It all started out typically

It all started out typically & innocently enough. I did my usual  ops session setup (a process I'm really trying to streamline) and invited a small group of my regular crew over to run the trains. One of the nice aspects of my railroad is that I can operate with  as few as one or  as many as 13 people, so I knew I'd get a session in no matter how many showed up. As it was, I only had to annul the Shore Line trains and the short local (PDX-1), opting to have 2 man crews on the Airline & Valley Locals and just TomD on the westbound Shore Line local (PDX-2).

So far so good.  But then I did what turned out - perhaps - to be the equivalent of poking Fate in the eye . . . I decided all the trains would be steam powered(!)

Yup, three New England Rail Service New Haven Railroad K-class moguls - all brass - ran at the point of the three locals. I've run them all before and they run as beautifully as they look. Bur for some reason, about 30 minutes into the session, they all took turns shorting out the layout. ARGH!

Now, more reasonable folks would have taken that opportunity to remind themselves that this was supposed to be a shake down session - to see what inevitable glitches may have cropped up over the year-and-a-half of idleness - to create a punch list of items to address - to, even perhaps, actually address those items as they cropped up.

But no - not me. With every irritating, incessant beeping of every short circuit indicated, I just became more aggravated and determined to Keep Going At All Costs, trying to WILL the layout into behaving.

Yeah. That didn't work so well.

Thankfully, my crew is not only good humored and patient, but it turned out they had much more reasonable expectations of the session than I did. And, as a result of cooler heads prevailing, I got the punch list I'd sought by scheduling the session in the first place (and that I, apparently, subconsciously sought to avoid by plowing ahead):

• Reset and Reprogram the decoders in all the steam locomotives.
  • All the shorting may have affected the electronics, so best to do a "clean reboot" to remove that variable. See the videos below for some of what I'm experiencing.
• Run all the steamers in the dark to check for any arching.
  • While they've run fine in the past, brass steam locomotives are notorious for developing short circuits over time as paint wears and parts come into contact with each other.
• Run some metal wheelsets through all the turnouts/frogs.
  • One of my COVID projects was to do a thorough cleaning of all the rails and apply graphite.
  • Despite my efforts to apply it very sparingly (a little goes a very long way), I may have been a bit heavy handed in some places and any rough spots - typically at rail joints and frogs - may have knocked off more graphite causing more to be applied. 
  • Too much graphite may have caused some bridging of electrical gaps. But once it burns off, it's fine.
• Reintroduce just one steamer at a time at future ops sessions.
  • In the meantime, I'll be running all-diesel sessions.

On that last point, I've been surprised to discover that I actually don't have enough appropriate diesels to run a full session(!) I have DL-109s (New Haven class DER-1) up the ying yang for all the Shore Line trains, but precious little internal combustion for the local freights. In 1948/49, the locals were powered primarily by DEY-3 and 5 class switchers (Alco S-1s and 2s). Unfortunately (depending on your perspective), the New Haven's Alco S-1s and 2s had a special low-profile cab.

Fortunately,  my friend MikeR has created  a kit for that unique cab, and  my friend JoeS has blazed the trail in building one ( and shared his process with us all).

So, I have an undec Atlas S-2 on my bench, ready to be converted into  NH DEY-5 #0604, and a Proto2000 undec S-1 waiting for a decoder and  Scale Sound Systems speaker (been dying to try one out) before being converted into  the Valley Local's #0967.

Though it's on my bench, the 0604 may have to wait until I straighten out her teakettle sisters. If you have any thoughts/suggestions after watching these videos, be sure to let me know in the comments. In the meantime, I'm planning the next shake-down session - and planning on keeping my expectations in check.

Frustrating

I hope the reset and decoder pro helped resolve the problems. My first guess was contact with the rails or the wipers but the sound kept on so … very strange. 
 

Your story about the “Shake down” reminded me of an old adage to “Plan for a miracle, but hope for the best” or was it the other way around? 

The shake down was just that

The shake down was just that a shake down. You did not fail you found many things that were not working correctly or needed tuned a bit to fix some issues. I would expect you to find more things in the next session, particularly with the brass locomotives. For some reason they seem to be built very well from the detail point of view but seem to need lots of attention to get them running properly both cars and locomotives. Now that is my limited experience with them. Plastic on the other hand seems to respond very well to some tuning and they run great afterwards and seem to keep going with little work. I suspect they have concessions designed in that reduce their accuracy a bit but improve their performance greatly, again that is just based on my limited experience.

It is always a bit of a bother to find things not performing as expected but now between op sessions you will have a good excuse to go run some trains, I mean test equipment. Doing so will help for shake down two and reduce your aggravation level greatly. Just getting a shorter punch list is a great goal, but I would not be surprised if a longer one does not crop up. You see as you eliminate some problems and get to use more equipment and more of the layout you will likely replace some of the corrected issues with new issues you did not know you had.

Be patient you will prevail.

I will share some of my first endeavors into running some of my cars and locomotives that I built and bought. At the time I had nothing other than a short test track and I had just joined the club I am in. I took a bunch of cars and some locomotives and put them on the track and they derailed and generally performed very poorly, embarrassingly so.

I began tuning things and adding weight, trucks, couplers, mechanisms and programing etc got the treatment. This was not a quick project but I got through it. It involved finding more things that did not work and some that did. After getting things done and improving things I developed my standards which are very remarkably nearly exactly what is covered in the rolling stock book Joe published.

Fast forward a couple of months and a member that was telling me what some of the things were that were wrong with reliability was standing next to me and saying Rob that is amazing what did you do to your equipment? You see I now had a pair of locos consisted and after running them around our layout in the normal fashion with a 45 car train  I began running backwards. Up grades down grades you name it through switches etc. I gradually increased the speed till I was running a train full speed in reverse around our layout. That is when he made the comment about amazing.

I still adhere to those standards and things still perform great as long as I catch every little issue when building my equipment. The thing is Chris, if I can do this I am sure anyone can and you will be successful in getting rid of the gremlins. The key is not accepting something not working the way you want it to. Perseverance is what solves these things and I am sure you will prevail. Anyone that puts forth the effort to get some beautiful models on the track can and will get them to work very well.