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Aristo Center Cab Switcher Tips
The Aristo Center Cab Switcher is a small
diesel locomotive modeled after a generic design of many small
industrial engines. There was no real prototype for this loco, but it
is credible in size and proportion. Many small switchers were made with
a center cab and a small (150 to 300 hp) engine/generator set under
each hood.
Aristo has apparently taken two short hoods, the cab and battery boxes from their RS-3 and put them on a new frame with a new die cast power brick. Unlike the L'il Critter, this locomotive has engine exhaust ports. There are NO smoke units.
Contents
- Performance and Detail
- Scale and Clearance
- Center Cab Power Bricks
- Couplers
- Lighting and Electrical
- Smoke
- Disassembly of the Center Cab
- Radio Control Installation in the Center Cab
- Battery Power Installation in the Center Cab
25 May 02
Performance and Detail
The Center Cab is a very smooth and quiet engine. There is
some audible gear noise, but the sound of the wheels on the rails is
louder than the mechanism. The engine is moderately weighted and has
good pulling power. It won't pull as well as the larger heavier
diesels, but since the motors are full sized, a little weight in the
body may improve that. I did run my standard Tractive Effort Tests on the
center cab and it did fairly well, pulling about as well as other
Aristo diesels that haven't had additional weight installed. Most of
the engine weight is in the truck castings, there are no internal body
weights. There are also no traction tires.
The slow speed performance is good, the slowest steady speed is about 1 tie per second either loaded or running light. The top speed is lower than other diesels, this locomotive more closely matches the top speed of a C-16 than the other Aristo Diesels. Typical industrial diesels could not exceed 40 mph due to their non-swinging truck design. The truck sideframe models a welded up truck similar to ones found on many small engines.
There are two switches underneath the loco for the motor and the non existent smoke. These can be reached while the loco is still on the track.
The paint job is a little more complete than the older RS-3's. On this unit, painted in an ATSF style, the ladders and their metal eyelets are all painted.
The wheel treads are wider than most wheels. This doesn't seem to harm anything, but the engine looks a little odd from the bottom. After extended running on my very dirty track, the wheels picked up a slight haze, but there was no sign of pitting. Power pickup was good considering the track it was running on which probably hasn't been cleaned since last year. The engine did respond to the bad track by speeding and slowing as it gained and lost power, but it did so smoothly without the jerkiness of some locos. It never did actually stall.
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Scale and Clearance
This is a very short locomotive so that it will handle tight turns quite well. It has minimal overhang under any conditions so that there are likely few railroads it won't fit on. The locomotive is 12" long over the end steps and 15" long over the coupler faces. The engine is 4" wide and 5-5/8" tall. The wheelbase of the truck is 2.343". The trucks are 5.3" on center.
Since there isn't a real prototype for this engine, its "scale" is open to interpretation. However, the engine size is consistent with the 1/29 scale of the rest of the Aristo product line.
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Center Cab Power Bricks
The Center Cab brick is a die cast metal assembly.
It is self contained and is very easy to remove from the loco. There
are two screws in sides of the A-frame that mounts the truck. Removal
of these screws releases the truck. The wiring is connected to the loco
with two plugs. These are differently sized and keyed so that it is not
possible to switch them or plug them in backwards.
There are four screws on each side that hold the brick halves together. To disassemble the brick, remove two wheels on one side by removing the screws in the center of the wheels. The wheels are centered on the axles with tapers and may bind a little, but a little prying will pop them off. Then remove the four screws on that side and pull the halves apart. The screws that hold the case halves together are anchored in plastic insulating spacers.
The truck has
a conventional can motor and worm gear drive. The motor has a bypass
capacitor and a device that appears to be a surge suppressor soldered
across its terminals. The motor is also wrapped in electrical tape to
insulate the can from the dicast case halves. The power pickup wires
are connected through lugs screwed to each case half. Note that the
wires are just crimped into the lugs and can come out. This may not be
visible due to the sleeving. If you have a truck apart, it might be
reasonable to cut off the sleeving, remove the wire from the lug, put
some more sleeving on the wire, solder it back to the lug and then heat
shrink the sleeving over the soldered joint.
