Thomas and James Tips

A few years ago, Lionel released a Thomas the Tank Engine set. Thomas is a British inside cylinder 0-6-0 tank engine that pulls two coaches, Annie and Clarabel. This set was based on the Shining Time Station TV series that is probably still playing on PBS. I would imagine that many large scalers with small children somehow managed to acquire this set.

Later, another set containing James the Red Engine was released. James is an inside cylinder 2-6-0 tender engine of British design that pulls two 4 axle freight wagons.

Neither of these sets is still manufactured but some may still be around. At the end of James' production run when Lionel exited the large scale business, these sets were blown out by a discount store chain, Pic-N-Save, for $49.95 each.

• Power Pickup
• Disassembly
• Lubrication
• Couplers
• Adding Weight
• Sound
• Battery and Radio Control Installation in Thomas25 Aug 08

Both Thomas and James have six driven wheels, but only four pick up power. Considering that the brass wheels get dirty fairly fast, this combination is sure to cause flaky power pickup. If the engine runs fine in the turns and sputters on the straights, suspect dirty wheels more than dirty track.

There is a simple modification that can be done to both engines that materially improves power pickup. The change is to add contacts to the center driver set.

There is no room to add a conventional power pickup to the center drivers, but it is easy to add a wiper contact that bears on the center driver tread. On James, it is straightforward to add a 1/32" thick by 3/32" wide brass contact strip. The strip is simply clamped between the frame and shell castings as shown in the photo. A wire is then soldered to the brass strip and run through a hole drilled in the lower shell and connected directly to the motor.

I attached the same type of contact to Thomas' frame with plumber's epoxy putty. This particular epoxy is handy because it sets up really fast so that you don't have to hold it in place for more than about five minutes. The epoxy also will not stick to your fingers. I modified Thomas several years ago. After I took this photo recently, I realized that I probably could have clamped the contact on Thomas the same way that I did James.

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Both Thomas and James are fairly easy to get apart for lubrication or modification. There are only a couple of cautions.

The brick covers come off with six screws. The only caution is to be careful of the spring loaded power pickup contacts. If you just lift the lower brick cover, they will pop out and are easy to loose. As you are lifting the cover, place your fingers near each contact and as the contact moves beyond the wheel face, hold it with your finger. You can then gently relieve the pressure on the contacts. Some of them may fall out, but at least the springs won't eject them across the room. Inspect the springs, they should be silver colored. If they are brown, they have been overheated and have lost their strength. Those springs won't work very well and should be replaced.

Thomas's body shell comes off with seven screws. There are three on each side and one in front. Note that the front one is shorter than the others. If you put one of the longer screws back in that spot, you will break off the mounting post when the screw bottoms out. The shell may take a little persuasion to release at the smokebox joint. Just gently lift and wiggle the shell and it will pop off.

James comes apart in much the same fashion except that the screw in front is obscured by the pilot truck which must be removed to gain access to the screw.

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Both Thomas and James use a small vertically mounted can motor that drives the rear axle through a worm gear. Power is transmitted to the other two axles by an external spur gear train similar to that used on many Lionel "O" scale locos. Lubrication of the worm should be done with heavy gear grease or oil. Lubrication of the spur gear train is a little more problematic because lubricants applied there will attract dirt and excessive lubrication will get on the backs of the wheels and interfere with the power contacts. I use a very small amount of LGB 50019 oil on the external gearing as this oil is effective and doesn't seem to foul the electrical contacts.

The mechanism that runs the moving eyes on the smoke box cover can be lubricated, if necessary, with gear grease.

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James resides at the Geologically Improbable Railroad, Mountain Division and so he needed LGB knuckle couplers. It turned out to be straightforward to mount them in place of the supplied hook and loop couplers.

Thomas runs on my outdoor version of the Geologically Improbable Railroad so he needed Kadee couplers. #831's mount with little difficulty.

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Both engines are very light. They will pull their assigned two car consist on level track fine, but add a car or hit a moderate grade and both will spin their drivers. I added 12 to 16 oz of lead to the inside of both engines centered above the drivers.

James has a three axle tender that is very light and would derail under almost any kind of a load beyond his two cars. I glued 4 oz of lead under the tender floor and the tender started to behave itself.

