P2K GP30 speed?

[NW Modeling List]

The newer P2K locomotives use a different gearing than the original P2K locos.  

The original P2K truck gearing was the same design as Athearn.  I have several P2K GP9 Phase II units from the first production run.

I recently purchased some new run P2K GP7 units with sound; I am changing the shells (they were Algoma Central) and planned to run a sound equipped and non-sound equipped units as a consist.  The newer run P2K units were much slower than the original P2K, which ran like Athearns.  Upon removing the gear box cover I noted P2K has gone to a helical gear, of which there are five; the older units had 2 gears per truck, one on each axle.

Since I wanted to run an old and new unit as a consist, a friend helped me to speed match them using Decoder Pro.  I ran some basic time tests over a given distance to determine which unit was the slowest of all of them.  It was one of the new P2K units; all new units were slower than my older units.

Since you can make a fast unit run slower, but you can't make a slow unit run faster, we then used the slowest unit as our base and speed matched all the other units to it.

I do think the newer units top speed is closer to prototype top speed.

Jim Brewer
Glenwood MD
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/nw-modeling-list/attachments/20090607/153ae3c9/attachment-0001.htm>