Cleaning an LGB Mogul 2-6-0

Since the time I began thinking about building a G-scale railroad, I have always admired the LGB Mogul. Its 2-6-0 wheel arrangment should be perfect, I felt, for a branch-line type railroad and short passenger or freight trains. And now there is one inside our house, having arrived on the porch step the other day in used condition. My first task was to clean up the outside of the engine to remove the apparent years of dust and grime. Some light soap and water and a combination of kitchen sponge and paper towel did the trick. Looks practically like new (see photo below).

The next step involved performing minor surgery, exploratory in this case. If possible, I wanted to inspect the drive wheel axles and pickups, which in HO scale are typically the first to gather hair, dust, and grime. This case would be no different. Using a variety of handy kitchen props available within eyesight, I flipped the engine on its "back" and scanned the underside. I gathered various implements of destruction including pliers, tweezers, and various sized screw drivers. With surgery ready to proceed, it was time to reverse-engineer its "insides". The cover plate looked easy enough. All four screws came out with no problem, but they were of different sizes. I was therefore careful to keep them in the correct order on the counter for ease of reassembly later. I highly recommend this practice. As you "reverse engineer" an unknown locomotive, be careful to keep track of where the parts come from.

I heard a "sproing" when the cover plate came off, exposing the gears, contacts, and drive wheel axles. It happens that the front pilot truck is connected to a short spring that provides tension to the pilot axle as it turns. These Germans were creative! After gawking at the mass of metal and plastic (and grime), I dove in and took off the pickup shoes and long metal contact plates. Nothing seemed that complicated, and it was a pleasure to work with such large parts after dealing with HO scale in the past. I was more pleased to learn that the brake shoes pull right up out of the frame, so I organized them with the other parts so that I could tell what went where later on (see photo below). These pre-molded plastic parts were easy to put under soap and water, immediately relieving them of their years of collected hair and filth. I then gingerly toyed with the drive wheel axles to see how I could separate them from the frame for cleaning. I was not courageous enough to remove the wheels from the tie rods, and I saw no need to do so.

I took some Goo Gone to the wheels, both their tires and the insides of the wheels. Looked like a lot of grease, and the nastiest part of the whole cleaning process was the grease and oil that a previous owner had apparently applied. It became an instant mess, not unlike that of cleaning a bicycle chain. I ruined a couple of cheap wash cloths, but they had already been downgraded to "railroad cleaning" duty previously. The black stuff got all over my hands (like a bicycle, which is why I don't clean those often, either) and was tough to wash off. I can't imagine that the engine will need any more lubrication in the near or far future, as most modelers advise newbies like me to not go so heavy with the grease and oil.

Thanks to good planning, I carefully reassembled the undersides after cleaning all of the contacts and surface parts that I could easily access. Should be ready to go for its first test run on the Ponderosa Lines! Needs to be converted to battery power, first! Not willing to wait that long, a neighbor G-scaler has kindly agreed to test run the loco on his own track-powered layout. Soon after, C&S #6 will be the fourth locomotive assigned to the Ponderosa Lines roster.

Judgment Day

One ongoing mystery was solved today, at least as an initial test case. How would the pristine, groomed railroad and its ballast survive its first rain storm? I thought we would have a month or more without any wet stuff coming down, during which I could continue to live in my dreamland where the outdoors behaves like the indoors, albeit without a roof and occasional wild and domestic animals scurrying through. Two nights ago a skunk bumbled across the main line toward the fence after setting off the motion-detector flood lights. In any case, today was Judgment Day, as I later told Linda as we stood on the balcony overlooking the layout. According to a lady we saw later this evening, it had rained, and even hailed, for about five minutes, as some scattered showers moved through due to a late-season Pacific storm. Very rare in June. So we got a chance to see how the railroad would react.

I had read a forum post (MyLargeScale.com) in which the author advised that rain on a garden railroad is not the "same" rain (I'm paraphrasing, probably poorly) that the typical outdoor environment expects to receive on a regular basis. The trains are still miniature in terms of scale, so the rain drops that actually strike the garden railroad are effectively much larger - perhaps 6-8 scale inches across. That's like having the impact of water balloons striking our homes and yards, since the particle size of our ballast is much smaller than that of prototype railroads. So the question remained in my head: How would the Ponderosa Lines react to veritable water balloons? At first, it looked like a mess, as I shook my head overlooking my hard labor for the past two months. Water had indeed splashed ballast particles up ONTO the rails themselves, which was perhaps the most annoying aspect. It also mildly pock-marked the roadbed and ballast beside and between the tracks, making it appear to have a rougher texture than how I laid it down. As I tested the track itself with my hands, it was clear that the railroad itself was still solidly embedded into the roadbed, so the rain hadn't actually dislodged the track. So, the most prominent concern was essentially how to clean the track. I took our trusted "Swiffer" tool, though the wet swiffer pad turned to mud pretty quickly. Finally, I took a dry swiffer pad, attached it to my 2-foot long level stick with a rubber band, and dragged that along the rails. Once satisfied that the bulk of the matter was now off the rails, I braved my LGB switcher with two gondola cars out ahead of it to hopefully "polish" the rails. This seemed to work ok, and the trackage is now somewhat back to normal. I don't know how the "track power" guys do it, as I can't imagine keeping the track clean enough to provide reliable power from the rails. But as Linda suggested, I might be too anal, striving too valiantly for the perfect track "interface" with my trains (even though the locos run on battery power). This latter notion is hard to refute.

So, we have a preview of our upcoming "Monsoon season," which Linda is convinced will be one of the wettest on record now that the railroad is partly installed. We then imagined how we look forward to seeing a White Pass passenger car floating down into the neighbors' yards and having to collect my trains when they finally make landfall. So, the railroad survived its first downpour. We'll see if I have to go further and build a Noah's Ark on rails to prepare for worse.