Atlas Model Railroad Co. Product Review

ATLAS AND QSI TEAM UP FOR FIRST DIESEL HOOD UNIT WITH SOUND

MODEL RAILROAD NEWS – November 2004

REVIEW: John Sipple, R. Dave Carr and Tony Johnson

F-M “Train Master” diesel locomotive
With QSI Sound, MSRP: $249.95
Without QSI Sound, MSRP: $139.95

Atlas Model RR Company
378 Florence Avenue
Hillside, NJ 07205
908-687-0880 – FAX 908-687-8857
www.atlasrr.com

Only nine railroads purchased the Fairbanks-Morse H-24-66, and Atlas has six of them in their first release: Lackawanna, Southern Pacific, Virginian, Canadian Pacific, Jersey Central and Pennsylvania with two roadnumbers and an unnumbered version of each. In addition, Atlas is producing these in Phase 1a, 1b, or 2 as appropriate. They are making the units available in undecorated, as well. See their web site for a list of which locos are available in their Silver Series without decoder or sound and in their Gold Series complete with QSI sound decoders.

Southern Pacific’s Train Masters
The Southern Pacific Railroad was shaped by the land it served. If other railroads in 1953 didn’t know what to do with a 2,400 horsepower six-axle, six-motor locomotive, SP did. They took the two Train Master demonstrators, TM-3 and TM4, and sent them to their Rio Grande division. They had these powerful machines working with high-speed trains filed with reefers. By the end of that year, not only had SP purchased the two demonstrators, they had ordered 14 more, receiving a large number of them before the year was out.

Back in 1953, they didn’t know that the loco power race would boil down to just two Generals – General Motors and General Electric. GE didn’t make road locos in those days, but a number of companies which no longer exist were vying for a market share. One of them was Fairbanks-Morse, a company which had come out of WWII with two very import assets. The first was an engine design that had gone into submarines and had proven very reliable. The second was the money they made from selling all those engines to the Navy. They turned to building locos with their submarine diesel engine.

F-M had designed an Opposed Piston engine which reached it’s pinnacle in the Train Master. While it was a 12 cylinder with an 8-1/8 inch bore and a 10-inch stroke, it had 24 pistons! The opposed piston engine worked by having a crankshaft on the bottom and the top, each one pushing its piston just five inches into the cylinder at the same time as the other crankshaft pushed its piston in. The idea was that this short stroke on each shaft would reduce centrifugal and linear forces, releasing more horsepower with less wear and tear. The resulting engine lived up to those expectations. With only 518 cubic inches of displacement per cylinder compared to EMD’s 567 of the period, the engine produced 2,400 horsepower compared to EMD’s V-12 with 1,200 horsepower.

The OP engine accelerated rapidly when compared to other diesel engines and was, like the EMD, a 2-cycle engine, but it sounded more like an airplane engine in some ways. Unfortunately, working on the engine in a railroad setting turned out to be a nightmare. If a piston had a loose rod on an EMD, that piston, its head, and its cylinder liner could all be removed and replaced without disturbing the rest of the engine. On the OP, the top crankshaft had to be removed, with all of its pistons either pulled or disconnected just to remove and replace a single rod on either the top or the bottom. Because the engine had a crankcase on top of the engine as well as on the bottom, oil leaks were an ongoing problem. Quite honestly, many of the submarines hadn’t lasted long enough to face these problems, and seawater is less bone jarring than railroad tracks.

SP used their new Train Masters down in the Rio Grande Division from 1953 until 1956. By that time, while SP thought the locomotives were basically good machines, they were having problems as a result of the desert environment. These engines had been built for sea level duty; the desert imposed altitudes, extremes of temperature, and dirty, gritty dust and sand. Meanwhile, the Coast Division had been having a problem of its own. It’s stop/start commuter service between San Francisco and San Jose was growing, and they were having trouble finding a single diesel unit, which could keep the schedules. Their trouble could be described in a single word: acceleration.

So the Train Masters were sent to Coastal California, a sort of homecoming for them. The engines were back at sea level in the rich, moist air they loved. Ex-Navy mechanics with OP experience were available. Best of all, the Train Masters could accelerate! Not only did they have the high horsepower needed, the distinctive OP diesel could wind up fast. From 1956 to 1972, these F-M units provided memorable service and required nothing less than the passenger version of the EMD SD45 – the SDP45 – to replace it. In the end, the Maintenance headaches and the Alco-like gushes of smoke on acceleration combined with the lack of replacement parts doomed the Train Masters.

