Just bought the recently released Walt Disney World 50th anniversary Lionel Lionchief set. After setting up, everything works great except the "chasing gondola" car with Mickey, and 3 other characters rotating around the gondola. After troubleshooting, discovered the truck's worm gear which is supposed to engage the main gear to spin the characters is not always engaging. There appears to be too much play in the truck itself which often prevents to worm gear from engaging. Before I attempt my own remedy to attempt to force the worm gear to engage the main gear, I thought I'd ask if anyone else has experienced this problem in Lionel chasing gondola cars and what your solutions might have been?! My current search of posts identified a thread about chasing gondola car gears seizing up and causing derailments, but my problem is different in that everything moves, but the worm gear is not engaging the main gear. Thanks in advance!
I read your post on the other forum
There really weren't a lot of suggestions that I saw.
I've got several cars that operate like that and unfortunately it's just a bad design. Most of mine do the same thing. They work sporadically due to the gears not engaging all the time. I've just learned to live with it.
I've never had problems with mechanical chase gondolas. There could be a problem with the geared wheel fitting properly in the truck.
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