the drive is just worn out or hadn't been lubricated as it should have been. Like the axleboxes, these drives were made to be easy to service with a little oil from time to time. You were expected to do just that though; no self-lubing bearings here.

The RS3 also has a motorised fan and well-sorted electrics all done to terminal strips. The machinework and engineering on this un-futzed version is first-rate throughout. It is very old school, though, no toothbelts, Falhaubers with reduction gearing, not even can-motors to work with. This unit is very quiet, though the ballbearings are still in excellent shape throughout.

My argument is the dam clutch. They were great for old-school layouts with Code 172, Marn-o-Stats, plywood, and (importantly to these drives) fixed consists and no grades. Add to the load or go uphill, and the clutch eventually stalls. The drive is very much engineered to take the jump out of the old power supplies like a Marnold and, in the environment for which they were designed, these are very nice drives.

Today, with a decent "transistor" throttle, say a Controlmaster 20, the clutch really is a curio and now that the typical model maker layout (read plywood multitrack loops style testtrack) of the '60s is really a thing of the past anymore, it's a design long past its use-by date.

I do enjoy running this thing on a flat switching layout though. It was well-thought out then and in its unadulterated form a nice trip into the past. Stew's engineering was first-rate, at least on this one, as is the workmanship. If one was to lock the clutch out, it runs well in a modern graded environment, easily besting the starting performance of a China drive and equaling, say, an Atlas SW.

[Pacific Limited]

+1. No model is perfect and you just have to decide what you can and can't live with. Looks like beautiful model and KEY was always much more accurate with headlights and number board squareness than the early OMI's.

Butch

Not according to a guy on NK today.

[Chris Webster]

Not according to a guy on NK today.

I'm shaking my fist at you, PL, because you prompted me to go look at NK to see what you were talking about. I think you were referring to the the post (in a thread about Midwest's SD45 pilot models) that included this line:

Having compared diesel models st the show, Key quality and detail doesn't compare to even OMI which is better in my opinion.

I'll give that poster the benefit of the doubt and assume he only looked at very late run OMIs (the last stuff they imported) and compared those to older/earlier Keys.

[up148]

1+ on that comment as well. OMI was more prolific in their offerings (when Tom was in charge), but KEY was always a notch above in quality, IMHO. I owned a lot of OMI models at one time and wished they were built with the quality of a KEY. I still have OMI Turbines and the only one that is KEY quality is the latest 1993 run of the 8500HP Turbine. The earlier standard and verandas are beautiful, but can be fragile and require a lot of fiddling. And it takes a repower to make them run as good as even the earlier KEY. Tom Marsh was the importer guru in O scale in his day and I take my hat off to him. But, I could always buy 3 or 4 OMI F units for the cost of an A/B in KEY and the KEY's held their price and still do.

BH

[De Bruin]

Agree with Butch; opinion even the better early factory OMI 's that actually ran reliably were no comparison compared to the early Key's which were consistently sturdier, more durable and often ran well for tens of hours straight out of the box in stark contrast to any virgin OMI I've seen ( at least "back in the day and
... those days are gone forever; over a long time ago .....oh yeah")

Conversely (off topic) I've personally never seen any factory OMI paint jobs fail so spectacularly in accuracy as some of those early Key units; Black roofs on PRR E7's, neon red lightning stripes on NYC units etc.

Sarge- really nice RS, feel like I should re-caption the string "show us your Kleinschmidt" (ja!)
Your pathology around the whole KS clutch design exegesis sounds dead right to me; the old school non transistor PS's do jump,
my downtown club has a Marnold throttle installation on its cabs(all five) and the power jumps off at almost twice the speed that you can subsequently dial down to once the engine
is rolling. Plays havoc with the PRC cans in particular. We're currently experimenting with solid state replacements.
Pete

[ScaleCraft]

Your Marnolds have load compensators? The old rheostats did that jumping with can motors. My open frames, with load compensator set, seemed to start up fine.
Change the resistors a bit and see if you can get it down.
But.
There were more than one rheostat.
I have one in a box, carefully labelled by the last owner. Seems it is for Half 0, and doesn't work well with bigger loads.

[sarge]

Pete:

Thanks for the kind words.

There was a time recently when I wanted to play around again with some of those great whacking power supplies that few of us could afford for ourselves back in the day, but I remember from the clubs I was in at the time (including a proto-ops club with a lovely layout in TT).

