Has anyone come up with a fix to the Tower 55 split gear problem? One of our elder members donated 2 to the club to use as fund raisers. Both have the split gear. I did not turn up anything searching the forums or internet.
Jerry Hunt
Corpus Christi Model Railroad Club
IIRC, the drive is exactly the same as Athearn Blue Box locomotives, so Athearn gears should fit.
You'll need to pop the cover off the bottom of one truck, remove an axle, and see if the wheels can be separated from the gear. If so, Athearn gears should work.
This particular locomotive is a plastic version of a brass drive. NWSL told me they were purchasing the tooling to begin producing an entirely new driveline for the locos rather than try to figure out what had been done. No more information at this time.
Athearn ended up with the Tower 55 tooling for the ES44 engines other than the drive as that belonged to Agin that produced it. Athearn has announce they are finaly going to rerelease the ES44's with thier Geneiss drive. IF they are smart, they will offer the drive without a shell but I doubt it. I am wonder if the old blue box Dash 9-44c chassis will fit under the T55 shell. Those older blue box era GE's can be had pretty cheap in the used market. Unfortuantly there is no fix for the T55 issues and Overland wont even talk to you about it. They washed their hands of the whole mess awhile ago. Its a shame as it was a nice looking engine, but why Agin went with that drive is beyond me. Thier brass drives dont use that little helical gear at the top of the tower like the T55 drive did. Good luck. Mike
Silly NT's, I have Asperger's Syndrome
NWSL told me a couple of weeks ago that they were in the process of buying the tooling to provide an entirely new and different drive for the T55 rather than try to fix the screwed up Agin drive. We just have to wait until they start manufacture. There must be a lot of these things out there for them to spend that much time and money on it. Good news for T55 owners I guess. No telling how much this will cost. Jerry