First off, I am sorry if this has been discussed elsewhere in the forums here. I currently own two Paragon 3 Unlettered C&O T-1 2-10-4's and one Unlettered Paragon 2, and am currently trying to adjust all three units to be able to run with the others. My layout is currently DC only with one of BLI's DC Master's to allow me to adjust CVs and control Blueline, Paragon 2 and Paragon 3 sounds, (although I am already planning out my future second layout which will have DCC installed.)
Thanks in advance for your help,
Thomas J Pearce
Tom,
Welcome to the forums.
As far as I know, you cannot speed match in DC, as the speed control is in the power pack. When you switch over to DCC the manual that came with your locos or decoders should have the information on speed matching.
Good luck,
Richard
Just try it. At "no load" (i.e. no train attached) the coupler bucking may be too much but, then again, maybe not. With a heavy train attached coupler bucking will be reduced. Since these are ostensibly identical engines their speed characteristics should be reasonably close and you should be ok. The big thing with those engines is that they are prone to drop power unless weighted properly in both the engine and the tender. With DC you can only hope that additional weight "helps"the power problem. With DCC keep-alive decoders solve that problem. Good luck.
They should all run fairly well together with no adjustments. They are pretty much all identical, same motors, same size drivers. Close is good enough. Depite the conniptions you see some DCC people going through to amke locos run in perfect lockstep across each speed step - you do NOT have to do that. There never was a way to do that with plain DC, and people ran multiple locos together all the time.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
Main thing with speed matching is you can use CVs to slow a fast engine down - that is, limit it's maximum speed - but you can't speed up a slow engine to go faster than it would go on DC. So, in your case, you'd want to find which of the three engines runs the slowest at full power, and reduce CV 5 in the other ones until they've slowed down to the same top speed as the slowest one. With the faster ones, I'd change CV 5 to say 240 and see how they run together. If it's still too fast, reduce it to 220 and try again. As noted, the engines probably run pretty close to the same speed already, so shouldn't be that hard to speed match.