A little more on the Mehano HO scale locomotives.
Mehano is a Slovenian toy company that makes railroad models (among other things). Their European offerings are considered to be high-end but the ones that they made for the American market, sold through International Hobby Corporation, were considered to be low end junk, sort of like Bachmann's N scale stuff through the 80's and 90's.
The lot I found was two 2-8-0 Consolidations and a single 2-8-2 Mikado, all lettered for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad. These three were reportedly sold through a Canadian grocery store chain called Loblaws as part of their President's Choice series. Most of those offerings were Canadian roads, but these are oddities (being Chesapeake and Ohio). Everything I have been able to find out about them suggests that they are 2006 vintage or so, which makes them higher quality than some of the earlier ones. They are pretty simply made, molded plastic shells on plastic frames with cast weights in the boilers.
The single 2-8-2 Mikado has a different tender than the Consolidations, sporting a "The George Washington" title above the C and O label. It was equipped with what is called a universal coupler on the tender, meaning it will connect with both horn-hook and knuckle couplers. The coupler on the front of the loco is a non-operational dummy. This tender was unique as well in that it did not have the two-pin plug or the two wire connector coming from the loco that the Consolidation tenders had. I am sure this would have improved the pickup characteristics, but the loco seemed to run OK without it. Power to the motor was supplied solely by wires connected to pickups on the drivers. Since the frame is plastic and the motor hard-wired it was very simple to wire for DCC. The back up light on the tender is operational, being wired to the tender truck pickups through a diode so that it only operated in reverse. This, too, greatly simplified the switch to DCC. More on that later.
The locomotive itself is a handsome enough unit although some of the details are not right. The bell, for instance, is somewhat large and should be hanging off the front of the smokebox although there is photographic evidence that some Mikes had them mounted in front of the stack as this one is. Doing my research online says that the details are cast on, but this one has grab irons and cut levers made of wire and separately applied. It is powered with a can motor of dubious quality that should be easy to swap out if necessary. I did have an issue when running the loco for its break-in run of the screw holding the drive rod coming off, but it was reinstalled with some LocTite and shouldn't be an issue again.
The Mikes are probably my favorite of the USRA pattern locomotives so I was pretty happy to be able to pick this one up as inexpensively as I did.
The two 2-8-0 Consolidations are identical in every respect. Like the Mikado the tenders had operational pickups and reverse lights, but unlike the Mike the tenders were also wired to a two-pin receptacle at the front of the tender. The loco had a two-wire connector that plugged into this receptacle and tied the power pickups for the tender to the locomotive. The wiring stuck out of the cab opening, so it was pretty obvious. I have no doubt this improved the power pick up characteristics of the loco, and it makes me wonder why the Mikado was not similarly equipped. The loco is equipped on each end with functioning horn hook couplers.
Like the Mikado the grab irons and cut levers were made of wire and separately applied. The motors are likewise isolated, being mounted in a plastic frame and wired to the pickups from the drivers. They, too, were very easy to convert to DCC.
All three of these locomotives were rewired with six wire harnesses from TCS so that they could be disconnected from their tenders. To do so I unsoldered and removed the original wiring and connected the TCS wiring in accordance with standard DCC wiring practices; red and black to right and left power pickups respectively, gray and orange to the negative and positive motor terminals, and blue and white to the headlight.
For the Consolidations I drilled a small hole behind the motor on the right side to thread the wiring harness through. This avoids running the harness through the cab opening. A small piece of heat shrink tubing disguises the wiring somewhat.
For the Mikado, since it did not have wiring from the loco to the tender, I hollowed a small relief at the rear of the loco frame to run the wires through and taped them down. When the loco shell is installed it goes over top of the wires and holds them in place without pinching them. I made two hollows, one on each side, but then opted to use only the right side since that is the side the tender connector opening is on (even though the connector was not installed the mount and hole was present for it).
The tenders were likewise wired with the receptacle side of the TCS harness. The existing connectors were removed from the Consolidation tenders and their mounts cut off from all three. The six wires were connected to their corresponding decoder wires and the black and red wires were connected to the appropriate truck connecting ring. The backup light was unsoldered from its diode, the diode was removed and the light wired in to the blue and yellow leads on the decoder. Holes were drilled in the coal load to allow sound to escape and the speaker and keep-alive capacitor glued into place.
I was only able to get two decoders at first (the third one is on its way now) so the receptacle side of the TCS harness was just connected to the tender pickups on the one that didn't get a decoder. Note the diode still connected to the reverse light in the image below. Since the tender wiring is detachable and the tenders are identical in all other respects this enabled me to run any of the locos on DC using the non-DCC equipped tender, at least until the last decoder comes in.
The installations went very well, but I have discovered the TCS connectors are very fragile, especially on the receptacle side. I have broken the black leads off of two of them so far, one while attempting to install it and the other while disconnecting the locomotive from the non-DCC tender. I have a different type of connector on the way and they will be installed along with the decoder on the non-DCC tender. The new connector type is a double stack of three pins instead of a six pin flat connector, I'm hoping I can mount the receptacles to the tender frames and that the different arrangement of pins will give a little more strength and support to the connectors themselves.
I'm also going to have to renumber one of the Consolidations, but that is a problem for another day.