Each axle runs in two ball bearings that are pressed on the axle. Power is picked up on every wheel and transferred to the case halves through the bearings. These bearings should provide a long bearing life, even if the loco is more heavily weighted.
Older Aristo bricks used
screws as thrust bearings and sometimes they would squeak loudly. Also,
if the screws were misadjusted, either the motor bearings would have to
take up the thrust or the lash screws would add drag as the adjustment
was quite critical. This brick uses a spring loaded thrust bearing
instead so that adjustment is not required. The thrust bearing does not
add appreciably to motor drag.
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Couplers
The Center Cab comes with standard Aristo knuckle couplers body mounted and a set of hook and loop couplers in the box. The existing couplers extend way out from the engine but they do work with other Aristo rolling stock on 2' radius curves. On S curves, the couplers get pretty contorted but they still work.
There are probably many ways to install Kadee couplers, but I choose to use a method similar to one that I used on the RS-3. I have a box if Kadee #831's so that I was inclined to use this standard truck mount coupler. The coupler mount is similar to the RS-3, but it isn't exactly the same. The post on an RS-3 has a ridge at the right height to position a modified Kadee #831. The Center Cab post does not have this ridge so that it must be modified somewhat to mount a Kadee.
The post is just under 0.25" in diameter
and is nearly the right height to hold a #831 if the mounting hole on
the #831 is drilled out to 0.25". The coupler box then rests on the
pilot and the whole assembly comes out just a tad higher than the
optimum height. The coupler cannot droop because it is supported by the
pilot. However, the coupler can slide up on the post unless something
stops it. The RS-3 had ridges at the right spot, but these ridges are
missing on the Center Cab. I cut a short piece of 0.25" ID brass tubing
and slid it over the post. With the coupler box in place, I pushed the
tube down to the right position with a toothpick and then applied a
drop of Zap-CA to hold it in place. The existing coupler centering
spring must be trimmed shorter so that it will fit in a #70 hole
drilled in the back of the coupler body
When the Kadee
#831 is mounted this way, much of the coupler box is back inside the
pilot and is not visually obtrusive. The coupler is also mounted much
closer to the locomotive than the stock Aristo coupler.
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Lighting and Electrical
When splayed
open, the Center Cab reveals that there is little inside the unit. A
distribution board is mounted to the frame and the hood wiring plugs
in. There is no overt provision for a DCC decoder or a command
receiver, but since all the necessary wiring is accessible on the top
of the distribution board, it would be an easy job with a knife to cut
the appropriate traces to make the necessary connections. There is
quite a bit of room inside both hoods for batteries, sound systems, and
control receivers or decoders.
The
schematic of the Center Cab is dead simple. The main distribution board
on the frame interconnects the motors and power pickups. Lighting wires
are taken off the board to go to each hood. The lighting is the same as
on recent RS-3's but it cannot be turned off. There are incandescent
lights for the cab and the number boards. The headlights are yellow
LED's. These can be seen in the daylight, but do not cast any form of
beam at night. There is a "smoke" switch but no smoke unit to switch.
The switch just terminates on a pad on the circuit board.
The two LEDs on
each end are wired in series with a 470 ohm current limiting resistor.
This sets the diode current at about 20 mA, just right for a White LED. I have installed one bright white
LED in place of one of the stock LED's in this picture. The white LED
is so bright, that getting this picture was difficult but it can be
seen how much more intense the white LED is in comparison to the wimpy
stock yellow LED. As viewed by eye, the difference is even greater than
the photo indicates.
With the headlights modified, the Center Cab
will cast a non trivial beam in darkness. The intensity of the light
cannot compete with sunlight but if you run at night, it makes a
considerable improvement.
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Smoke
The Center Cab Switcher DOES
NOT have smoke units, but it doesn't appear that it would be
difficult to install LGB smoke units. The stack is nearly big enough to
take one dropped in from the top. A little work with a 3/8" drill bit
and a rattail file can open the stack sufficiently to allow an LGB or
Seuthe smoke unit to fit. I am not sure that I want to install $40+
worth of smoke units in this inexpensive locomotive, but it could be
done.
