no dummy loco's i was just looking at walthers for 3 dummy gp38-2 and there are none. i wonder why?? now i need to get 3 cheep 38's and pull the worm gears:thumbs_down:
What is wrong with having 3 working loco's that will add to the pulling capacity of the consist? Hardly anybody makes dummies anymore, HO or N.
the LIRR never ran a long train between 4 and 8 cars two locos i have 2 38's the fa/1 and the mp15 need the cars and end loco all my pics i had from the oyster bay yard the set up was blue wave 38 however meny cars then a fa or mp blue/yellow 38 cars mp15 this pic is off the net at valley stream the red trim on the white stripe was from the 70's
If I recall correctly, LIRR didn't run with 2 locos, one is just a cab to operate in push pull fashion
Pick up a Bachmann F unit and have it do half a lap of a test loop so the motor fails. Then strip the useless parts out of it, trim the chassis for less weight and you have your dummy. Works for me! p.s. - don't pay more than $10 for it...
One point to check is whether the wheels are turning without the power. I have an old unpowered LL FB which is just the plastic chassis without gears and motor. The wheels won't turn because there is no proper bearing of the axles. So take care, "YMMV"
Only two dummy units her. I'm in HO and have two Athearn F7b dummys as power units for the rotary snowplows. Just like the SP rotaries the power units didn't have traction motors. No dummy units in the locomotive pool. If the train needs three units all are powered and pulling.
LL powered/dummy sets still show up on ebay now and again. Not the nice new ones but relatively cheap.
Back to the original question, why are there no dummies... Most of the cost of the loco is in the tooling for the shell. The motor and gears only add at most a couple dollars to the cost of building a loco. There might be a 10-20% difference in selling price between powered and unpowered. Look at the last company to do powered and dummy units, Precision Craft E7's. The powered DC units retail for $99, the dummy's were $79. The run has been gone for over two years yet dummy's still exist most places, powered units are long gone. Dummy's don't sell and manufactures know that. If I'm adding a loco to a train, I want it to be helping, not adding weight and drag. The few dummy loco's that I have (Life Like E-6, PCM E-7) do not roll well and weigh a lot more than a freight car so they are roughly equal to adding 4-5 more cars worth of drag to a train. There is nothing wrong with running multiple powered loco's on a train. The train that my son runs on Ntrak has 4 units up front pulling 60+ cars on DC, no DCC speed matching needed. In your situation, with a trailing loco used as a control cab, just make sure the two loco's run reasonably close in speed and you should be fine. On the flip side of that, Walthers is blowing out the older plastic frame GP38's in the $20 range if you want a cheap loco to pull the motor out of and make a dummy. Bachmann sells a GP40 set with a powered, unpowered and caboose through Great Planes distributing. Both loco options are cheaper, less detailed loco's though.
I probably ought to restate that, you are right, it sounds off. The tooling cost of the frame and trucks enter into it also. A dummy is going to use the same frame and trucks as the powered unit, they just eliminate a couple of dollars worth of gears and motors. The maufactures don't tool up a seprate truck and frame design specifically for a dummy loco. If they did, dummy's would probably cost the same as a powered unit.
Rolling stock manufactures produce more then one car (road number and railroad) from the same mold and sell more cars then loco manufactures sell. I have no clue what the ratio is but it is a long way from 1:1.
Back in their hayday Concor offered cowl units in both powered and unpowered versions. The cost of the unpowered units was about one third of the powered units. I still have the original boxes with pricing to document this. It is hard for me to believe that the cost of a split frame mechanism ,motor and power trucks only adds a few dollars to the cost of a loco. Does anyone have documentation to support this theory? The manufacturers are producing locos and paint schemes at an amazing rate. many of which I would like to add to my collection. Given the current economic times and prices topping the $70 mark per unit, it seems to me sales would be down for the Big 6(Atlas,Bachmann,Kato,IM,Athearn,Proto).
My take on the cost of a dummy unit is it should be about the same as that of an observation car since there is only one per train. I personally think what the manufacturers found out was: Dummy units did not sell in sufficient quantity to make it worth it Dummy units displaced the sale of powered units People would buy multiple powered units if they wanted more than one unit So why bother making lower cost and by extension less profitable dummy units if people will buy just as many powered ones? No one has ever countered this line of reasoning to my satisfaction.
i just thought it was odd that there was not that many dummies. back when i did ho i had a dummy for every powered unit i had gp38,f7,sw even a dd40
Aha! You just discovered one of the differences between the HO and N scale markets. One reason this is so, is because in N scale it is possible to run longer trains, and because we like to run longer trains like the prototype does. That requires power.
I have picked up some old, cheap, broken locos at trains hows, most will make good dummies, I just gutted them out and made sure they are free rolling, and then add then in train as helpers, they dont push the train up in a pile when the leaders hit a dead section of track like when you forget to turn on the power to a block. I found a bad U50 once, they are heavy and it took an extra loco on the front of the train just to push it a long, that was before Con-Cor came out with the last batch of U50s and find one in running order was a hard thing to do. anyway you can get bad powered locos real chaep on eBay, at train shows or garage sells. .
A few more thoughts I agree with Gray One. Also, I have heard the tooling argument for years. I dont totally agree with it. One could argue that all tooling costs were in the original powered unit. Then all you need to do is subtract parts and labor not associated with the power unit and you have a dummy unit. But you could also say that there are other reasons to sell or not sell dummy units. ConCor, Bachmann,LifeLike, Trix have all made dummy units. As far as I know Atlas, Kato, Model Power and Arnold have never made dummy units. Who is right? I dont think either one is wrong or right. They just do what they think is best for them. I like to run LONG trains but I dont need seven powered engines. Maybe three or four powered and three or four dummies. I also would like to see more dummy units in N scale.