I've built most of my throttles over the years, but now I use primarily Aristo radio driving a 15 amp Scintilla supply for the current layout. You guys at RMCA might want to consider the Aristo/Crest radio throttles hooked up in-line with your current power supplies as a cost effective upgrade. The control is much smoother than through Marn-o-stats, but requires no change in your switch gear or base power supplies. The added advantage for you guys would be the ability to use them up in the controls platform during open houses, then take them down on the floor for ops sessions. If my experience with them over thirty years or so (hard to believe!) is any indication, you'll find them a vast improvement that requires really no more modification to the layout than tapping them into the existing power supplies. They can be had off the Bay of E pretty readily, and mine have been bulletproof.

I have a couple large banks of Marnold throttles, more for recreation than anything else. One is selector switched into the layout so I can go back in time a bit when the mood strikes. It has three throttles, compensators, the lot. I also have a second 15 amp Scintilla with four Ohmite rheostats wired in, as well as taps for homebuilt tether throttles (which is what is usually used on my branchline), the Aristos, DCC, and even DCS. The latter two are there in case we get a loco to review for the magazine, though DCC was the system of choice in the railroad before this one. The whole lot are wired in through rotary switches to select what you want to drive the layout.

Of the antiques, the Scintilla with the Ohmites beats the Marnolds hands down. I can only surmise that, since Walthers handled Marnold, that is why they are more common. Head to head, though, the Ohmites perform lightyears better than the Marn-o-stat, and even deal with China drives and modern cans very acceptably, something the Marnolds just don't do at all, even with the variety of ratings that were available in Marn-o-stats. If you guys can scare up some old Ohmites, that might deal with your issues, again without tearing out the old power supplies.

So, the conclusion of all this is it might be an easier approach to just find a replacement for those bloody awful Marn-o-stats themselves. There really isn't anything the matter with the rest of the Marnold gear, just the 'stat doesn't have the finesse for cans without "compensators" which is their patch, a switch with add-on resistors. Cans and even good openframe permags made the Marn-o-stat pretty obsolete as a useful rheostat.

I hope some of this musing is useful, anyway...

[E7]

+1. No model is perfect and you just have to decide what you can and can't live with. Looks like beautiful model and KEY was always much more accurate with headlights and number board squareness than the early OMI's.

Butch

Not according to a guy on NK today.

Regardless of what the expert on NK says, Key was and is, pretty much light years ahead of OMI with their EMD F's and E's. Suspect he should look at some prototype pictures.

Within the ones done by Key, I prefer some builders to others. All this you can file under opinion.

Even some of the Overland stuff is pretty respectable, depending on the run. Again more opinion.

Buy what you like.

[bob turner]

I certainly agree with that. I was about to go to the effort of posting photos of the prototype and my Overland PA, but figured his mind is already made up and I would be wasting time.

On the resistive method of speed control: Why not consider reactive? I use Variacs, feeding stepdown transformers, with excellent results.

[ScaleCraft]

I certainly agree with that. I was about to go to the effort of posting photos of the prototype and my Overland PA, but figured his mind is already made up and I would be wasting time.

On the resistive method of speed control: Why not consider reactive? I use Variacs, feeding stepdown transformers, with excellent results.

True, and I know folks who do just that. But hey, when you run Doorstops, you want matching supplies, right?
I am considering bridge rectumfriers in my Post War Lionel and using the Marn-0-Stats for that.

Only problem is right rail.
I need to put a switch in for when I have diseasemals in consist backwards.
But I can do that.

resizedmarn-0.JPG (125.22 KiB) Viewed 7493 times

[sarge]

I know people who have done the same, but really don't see a big difference between regulation of the high voltage side or the low voltage side so long as the components are decent. I think I have one of Armstrong's motorised Variac supplies around here somewhere...

I brought up what I did not so much for discussion rather than to give Pete some ideas how they could upgrade the controls at his club without tearing everything out and starting from scratch; simple and cost effective was the notion while still able to handle both vintage locos and modern-made.

[hibar]

I take it you guys are referring to NW2124s replacement as the new "front man" for MMWs forth coming products, definitely enthusiastic.JMO

[Chris Webster]

Cool to look at but impossible to make run satisfactorily. Gregg L. had a similar drive and we spent many days trying to get it adjusted/tweaked. Bottom line, cool looking components but not really satisfactory execution.

Someone brought a Southern E-unit with Klienschmidt drive to a meeting of the other Atlanta club.

It was interesting to watch -- when starting from a dead stop, the motor would first have to spin up to a certain RPM and only then would the mechanism engage. It didn't make sense to me until I remembered the trainset power packs I had to use before I bought my first MRC Tech-II, back in the 1980s. If you were using a power pack that went from off to 2 or 3 volts, then having that clutch probably would have been an improvement over the stock mechanism.