11-08-2010, 07:37 PM
The La Mesa club with the Tehachapi Layout at the San Diego Model Railroad Museum now runs dcc, but a friend of mine was a member before the advent of dcc and I asked him how they ran 100 car trains with midtrain helpers and pushers on dc without having mishaps? I also asked how they could run all of those engines together, or did they need to match performance between engines before they would work together? What he told me then I've never forgotten. He said any model locomotive will run with any other model locomotive if it has enough load behind it. If two locomotives are hooked up to a train, each will pull the maximum that it is capable of pulling, and the other one will pull its maximum. If you have problems with locomotives not working together, it is because you don't have enough load on the train. He said the same thing is true of helper units. Lets say for example that one combination of diesel locos will pull 50 cars up the grades in the layout. Another combination of diesels will push 50 cars up the grades on the layout. If you put the first combination on the front of a 50 car train and the other combination on the rear, neither set is loaded, so you may have problems. On the other hand if you put one set on the front of a 100 car train and the other set on the rear of that 100 car train, the first set will pull the first 50 cars, and the second set will push the last 50 cars. Of course now they run an NCE dcc set up, so they can speed match all of the locomotives in a consist, so it isn't as critical to load fully every locomotive on the layout.