Neither of these sets have metal wheels yet. I'm not sure why I haven't changed them.

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Neither Thomas or James come equipped with a sound system, and considering how little these engines are worth, it doesn't seem reasonable to spend the money to add one. However, after I added a Sierra to one of my Shays, its old Bachmann sound board became available. Since it could run off a battery for a long time, it seemed reasonable to install in James which still had plastic wheels.

There is little room in Thomas for a sound board and speaker, but James has a large nearly empty tender that is easily big enough. The tender shell is attached with two screws, one under the rear coupler and the other also secures the drawbar.

A 3" speaker fits easily on the flat floor. A bunch of holes drilled through the floor lets the sound out. The Bachmann sound board was recovered from a defunct R/C Big Hauler. To make the board fit better in the Shay, it had been literally hacked in half. All the sound circuitry is on the rear third of the board so all that is necessary is to cut a trace leading down each side of the board past the sound circuitry and then to physically cut the rest of the board off. I left some of the motor control circuit behind just because it was easier to cut right through the motor controller IC. The rest of the board is mounted to the back of the speaker magnet with foam mounting tape. The battery is stuck to the side of the speaker with foam mounting tape.

The sound switch is a reed switch left over from a PH Hobbies sound board installation sometime in the dark distant past. The switch is stuck to an existing bracket in front of the rear axle. Two small high energy magnets are attached to the rear axle with Zap CA.

This cheap and dirty installation didn't cost me a dime out of pocket as all the parts were already available as left overs from previous sound system installations. The sound is typically not great, but then considering the cost, it is acceptable.

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Thomas is a favorite now of the nephews, but it often tended to disappoint them because it just didn't run all that well. Even with the power pickup improvements described above, Thomas was never an outstanding performer on track power. There just aren't enough pickup wheels and the brass wheels tend to get dirty quickly. Just as I have done on several other locos, if they are too small to pick up power well, they get converted to battery power with radio control. Thomas got converted to battery-r/c using the tri-modal wiring that I have described elsewhere. I choose to use a 75 MHz CRE-55491 receiver (because I had one handy) and a 12 cell NiCad pack (because I got it for $12 at a local ham radio swap meet). All the rest of the parts were retrieved from my parts stock.

This is the schematic of I used to wire Thomas. It is my standard "tri-modal" circuit. It takes just a little more wiring than the dead simple versions, but depending on how the switches are set, it will still run from straight track power, or RC with track power, or RC with the internal battery. The charge jack is arranged to charge properly from a 24 VDC source.

Thomas consists of three major parts, the motor brick and sub-frame, the frame and the shell (not shown in this view). The first order of business in any RC installation is to determine where to put all the stuff. This takes some thought. I like to either put everything on the frame or everything in the shell to minimize the number of wires going between the frame and the shell. It was pretty clear that in this installation, most of the stuff would go into the shell. Thomas's eyeball activation mechanism takes up the entire boiler volume so everything would have to go into the saddle tanks or the cab.

The saddle tanks were too small to hold the battery packs that I had, but they would fit nicely crosswise in the cab with the cab interior view block removed. The region under the coal load could hold the receiver. The switches and charge jack were a problem.

Thomas's coal load is easily removed and the region under it was just right to hold the five items that had to fit there, two power control switches, the code set button, the charge jack and an indicator LED to make programming the receiver from outside the loco practical. The LED is wired as the rear headlight. Thomas doesn't have a front headlight and I choose not to install one.

All this hardware hanging off the back of Thomas isn't particularly attractive, but they were easy to install and access in that location. The back side of the coal load and its mounting posts must be gouged off but this can't seen from the outside and the posts weren't used anyway.

The receiver is simply mashed back in the tender. I didn't use the adaptor board because there wasn't room. The shrink tubing over the wires soldered to the pins is sufficient to hold the receiver in place against the battery.

Now Thomas runs quite smoothly and it doesn't care what condition the track or wheels are in. The next time that the nephews visit, they'll have Thomas to run until the battery goes down. Then if they want to run it some more, they can switch it to track power and keep going provided some hesitation doesn't bother them.