As many of you know, I and others have been struggling with the anemic pulling power of the Spectrum Mountain. Many suggestions have been put forth to remedy the problems, from filing down the blocks of the non-traction tires, to increasing weight, to removing the trailing truck spring, to shimming the traction tire block. I am happy to report that I have gone from a loco which could not pull five cars up a 2% grade to a loco which now pulls twenty up it without slowing down at all. How did I do it? Well, in taking it apart to try a few remedies, I removed the traction tire wheel to examine it. I noticed a slight difference in the dimension of the block which seats the traction tire wheel. Or at least I thought I did. I figured, no, it can't be that easy. Well, I simply rotated the block 1/4 turn so the dimension was the other orientation, put it back together and ran the loco. Voila! Now, with the Spectrum Consolidation, this is the most powerful loco on my layout. It is simply that the traction tire was too high to make full contact. I don't know why this should be, but it is. Try it. It takes one minute, by simply removing the retaining plate on the bottom and pulling out the TT wheel. Be careful in your orientations because the two blocks on either side of the wheels rotate independantly. It may take a couple tries to orient them the correct way. Well Bachmann, do I win a prize? If you want me to supply you with my name and address for a couple freebies for solving your assembly/design problem I'd be more than happy. Sorry to be so flip, but I've been screwing around with this for a week to fix a problem which should not have occured in the first place. Jacob
Jacob, Good to see you've found a simple solution. I felt that not all the drivers on my mountain were touching the rails. I took a ruler and put it against the drivers and moved it slowly back and forth. The first and fourth set of drivers moved with the ruler. The traction tire driver and second driver didn't move until the slack was taken out of the drive train. I tried it on both sides with that same results. It could be that when running in reverse the gear forced the traction tire down on the rails giving better contact. I'll have to try your solution. John J. Butler
