onboarding the new Atlas HO RS-3's

This week, I "onboarded" two Atlas HO Alco RS-3 locomotives in BN paint. They are good looking and running additions to the roster for my layout's 1973-ish era. You can see them here in action on YouTube. The onboarding process for a "ready to run" locomotive involves these steps:

1. Carefully taking it out of the box, which in this case involves unscrewing it from the bottom and replacing the screw holes under the loco fuel tank with special plugs provided in a plastic bag within the box. (which need to be cut from the sprue using an xacto knife or flush-cutting pliers) (5 min)
2. Placing it on the track and seeing if, and how, it works. Sounds, lights, movement. (5 min)
3. Put some alcohol (iso or eth) on a paper towel, and clean the wheels by running it at full speed while holding one of the trucks on top of the wet paper towel on the rails. This also confirms that both trucks are picking up power, which you want to know. (5 min)
4. Run it at full throttle for about ten minutes in each direction, to "set the gears" (break it in). (20 min)
5. (optional) Clean the wheels again, now that you've picked up whatever dirt was on the mainline track since you ran trains last. (3 min)
6. Placing it in a cradle and replacing the couplers with KD #58 "scale head, center set, medium shank, whisker" couplers. (15 min)
7. Putting it back on the track and checking if the coupler height is ok, and if the trip pin needs to be bent. (2 min)
8. Opening a jar of "light india ink wash" (india ink diluted in lots of alcohol) and using a soft brush to cover the body and trucks with it. This somewhat dulls the sheen of new paint and brings out all the joints and details in the model, and dries quickly. (8 min)
9. Taking it upstairs to my office and putting it on the test track, opening up the LokProgrammer app on my computer, and adjusting a variety of CV's in the LokSound ESU 5 decoder (which has 2000 user-adjustable CV's - don't get me started on that topic!) (10-60 min)
10. Taking it back downstairs and testing to see if it still works ok. It may not, which may involve several more trips up and down stairs to get everything adjusted right. If I'm doing a lot of locomotives at one time I'll take the computer and test track downstairs to make the iterations easier. But climbing stairs is good exercise, too. (0-60 min)
11. Getting out the pan pastels and dusting it all up with some off-white to bring out the handrails and truck side frames, followed by some rust applied to the couplers, truck springs, exhaust stacks and radiator and fan grilles. I try to do this weathering before the final speed-matching step, to make sure that I resolve any electrical pickup issues that all that chalk flying around might cause. (10 min)
12. Getting out the speedometer and putting the loco back on the track. Setting the max and mid speed CV's 5 and 6 to give the same speed performance as your other locos. In my case, I'm using a top speed of 30 mph and a mid speed of 15 mph, which on these locos equates to CV5=88 and CV6=44. (It's good to do this later in the process, because you need to break the loco in at the higher speeds that it runs at, right out of the box.) (15 min)
13. Getting out a different locomotive, and seeing if the braking rates match. They usually do, if you set them consistently, but in this case I found I had to increase the "brake 1" braking rate to CV179=200 in order to be consistent with my other locos. Most of my other locos are older SoundTraxx and LokSound decoders, so I'm still getting used to the new settings on the ESU 5. (5-30 min)
14. Writing out a new "loco card" for each new loco you are onboarding. I usually put the manufacturer of the loco and the decoder on the back side in ink, and then some of the main CV values in pencil, so I can adjust them later on the fly if needed. (3 min)
15. Going back upstairs and firing up my "Waybills" (Shenware Software) program on my Mac (using a PC emulator program called "Parallels", which I also used to run the PC-only LokProgrammer software) and printing out a "DCC functions" card to insert into the loco card. This tells an operator what will happen when they push each of the function buttons on the throttles. Since different decoders and locos (and layout owners) have different functions, this is necessary. In my case, I use F9 for brakes and F7 for dimming. (10 min)
16. Going downstairs, inserting the DCC functions card in the loco card, and placing the loco card in the waybill box associated with the track that the loco is sitting on. We are now ready to run trains.

These two Alco's are very beautiful and smooth-running locomotives which I am very pleased to welcome to the fleet. #4082 is a duplicate (and significant upgrade) of the very first Atlas - Kato drive DC locomotive that I ever purchased, back in 1984, which was so smooth-running at the time that I re-discovered my love for switching cars, and decided to switch (no pun intended) back to HO from N scale, which I had been modeling in for about ten years before. That switch to HO in 1984, caused by this Atlas-Kato loco, was the start of a 35 year project to build the present Burrlington Northern layout that is the main subject of this blog. Here's a picture of that original loco, now displayed fondly in one of my display cases for "extra" equipment.

I never got around to weathering it, and you can see that the shade of paint is wrong. But it was probably cast in the same basic mold. I did put a basic NCE DASR decoder in it, so it did used to run on the layout, at least.

But, back to the subject at hand, onboarding a new locomotive is a complicated sub-hobby in itself. It took me about 4 hours to onboard these two RS-3's, which is typical. But much less than if I had to build the models from scratch, paint and decal them, etc! Still, however, there are a number of steps that I didn't do and would like to:

1. In my era these locos should have yellow rotating beacons operating on top of their cabs. This would involve taking the shell off, finding the correct size yellow LED, soldering the correct resistor to one of the leads, drilling the correct size hole in the correct place, using the correct glue to put it at the correct height, adding some leads to the LED, soldering those leads to the correct pad on the decoder (if there is one!), programming the decoder to flash the rotating beacon at the correct rate, testing it, putting the shell back on, and testing it again. What am I waiting for? (60-120 min)
2. You can see from the first picture above that the finish is still too shiny. Fixing this involves spray painting with a flat finish, which involves masking the windows. In future years I look forward to having the discipline to include this key step in my normal onboarding process. (30-60 min)
3. Painting the wheels a rusty steel color. This involves either removing the truck side frames or applying paint in from the side while the loco is running. (20 min)
4. Crew. There could be an engineer in the cab and a brakeman on one of the pilot decks. I do this as much as I can on switch engines, but it would look good on these locos too. Pre-painted figures wouldn't take long, but you could also custom-build people in certain poses and clothing and skin colors. (5-60 min)
5. More weathering. Various vents, oil drippings, white fading below the lettering, rust spots on the fuel tank and elsewhere, wheel splash markings on both ends, etc. (30-60 min)
6. Research and detailing. It would be fun to find pictures of these specific locomotives and to see what details are missing from the model that could be added. For example, BN 4082 was originally a Northern Pacific unit set up to run short hood forward, so the white reflector stripes should be on the opposite end. (10-200 min)

There you have it - what it takes to onboard a "ready to run" locomotive after you buy it. How you buy it is a whole different subject - the "purchasing department" of your railroad. That, too, has been changing over the years, and is both more complicated and easier than it used to be - a subject for another day.