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Disassembly of the Center Cab
While the Center Cab is not difficult to take apart, there sure are a lot of screws that need to be removed to do it. Due to interference between the bricks, the sideframes and the hood and cab mounting screws, it is easier overall to just bite the bullet and strip the whole thing down. Remove all four sideframes (2 screws each) and both bricks (2 screws each) and unplug the bricks. They are identical, but you can mark them if you want. Then remove 14 more screws underneath to release the battery boxes, hoods and the cab. Both hoods and the cab come off as a unit.
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Radio Control Installation in the Center Cab
I installed a new Crest
CRE-55491 On Board Train Engineer in the Center Cab. The installation
was pretty easy. Although the rewiring was fairly extensive from a
schematic point of view, it only took 8 circuit board cuts. Six of the
cuts are on the main board and one on each headlight board. The cuts
separate the main circuit board into 4 isolated sections, the power
bus, the motor bus and one section each for the front and rear
headlights.
In order to use just the four wires that already go between the frame and the shell, the functions of the four wires were reassigned. One brings power up to the shell. The other three activate one each of the three lighting circuits, the front headlights, the rear headlights and the cab/number board lights. The power going to the shell is derived from the internal bus of the 55491. This bus is available by tapping power from the positive terminal of the 220 uF capacitor on the 55491.
The cuts can be seen as light
marks on the board, two near each end and one in the upper center that
cuts through BOTH thin traces.
The code set switch is mounted to project through the frame right right next to the switches. The 55491 itself is hot glued sideways to the frame. The previous motor switch has been reassigned to control the cab and number board wiring.
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Battery Power Installation in the Center Cab
After the track powered RC installation was in
and working, I converted the loco to track or battery powered
operation. For this conversion, I selected NiMH batteries. 15 AA cells
were made into two packs, one of 7 cells and the other 8 cells. The
packs were installed in both hoods with foam mounting tape so that they
cleared the truck pivots. The 55491 was mounted with hot glue on top of
one of the packs. A charging jack was mounted on the floor underneath
the circuit board.
For this
installation, I elected to use the "tri-modal" configuration. This
allows the loco to run from straight track power, track powered R/C or
battery powered R/C. Since two DPDT switches were already there, this
installation was pretty easy.
I basically hacked most of the traces on the circuit board to disconnect everything but the front and rear power picks and the motor connectors. All of the traces to the switches were cut and replaced with wire. Note that the standard wiring has both sides of each switch paralleled on the circuit board. It is necessary to wick all of the solder from the switch terminals and then carve out the connector between the poles of the switches.
The schematic shows the general wiring of the tri-modal configuration. One switch controls the source of power, and the other switch controls where the motors get them power from. The lighting wiring was left the same as it was in the track powered R/C configuration.
The antenna of the 75 MHz 55491 is about 18" long. It is routed around the frame following the shell outline. In this configuration, the R/C range is 10 to maybe 20 feet.
The range that I got with the less than ideal
antenna arrangement needed improvement. I had tried other arrangements
in the past with the antenna wire wound around the top of the loco, but
these were usually mechanically unsatisfactory because they complicated
disassembly of the loco. This time I tried a whip antenna made from
about 1 foot (30 cm) of 0.025" (0.6 mm) music wire. The wire is so thin
that it is nearly invisible past a few feet especially if it does not
contrast with the background. The wire can be seen coming up from the
front deck just at the nearest corner of the hood. It can also be seen
contrasted against the house in the background.
The wire antenna
was secured to the front pilot assembly with a self tapping screw. The
antenna wire comes through a 0.026" hole in the deck just outside the
cowl and is bent to fit around the screw head. The antenna wire from
the receiver comes though a small hole drilled in the frame just inside
the cowl and is also wrapped around the screw.
This arrangement yielded about triple the former range. There is reliable control to 30' and some control to 50'. The wire is long enough so that it will scrape low obstructions some, but it is flexible enough so that it just slides underneath and pops back to vertical after clearing the obstruction. Smaller music wire would work as well, I happened to have the 0.025" diameter wire handy.
This page has been accessed times since 12 July 00.
© 2000-2002 George Schreyer
Created July 12, 2000
Last Updated May 25, 2002
