A new engine has entered the roster at the Euclid yard of THE GREATER NICKEL PLATE. Thanks to help from friends on this site, much sweating, swearing, soldering, testing, re-soldering, re-testing and ​praying. S-4 Number 12 is alive and running after installation of a new motor and a Z scale decoder. 

One caveat however,;the instructions for the S-4 provided showed the Orange Wire being hooked to the screw on the top of the motor weight bracket - NOT TRUE in my case. (They must all be different as the other S-4 doesn't have the same upper weight design/configuration.) In the case of Number 12, some of the re-testing resulted in the Orange Wire having to be installed to the bottom pole of the motor.

I did pick up one trick to pass along to those who may not be aware of it. The use of Kapton Tape is very handy in testing the reliability of both motors and decoders. Stripping wires and connecting them and protecting with a small bit of tape temporarily before soldering helps greatly. So does "connecting" the bottom Orange Wire and the top Grey Wire to the poles. Thus configured, you can program the decoder; set CV parameters; and test the engine. 

Once this is done, THEN you can solder and heat shrink and tape the wires and decoder in place. I learned the hard way, but as someone pointed out in my other blogs, "David, you learned something you didn't know. . "

ONWARD AND UPWARD!