I recently picked up a 2nd hand N-scale Rivarossi Challenger (#1592 from 1996) but without service sheet. Pickup is a little rough and ready (stalling on a frog!) so I figured I'd open it up and check that the pickups were clean and making good contact. Does anyone have a copy of the sheet - I found the 1980's one for the HO scale version (on HOSeekers), but it only contained a blow up image, which wasn't entirely helpful here!
I sold my two precisely for that reason: stalling on plastic frog switches at speeds less than 30 SMPH. As I have sold mine, I do not have the instruction sheets any more. The reason for the herky-jerky running is the pick-up configuration. One driver group is live on the positive pole and neutral on the negative. The other driver group is live on the negative on neutral on the positive. The tender is electrically neutral. This does not make for very good contact. If it was overgreased, no doubt it has attracted some dirt. It may have attracted dirt just in normal running. It has gotten to the point where if a locomotive develops a stalling problem, the first thing that I do is check for dirt. The major ogres that plague any N scale power are: 1. dirt 2. Dirt 3. DIRT 4. gear binding 5. DIRT! 6. electrical/wiring problems 7. dirt 8. small footprint rendering limited contact 9. abuse/lack of maintenance 10. .....and yup, you guessed it DIRT!! Miranda's Maxim as explained by ke is important: "The poor performance of many N scale steam locomotives is almost always directly attributable to poor electrical contact.".
Richmond controls http://www.richmondcontrols.com/ do a tender power pickup conversion for this loco, I added it to mine when I converted it to DCC and now I have no problems at all. -James
I opened it up and can only assume the previous lubricant was cheese. Some time later, with a drop of new lube onto the (no longer green) gears and she's running a lot better. I'll look into the tender pickup kit though, based on your comments (and my experiences with other locos) that might be a good idea. Thankyou, dstjohn, if you could scan it that would be greatly appreciated.
That "cheese" is a common malady in those engines. Beware. If you have not cleaned it all out of there very thoroughly, remnants of it will keep causing trouble. In other words, if you just scraped out what you could see and put some clean oil in there, that may get it going for a while, but the oil will loosen and move cheese around in there, and cause problems. When I fixed one of these, I took everything out of the frame and washed it and washed it, and the gears, with alcohol over and over until I got every last bit of that old hard grease out of there.
I have the instructions scanned in, please PM me your e-mail address and I will send you the PDF file. If anyone else wants them, just PM me and I will get it out to you.
Have a Rio Grande unit, I found at a Denver train show, years ago! Virtually brand new, looks to have never been run at the time. Since then, I've run it since, with some initial overheating. After running a bit more, the heat stopped and it ran great. But, I don't recall instructions in mine either. Gotta DCC/Sound mine one day!! Since the Atearn unit seized!!
