Some months ago I bought an old Valiant HO-scale brass E9, intending to display it on a shelf. A few days ago I removed the shell while cleaning it up, and noticed these nice individually-powered trucks.
After putting it back together I ran it for a little while on a quick-and-dirty test track, on "Pulse" power from an old MRC 501 power pack, and it was surprisingly smooth at very low speed. I don't know the history of this model but have to appreciate the good engineering and craftsmanship that went into it.
watch?v=tzMQDGEQEtI
Not sure about the amps... I'll have to get a meter on it sometime and take a look. It sure has a solid feel to it. Gotta love stuff like that!
Slow running is a bit of a misnomer I would say, more like "no visible movement detected" would describe it. At that speed in real life or a model there would be reason for a locomotive to ever run at that "SPEED"
Certainly, no point in just barely crawling along like that for any distance--I just liked the fact that the mechanism is good enough to do it. And from a modeling perspective, if I were going to run this locomotive instead of display it, I'd appreciate its ability to consistently come to a smooth stop.
Great low end. Can it make the prototypes top end speed?
Richard