Overland Models 4-4-2 Hiawatha

[Jay Criswell]

Lou would be happy. It went to a good home and a fellow veteran.

Jay

[2railjon]

Jay, whenever it’s convenient tell me more about Lou and his association with 2 Rail as I’m still running around with my training wheels on!

[Jay Criswell]

Jon,

For now, just know he was a true gentleman, a veteran of WW11 (Battle of the Bulge for one), a devout Catholic, never married though in his younger days living in the Hollywood Hills he dated really beautiful women. Modeled O Scale since he was a kid. Knew a lot of the pioneers (good friends with Elliott Donnelley from Scalecraft). Much, much more but I gotta get ready for Chicago.

If you got to the Right-O'-Way website http://www.right-o-way.us./ you'll see "History" and "About Us". There is a little bit about him written up.

Jay

[bob turner]

I met Lou and Gene LaVancil in the late. 1980s in Burbank. They had found some doorstop PA castings for me. I agree - Lou was a true gentleman. And his rails are now the standard for 2-rail scale.

[2railjon]

Well the engine wasn’t very stellar on the layout. It required a nudge to get it going and would continually slow down with a flickering headlight and then speed up over and over. Not sure if it’s a power loss issue or a short.

[2railjon]

For troubleshooting I checked all the brakes and sand pipes for shorts and they’re fine. I did notice that moving the front truck and trailing truck I would lose continuity so I scraped paint and added springs. They both swivel fine with no continuity loss now. I’ll set it on the tracks tomorrow and try again.

[Jay Criswell]

Jon,

If memory serves, which it frequently doesn't, Lou didn't run the model. His layout was setup with DCC, using a Lenz system, and I don't think the model ever had a decoder installed. By now, you know better than I. It may help to clean out the gearbox and re-lubricate everything. Having said that, there may have been other issues that were never made apparent because of the lack of decoder.

Good luck,

Jay

[bob turner]

Jon - often older mdels do not run well after sitting for a long time. Most won't run at all after a quarter century. A good re-lube helps. The fact that it moved at all is a plus - means you probably didn't burn up the motor when you applied power.

However - if it still needs a nudge now and then, you may have a bad motor segment. Always best to run motor and mechanism separately on initial startup.

Once everything is loose, about 30 minutes around the oval seems to straighten out remaining problems.

[2railjon]

Thanks for the tips, Bob! I gave everything a good lube and placed springs in the front truck and trailing truck for better continuity. I also cleaned up the drawbar connection.
Success!
Here’s the Overand Hiawatha pulling a Weaver set of aluminum cars!

https://youtu.be/HdATEcj66sw

[sleepmac]

Jon, very nice!

Dan Weinhold

[Jay Criswell]

Jon,

Did you get the cars from Norm also?

Looks exactly like the train Lou had. I have photos of it on his layout......somewhere.

Jay

[sarge]

Well done, Jon!

Looks just grand.

[2railjon]

Thanks! It will be the perfect running mate next to The Weaver Hiawatha when it gets completed by Joe!
Jay, I purchased that set by Weaver and the Morning Train Set off of EBay.

[2railjon]

A neat feature on the OMI model is if you remove the winged plates (or cut them so they don’t interfere when the shrouds swing open) then the shroud opens to the smoke box as seen here on someone else’s engine:

[bob zinn]

Back to the performance issues - the OMI Hia 4-4-2 Loco and a half dozen cars were my first major investment in O scale 25 or so years ago. All excited I got the loco and cars running, and after 10 minutes the loco slowed down, and then came to a stop. Teardown revealed that the tiny motors' bearings are seated in plastic, which melted !!!!