Atlas Gold-Series Train Master
In a way, Atlas has picked the Train Master as the perfect hood unit for the first installation of QSI sound. While the average diesel locomotive has a six-foot-wide hood, leaving 2-foot wide catwalks on either side, the Train Master’s hood was a whopping 7-foot 3-inched wide (but their catwalks were for skinny people). Of course, Atlas has given us a model of superlative quality and stellar operation, but let’s get to the specifics.

Southern Pacific took the first demonstrators pretty much as is. This means they had the single “blat” horns, the stock lighting and number boards, and the “scaffold” walkways on both sides. That walkway made them Phase 1a. By the time they purchased the demos (4800-4801) and ordered the other 14, F-M had closed up the areas under the walkways, leading to Phase 1b. SP ordered theirs (4802-4815) with 5-chime horns and the train number boards used by most of the ex-Harriman roads. They also used a different headlight arrangement, though this was not consistent across the lot. Of course, they had modified the demonstrators to this relative standard as soon as they took title. I saw one builder’s photo of a demonstrator in Black Widow still wearing the blat horn; that didn’t last long.

Tony Johnson and I look through Joe Strapac’s definitive Southern Pacific Historical Diesels, Volume 1: Fairbanks-Morse Locomotives and a few hundred photos from other sources. We called on Tony’s years of residence in the Bay Area. From all of this we discovered that our sample, 4802, was delivered December 1953, weighed 379,320 pounds, exerted 94,830 pounds of tractive effort, and cost $251,015. SP added the spare number boxes below the number boards after the units arrived.

The prototype 4802 was delivered with 5-chime horns, SP number boards, and sunshades. Number 4802 also had its headlights nearly flush in its nose, under the larger oscillating light. All of this is of some importance because Atlas had produced one basic shell design and decorated it for all. As a result, the model of 4802 has blat horns, regular number boards, bezel-mounted headlights, and no sunshades, meaning the dedicated modeler has something to do. We aren’t going to fault Atlas on this account because if they had produced a whole separate mold and production run for the SP version, you and I couldn’t have afforded it! They also have over looked the number boxes.

So let’s go beyond these little problems and move to the model as a whole. The specs are right on, based on drawings I have. Detail is exquisite with crisp louvers, hood doors, and other features. Handrails have a nice look and feel about them. The front and rear rails, stanchions, and pilot grab iron must be installed by the user. It would be really hard to pack this loco with these items already on and not have them get broken or distorted in shipping. I turned to expert modeler R. Dave Carr for professional installation; he said it required about an hour, much of that taken up using a drill bit to chase out the mounting holes.

Taking a close look at the radiator area is very rewarding. F-M borrowed Baldwin’s angled radiator mounting, using a screen grill to match the body shape. Atlas has absolutely nailed it! Look through the grille and you can see the fan blades, but at a certain angle, you can see in one side and out the other. Door handles are separately applied, a good feature which enginemen cursed in real life. Instead of knuckle busters, F-M used handles which, with the narrow catwalks, snagged your clothes as you tried to slide past.

We closely examined the Tri-mount trucks used by F-M, Alco, and others on various six-axle projects. The king pin on the prototype was located at the truck center which was on a vertical tangent about even with the outside of the tread on the center wheel. This axle, in turn, was not centered in the truck. Two sliding pads, reminiscent of support plates on the trailing trucks of steam locos, held up the inside end of the truck as they slide from side to side. Atlas has taken a small liberty by making the physical center of the truck the pivot point for it. Since the loco is quite happy on 18-inch radius curves and passing through Number 4 switches, I think they’ve gotten it right. Detail, aside from the separate brake cylinders, is molded into the sideframes and looks very nice.

Tony, Dave, and I all were very impressed by the paintwork. We subjected the carbody to close up examination with magnifiers and the camera’s macro lens, finding the lettering to be a perfect miniaturization of the real thing. Paint is even and the masking is excellent. The Black Widow paint scheme is one of my all-time favorites, and Atlas had done it very well. They are also producing a silent, Silver-series version in the later SP “Bloody Nose.”

