When it seizes up, leave it sitting as is. Then take a pair of fine-tipped tweezers and reach in to carefully grab each piece in the connecting rods, etc in the external drive. They should all have some slack you can feel and see when you grab it with the tweezers.
If, on the other hand, you come across one that is all bound up and you can't move or shake it, that may be your culprit.
Also visually inspect all the rods, etc to see that they are straight. Sometimes a steam loco will get picked up improperly and they will get squeezed and bent slightly and could cause a problem.
Mike Lehman
Urbana, IL
My guess would be an errant piece of plastic from the shell causing a binding thus an overheating since all is good when shell is off.
This sounds to me like the decoder is overheating in its confined space. That it happens repeatedly tells me there is something stressing part of the circuitry, perhaps excessive drag or misalignment in the drivetrain, or perhaps a functional high-resistance short of some kind.
We can likely rule out some things at this point: the electronics as far as the motor have been replaced, and presumably the wiring through to that point has also been checked at operating current. Do we have any means of assessing the average and peak currents this locomotive draws around the time it develops its problems?
We might also suspect there is no 'common-mode problem' with the T1 production design, as we haven't heard widespread incidence of this specific problem.
Has anyone else had this problem and have any hints on how I can fix this. I really like this model and I wished it worked as good as it did when I first had it.
Gilshrat
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