Life-Like N-scale BL2s

[Anonymous]

Well then you're lucky in my book. I've had pretty good luck with other LL engines thus far, but the BL2s I bought may have come off a bad lot from the production line.

[AltonFan]

I own two, made in the early 1990s, and never had any problems. In fact, the first one got me back into model railroading.

[Anonymous]

Has anybody out there had ANY luck with getting a Life-Like N-scale BL2 that actually functions half-way decent? I bought one, it ran absolutely terribly and I returned it to the manufacturer's USA office. They replaced it, and I went-through that cycle twice more before I finally gave-up. I spoke to a couple different hobby shop proprietors and they both said they'd had similar severe problems reported and one said he refused to stock them or special-order them to save himself the headaches.

The units I tried ran extremely rough, when they ran at all, and one seemed to run OK on the straight ROW but ground to a halt on even the widest curves. I attempted to perform the type of engine tune-up that I saw documented in MR some years ago regarding Life-Like GP18s but this didn't help at all. Near as I can tell (from what little I can see), the problems must be electrical conductivity since the mechanical operation seemed in order when I had the unit disassembled after the third return.

Ideas?