Installing a Tsunami in a BLI BlueLine P.R.R. T1, what could possibly go wrong!
‘BlueLine is a great choice for the budget-savvy modeler’; this was Broadway Limited Imports marketing strategy for some of their earlier models. Budget-savvy meant that to run it on DCC you had to buy and plug in a second decoder. I found it most frustrating, trying to change sound values etc. required the plug-in decoder to be removed and that was just the beginning as quite often the sound decoder wouldn’t respond to the cv changes.
Anyhow I have two BLI P.R.R. T1 locos. that were retired out of frustration and replaced with a Key model of the T1, in which I installed a Tsunami.
However the BLI models did have some positives, good detail and they ran quite well.
When Soundtraxx recently introduced the new Tsunami the old version was being sold off quite cheaply, so I bought a heavy steam version with the idea of getting a BLI T1 running with a decoder that I could actually work with. One of the T1 models had tender wheels so out of gauge that points were a real challenge, while the other one from the same run had correctly gauged wheels. I decided to work on the dodgy one because at least the other one could still operate. The wheel sets were fixed and could not be re-gauged, but I had a solution. Many years ago I acquired an Alco models brass T1 which was not only a poor runner but had the front driving wheels articulated which of course the duplexes were not. I could use the brass tender off it, problem solved!
I decided to install the decoder by removing the wiring harness from the BLI decoder and simply connect the tsunami wires to the harness and thereby use the 7 pin plug that connects the loco. and tender; if I could find a wiring diagram, because the BLI wiring is not colour coded, all are black. What I should have done at this stage was take the top off the loco. remove the existing wires and simply hardwire in the Tsunami. Oh no, stupidity prevailed. I spent an inordinate amount of time on the net seeking information, finally I contacted Tony’s in the US and they gave me the 1-7 wiring sequence with a warning that BLI sometimes changed the sequence. Again at this point I should have taken the top off and hardwired.
Rather than risk the Tsunami I wired in an old Locsound decoder that I had in order to test the connections, it worked so I connected the Tsunami and it worked, so two days of work had paid off.
Not quite!
When I ran it on the programming track it obviously had a bad connection because it wouldn’t run smoothly, it appeared that the 7 pin plug was causing the problem, so the answer was to hard wire it.
Now I decided to take the top off.
I undid the 3 screws under the frame that seemed to connect the mechanism to the body, it was tantalisingly close to coming apart but not quite, something wasn’t releasing. A lot later, several cups of coffee, plus trying to make sense of the exploded view diagram that came with the model I eventually found the well-hidden screw that finally released the body. However to then completely separate the two I had to take the clips off the top of the gearboxes and remove the brass worm and universal coupling, which sounds worse than it was. At last the two sections separated.
This was the first time that I had seen the inside of a BLI loco. I was quite impressed, a good quality motor and two metal idler gearboxes, but what I was really interested in was the wiring. Four wires, two to the motor and one to each side of the split insulated frame, there was also the headlight connections. I unscrewed the female plug and removed the harness that went up to a pc board that sat above the motor. I fed the new wires through the space where the plug had been and connected them to the decoder in the tender. I put it on the track and tuned on the power and the reassuring sound of the air pump began, unfortunately it didn’t run any better, the problem hadn’t been the plug.
Time for yet more coffee.
I went to the other loco. and examined the tender and realised that it too picked up from both sides, so a pickup now had to be installed on the insulated side to augment the loco. frame pickup. This project was rapidly becoming an exercise in frustration and problem solving; fairly common in model railroading I find.
With the new pickup wired into place the loco. at last ran smoothly, so with that success I ended work for the day and sought something stronger to drink, satisfied that I now only had to connect the headlight via a resistor.
Definitely a triumph of will and perseverance.
When I went to bed I was still enjoying my triumph until for some reason the drawbar popped into my head, a little shiver ensued, a metal drawbar screwed directly to the frame, not insulated like a brass loco because while the frame of the original BLI tender was metal the two bogies were insulated from it to facilitate the two sided electrical pickup , of course my brass tender had the usual arrangement. I had an uninsulated metal connection between the loco. and tender.
An insulated drawbar was fashioned and installed and I also replaced the flangeless drivers with flanged ones. I programmed the decoder and it sounded great.
