I am starting to build my loco roster for Milwaukee Road and I am looking to buy a streamlined 4-6-4 Hudson by Con-Cor. My question is: can you think of store/service that could place a decoder in the engine or tender? I tried Tony's Train Exchange and they do not work on Con-Cor. Does that mean the quality of Con-Cor engines is not good?! Thanks to all that reply! Jeff
Tony's had too much trouble with Con Cor steam loco's and returning them for exchanges. This goes back many years. They no longer sell Con Cor loco's and prefer not to do any work on them. Stay cool and run steam......
There are several production runs of the Con-Cor Hudson. The Atlas forum had a pretty good topic on which ones to look for. Part of the problem with Con-cor is, in my opinion, they are under-staffed ( or not staffed at all) for repairs. I recently sent them a 2-10-2 because of the wobbling issue, and several weeks later they sent me a brand new locomotive - only this one wobbles twice as much as the one I sent them. As far as the Hudson, for many years I thought that all "Rail Baron" versions were junk, due to the poor performance of mine. I recently dis-assembled the whole thing, found that the center drive gear had been installed off by one tooth, and the electrical pins inside the tender had been crimped over the insulation instead of the wire conductor. After fixing these two relatively simple things, and cleaning the excess grease from everywhere, it now runs like a champ. Although the earlier versions are said to have better mechanisms, they lack the tender pick ups of the later ones, and it is virtually impossible to buy parts from Con-cor.
Some of the later versions 4-6-4 CC Hudson are relatively easy to install a decoder in. I did the decoder installation on a CC Southern Crescent Limited Hudson. This model was from the last run and easy to do as the tender had all wheel pickup. The early CC Hudson's main problem was isolating the motor from the frame. The second issue was the tender didn't have all wheel pickup. The third problem was the fragility of the parts of these loco's. The one's with the plastic side rods had the problem of the side rods falling off every time the loco was run. You take your chances when you buy these early versions of the CC 4-6-4's especially if you want to install a decoder in them. It might be wise to make another choice. For some reason, the larger CC 4-8-4's run better. They are also much easier to work on for decoder installation. In most cases the motor is isolated from the frame, so decoder installation is easier. You might think of using this loco instead of the 4-6-4 and repainting it. Stay cool and run steam....
You can try Bruce at Litchfieldstation. He does decoder installs but I don't know if he will or will not work on Con-Cors.
