Increasing the weight of AZL locomotives

IMO most of the modern (21st century design) locomotives have sufficient traction to scale from the prototypes
with AZL adding traction tires to many of there locomotives:



(I don't know if this is my image or one from the BAZBoys)

Adding weight adding weight won't improve electrical contact as that is dictated primarily by railhead width.

Mark

Having seen the BAZBoys do this about a half dozen times, the limiting issue seems to be the reliability of couplers and not motive power.

BTW from what I know, SP would have run an ABBA consist.

We have our favorites for pulling the long trains and choose locos for a variety of reasons like: apparent traction and electrical (pickup jitters). Some just run and run (like the F3's) and some are finicky (SD45, G38, etc.) The finicky ones can be tweaked to perform better.

The traction 'tires' on the AZL products are not flush bands so the wheel's traction surface is smaller than the non-traction tire. Maybe being wider and more flush would help but the 100 car trains are riding on mostly Micro-Trains flex track, which has a noticeably narrower rail head which one would think could be worse.

Sure, grades make a difference. But no one is going to run a 100 car train on a 2% grade but some of those modules have 1% grades Look at märklin's locos. Most can barely pull a 5-7 passenger train, especially on a grade.

Many have tried to optimize traction. The worst was the belief that Bull Frog Snot would be a cure-all and ended up in disasters. Once that worked was some added eight to the nose of the Mikados.

DCC makes some of this better and sometimes worse. Electrical pickup creates havoc as the decoder takes time to reinitialize when the power is re-applied. The Digitrax decoders by default have Momentum so when the decoder starts, it has to 'ramp' up the speed from 0, which magnifies the speed glitches. We set the Momentum to 0 so the decoder resumes the last Speed Step as it detects the packet on the rails.

Clean track, no oil/lubricant residuals on the rails, NO overly oiled locos, CLEAN wheels (don't used the metal brush 'cleaners', they can damage the traction tire and do not remove lubricants from the wheels such as plastic residue from MTL wheels) and metal wheels.

Here's some info for starters. www.trainboard.com/highball/index.php?threads/adding-weight-to-freight-cars.27930/#post-344601

Perfect, tray to the rescue here with standards for car weights, thank you!

I will look for more info about weighting the nose of AZL Mikados. I got one yesterday and while I am very happy with it I noticed it could pull a longish train but can’t push much at all.