However, while I was working on it I had been looking for a way to install a speaker in the boiler rather than in the tender, I’ve been using medium size oval speakers in my other locos. but because of the limited space this one looked like a lost cause and I wasn’t prepared to use a smaller speaker. So it was running with the same arrangement that BLI had installed, a speaker in the tender (in fact they use two speakers). But I just couldn’t give up on a boiler installation. So I went back to the unmodified model and disassembled it, installation still seemed hopeless, because of the drive train design there didn’t seem to be room for a speaker, but I wouldn’t concede defeat. Once I stopped trying to do it the same way as the brass locos. I finally solved the puzzle. All up it added another couple of hours to the project, including installation in the Tsunami equipped loco. and putting the ‘trial horse’ back together.
Experience is a wonderful thing; it would now be quite straightforward to do the decoder and speaker installation.
The next time I’m using the airbrush I’ll weather it a little to replicate their appearance at the end of their short lives, but that’s for another day. For now, I’m quite happy just running it with a set of newly arrived BLI p70 coaches.
The second T1
I recently wrote an article about installing a Tsunami decoder in a BLI Blueline T1. In the article I mentioned that I had a second T1 that needed the same treatment, so I decided to do it as I had a spare decoder and I couldn’t see any reason to leave the loco. just sitting in its box, although I’m not sure that I needed a third T1.
I would point out that performing these installations is not really financially sound, it requires almost $200 to do it, decoder, current keeper and speaker. The only advantage over buying the latest and much improved version is that I install the speaker in the boiler. I would like the BLI ‘as built’ model but can’t justify another T1.
The main difference from the first installation is that I used the BLI tender, as this one actually had all the wheels in guage. After I removed all of the electrical components from the tender I was left with two wires, each wire being the feed from the tender trucks. At this point it would be logical to assume that each truck was the same polarity as it is with a brass model. Of course they aren’t, this is BLI, the first inclination to join both wires to the black wire on the decoder would definitely have resulted in smoke.
So one truck was the same polarity as the loco. which left one truck to supply power from the left side, however I really wanted a power supply from both trucks. I couldn’t simply rotate one truck as they are different on each end and in this case BLI got their orientation correct.
So I took the bottom plate off the offending truck, an interesting set up, the
pick-up uses wipers that contact three of the four axles and fortunately it was simply a matter of flipping the wheels to achieve what I wanted. I also removed the plate from the other truck and found that one of the wipers wasn’t in contact with the axel. So, in its original configuration the tender pick up was supplied from just two axels i.e. two wheels. Interestingly when I originally ran the loco. I don’t recall it having a pick-up problem. So 5511 has returned to service and can easily handle a twelve car passenger train, definitely better than sitting in a box.
‘BlueLine is a great choice for the budget-savvy modeler’; this was Broadway Limited Imports marketing strategy for some of their earlier models. Budget-savvy meant that to run it on DCC you had to buy and plug in a second decoder. I found it most frustrating, trying to change sound values etc. required the plug-in decoder to be removed and that was just the beginning as quite often the sound decoder wouldn’t respond to the cv changes.
Anyhow I have two BLI P.R.R. T1 locos. that were retired out of frustration and replaced with a Key model of the T1, in which I installed a Tsunami.
However the BLI models did have some positives, good detail and they ran quite well.
When Soundtraxx recently introduced the new Tsunami the old version was being sold off quite cheaply, so I bought a heavy steam version with the idea of getting a BLI T1 running with a decoder that I could actually work with. One of the T1 models had tender wheels so out of gauge that points were a real challenge, while the other one from the same run had correctly gauged wheels. I decided to work on the dodgy one because at least the other one could still operate. The wheel sets were fixed and could not be re-gauged, but I had a solution. Many years ago I acquired an Alco models brass T1 which was not only a poor runner but had the front driving wheels articulated which of course the duplexes were not. I could use the brass tender off it, problem solved!
I decided to install the decoder by removing the wiring harness from the BLI decoder and simply connect the tsunami wires to the harness and thereby use the 7 pin plug that connects the loco. and tender; if I could find a wiring diagram, because the BLI wiring is not colour coded, all are black. What I should have done at this stage was take the top off the loco. remove the existing wires and simply hardwire in the Tsunami. Oh no, stupidity prevailed. I spent an inordinate amount of time on the net seeking information, finally I contacted Tony’s in the US and they gave me the 1-7 wiring sequence with a warning that BLI sometimes changed the sequence. Again at this point I should have taken the top off and hardwired.
Rather than risk the Tsunami I wired in an old Locsound decoder that I had in order to test the connections, it worked so I connected the Tsunami and it worked, so two days of work had paid off.
Not quite!
When I ran it on the programming track it obviously had a bad connection because it wouldn’t run smoothly, it appeared that the 7 pin plug was causing the problem, so the answer was to hard wire it.
Now I decided to take the top off.