Operation
QSI wrote the book on HO sound, and Atlas has read it. This machine works under DC pretty much the same way it does under DCC. This is QSI’s forte, the same magic they first brought to Broadway Limited and then to Lionel. If you are generally familiar with how their products work, you will recognize the same thing here. Somewhere around 6VDC, the sound system fires up, giving us a sonic representation of the engine starting. The engine then idles and the lights are in dim mode. As you advance the throttle and get to around 10 volts, the loco begins to roll as you hear the engine ramp up. The headlights come on and the Mars light begins its dance.

Tony made a copy of a tape he has with some cuts of Train Maters on the Southern Pacific. As I listened to the tape I was struck by how much these engines sounded like the Rolls-Royce/Merlin engines used in P-51 Mustang fighter planes. With twin exhaust stacks, 24 pistons at 850 RPM seem to pass for something with only 12 pistons at 1,700 RPM. Some of this is due to the dual exhausts. So I held court, submitting the evidence to a jury of my ears and hereby enter an opinion that this sounds like a Train Master being played though very small speakers.

The bell is good, if a little loud. You can adjust all of the volumes through programming in DC, though it is a somewhat more arduous project than programming with DCC. One thing can’t be reprogrammed, however. The horn you get with [F2] is the monotone “blat” horn, not the 5-chime with which the unit was delivered. The good news is that this horn is perfectly correct for the other roadnames Atlas is producing.

This model is a chunk, weighing in at 23 ounce. Our By-The-Numbers pull testing revealed 5.3 ounces of pull as the loco slipped, which it did smoothly, with grace, usually the sign of a well-balanced mechanism. I gave it a 40-car train of NMRA weighted 40 footers to lead around a loop with 30-inch radius curves, and it handled the train without slipping.

When you look at the chassis with the shell off, the total space is packed. The “A” frame speaker mount is pure genius! The sound is magnified for the backs of the speaker in the space remaining in the shell; the fronts radiate their sound downward, into the front of the rear truck. The front and rear lighting also reveals another technology breakthrough: 1 mm LEDs. These are ultra small devices which surface mount on a small board but give out as much light as the larger 3 mm versions.

The rear flywheel on the motor is actually quite small, but we need to recall why flywheels are used: momentum. Thanks to the QSI DC/DCC decoder, the locomotive gets much of its momentum in the software. There are no openings to let you manually adjust sound and so on. Instead, Atlas has included a magnetic “wand” which is used to trigger a reed switch just behind the dynamic brake grille. The directions supplied with the locomotive explain how this is done.

DCC
Then there’s DCC. The unit starts moving on Step 1 at 3 scale miles per hour. As should be predicted not only is DCC operation easier, it is also smoother. Our test track uses a Lenz System with a 100 ohm resistor into the program track; set up this way, it looked at the QSI decoder and programmed it without a hitch.

SP had a system-wide speed limit of 79 mph, but Train Masters under the hand of hogheads making up time have been reputed to run ninety. Thus, the top DCC speed of 102 smph may be a little high, but not by much. If you want to slap on a governor on her, you could adjust Control Variable 5 downward a bit to suit our tastes.

The top light is an oscillating type which SP’s Train Masters had from the factory, and Atlas has given it a very good look. The little surface mount LED shines into the lens and flashes in a manner much like the prototype. The lower headlights employ two, rounded light pipes. The number board is blacked out on our version, and the train indicator lights are not functional.

The sound system is set up in eight notches such that when you are in 128-step mode about every 10 steps will increment the sound up to the next level. Notch One starts from zero to 10, and so on. The diesel sound loads up when accelerating and lets up when coasting or slowing down.

Summary
Ever since its inception at the hands of Steve Schaffan, Atlas has been a company known for innovation. Whether it is the flex track they invented in the fifties or putting sound into diesel hood units today, Atlas has always been out front, where you expect these kinds of changes. They have raised the bar with this model; from now on, diesel sound and surface mount micro-LEDs are what we will expect. The Train Master, which was such a technological accomplishment in 1953, is a marvel once again – 51 years later.

Atlas, H-24-66 “Train Master”
HO 1:87.1
Starting Volts = 9
Traction Tires? No
Stall Amps =
Volts Amps Scale MPH
9 .10 0.6
13 .26 72.3
16 .26 99.9
Decoder: QSI Quantum Sound
Installed by : Factory
Step Scale MPH
Min 1 3.0
Mid 64 52.4
Top 128 102.3
Pull Test (ounces) Slip
Loco Wt. 23.0 Volts – Amps
Pull Wt. 5.3 14 .48
Efficiency – 23%