I undid the 3 screws under the frame that seemed to connect the mechanism to the body, it was tantalisingly close to coming apart but not quite, something wasn’t releasing. A lot later, several cups of coffee, plus trying to make sense of the exploded view diagram that came with the model I eventually found the well-hidden screw that finally released the body. However to then completely separate the two I had to take the clips off the top of the gearboxes and remove the brass worm and universal coupling, which sounds worse than it was. At last the two sections separated.
This was the first time that I had seen the inside of a BLI loco. I was quite impressed, a good quality motor and two metal idler gearboxes, but what I was really interested in was the wiring. Four wires, two to the motor and one to each side of the split insulated frame, there was also the headlight connections. I unscrewed the female plug and removed the harness that went up to a pc board that sat above the motor. I fed the new wires through the space where the plug had been and connected them to the decoder in the tender. I put it on the track and tuned on the power and the reassuring sound of the air pump began, unfortunately it didn’t run any better, the problem hadn’t been the plug.
Time for yet more coffee.
I went to the other loco. and examined the tender and realised that it too picked up from both sides, so a pickup now had to be installed on the insulated side to augment the loco. frame pickup. This project was rapidly becoming an exercise in frustration and problem solving; fairly common in model railroading I find.
With the new pickup wired into place the loco. at last ran smoothly, so with that success I ended work for the day and sought something stronger to drink, satisfied that I now only had to connect the headlight via a resistor.
Definitely a triumph of will and perseverance.
When I went to bed I was still enjoying my triumph until for some reason the drawbar popped into my head, a little shiver ensued, a metal drawbar screwed directly to the frame, not insulated like a brass loco because while the frame of the original BLI tender was metal the two bogies were insulated from it to facilitate the two sided electrical pickup , of course my brass tender had the usual arrangement. I had an uninsulated metal connection between the loco. and tender.
An insulated drawbar was fashioned and installed and I also replaced the flangeless drivers with flanged ones. I programmed the decoder and it sounded great.
However, while I was working on it I had been looking for a way to install a speaker in the boiler rather than in the tender, I’ve been using medium size oval speakers in my other locos. but because of the limited space this one looked like a lost cause and I wasn’t prepared to use a smaller speaker. So it was running with the same arrangement that BLI had installed, a speaker in the tender (in fact they use two speakers). But I just couldn’t give up on a boiler installation. So I went back to the unmodified model and disassembled it, installation still seemed hopeless, because of the drive train design there didn’t seem to be room for a speaker, but I wouldn’t concede defeat. Once I stopped trying to do it the same way as the brass locos. I finally solved the puzzle. All up it added another couple of hours to the project, including installation in the Tsunami equipped loco. and putting the ‘trial horse’ back together.
Experience is a wonderful thing; it would now be quite straightforward to do the decoder and speaker installation.
The next time I’m using the airbrush I’ll weather it a little to replicate their appearance at the end of their short lives, but that’s for another day. For now, I’m quite happy just running it with a set of newly arrived BLI p70 coaches.
The second T1
I recently wrote an article about installing a Tsunami decoder in a BLI Blueline T1. In the article I mentioned that I had a second T1 that needed the same treatment, so I decided to do it as I had a spare decoder and I couldn’t see any reason to leave the loco. just sitting in its box, although I’m not sure that I needed a third T1.
I would point out that performing these installations is not really financially sound, it requires almost $200 to do it, decoder, current keeper and speaker. The only advantage over buying the latest and much improved version is that I install the speaker in the boiler. I would like the BLI ‘as built’ model but can’t justify another T1.
The main difference from the first installation is that I used the BLI tender, as this one actually had all the wheels in guage. After I removed all of the electrical components from the tender I was left with two wires, each wire being the feed from the tender trucks. At this point it would be logical to assume that each truck was the same polarity as it is with a brass model. Of course they aren’t, this is BLI, the first inclination to join both wires to the black wire on the decoder would definitely have resulted in smoke.
So one truck was the same polarity as the loco. which left one truck to supply power from the left side, however I really wanted a power supply from both trucks. I couldn’t simply rotate one truck as they are different on each end and in this case BLI got their orientation correct.
So I took the bottom plate off the offending truck, an interesting set up, the
pick-up uses wipers that contact three of the four axles and fortunately it was simply a matter of flipping the wheels to achieve what I wanted. I also removed the plate from the other truck and found that one of the wipers wasn’t in contact with the axel. So, in its original configuration the tender pick up was supplied from just two axels i.e. two wheels. Interestingly when I originally ran the loco. I don’t recall it having a pick-up problem. So 5511 has returned to service and can easily handle a twelve car passenger train, definitely better than sitting in a box.
