I joined the HO club downtown last year. Hey, why not? I’ve got some rolling stock, the club’s just a short drive away, and I already know many of the members. For the club’s annual open house, member trains must meet strict mechanical standards: metal wheels throughout, metal-shank knuckle couplers, NMRA weight recommendations, and so on.

My motley collection of old Tyco streamlined cabooses doesn’t even come close to complying. I decided to run some anyway.

Out of my large collection, I picked 19 that were in good condition, and represented a variety of decorating schemes. There were prototype railroads (PRR, Chessie, Virginian), train-set fantasy schemes (Chattanooga, Golden Eagle, Clementine), and private-label sets (Elvis, Fujifilm). I leaned heavily toward the more colorful ones, with only three plain red cabooses included. Of course I included a chrome-plated Silver Streak. If Tyco had ever done a streamlined caboose with Nite-Glow, I would have included that, too. I also set aside a couple of backups.

Testing

I started with some test runs, with an assortment of 19 cabooses strung together. The club’s eastbound main line has two double-slip switches bracketing the passenger terminal, and some of the cabooses had trouble there. Tyco wheelsets are one-piece plastic moldings; gauge isn’t an issue, but they have very deep flanges. After the first test run, I decided that the double-slips were more of a challenge than I cared to face, so I flipped the whole train around and tried it on the westbound main instead. No double-slips there, but there are two shallow-angle diamonds, and one of them was giving me some problems. There were a few other spots on the main that had some trouble, too.

Flangeways

Making alterations to the club’s trackage was out of the question. Everything was at—or at least very close to—NMRA standards, and other people’s trains were running fine. I did, however, find a significant accumulation of crust in frogs and guardrails, hardened gray crud that didn’t affect lower-profile wheels, but fouled the deep Tyco flanges. Some careful work with a dental pick cleaned things out, and reduced the near-derailment bobbling.

The Cars

For an HO scale car with a 5-inch long body, the NMRA recommended weight is 3.5 ounces, and none of the Tyco cars were even close to that. The heaviest clocked in at about 2.6 ounces, with the lightest more like 1.8, half of what it should be. I wasn’t going to permanently alter the cars, or even remove the body shells if I could help it, but I could pour ballast material through the windows. After a failed initial attempt using white rice (not dense enough), I found a jug of copper-plated BBs at the club workbench, and poured them into the cars. I started with the most problematic cars, bringing them up to about 3.1 ounces, and that helped. I did the rest of the train likewise. That gave me a new problem: the cars were rolling much less freely than they had been. A single diesel could no longer move the whole train. Car by car, I dumped out the BBs, oiled each journal, and reloaded the BBs. That didn’t make it free-rolling, but it helped a lot.

By this point, the train was behaving much better, but still not good enough. I re-weighed the cars to a full 3.5 ounces, and things improved further.

One caboose repeatedly came uncoupled from its neighbors when slack was in. Every car on the train, save one end of the first caboose, still had its original Tyco horn-hooks, so I’m not sure why this one behaved so much worse than the rest. Rather than spend time troubleshooting factory-awful couplers, I just swapped the car out for one of the spares.

The Big Day

Throughout this process, I was keeping the club’s compliance team informed of my progress. All those stringent mechanical standards are there for a reason. Nobody wants a derailed train fouling up the main line when guests are paying to see trains on the move. Nobody wants to thread their way through aisleways full of visitors to rerail a train stuck at the far end of the layout. Nobody wants to constantly stop-and-go three other perfectly good trains for the sake of one bad actor on the line. Confidence needed to be instilled.

I wasn’t expecting the train to make it into the regular open-house rotation. Instead, I asked for (and was granted) just one lap, at the end of the show, when the crowds had thinned and the stakes were lower. With no suitable motive power of my own, Rob loaned me a pair of chunky 4-axle diesels with enough oomph to keep all those high-drag cabooses moving across the railroad. When the last hour came on Sunday afternoon, he offered to run the train himself. I’m not sure if he did it to soothe his concerns about the train, or just to get a front-row spot to view the spectacle. A small cluster of club members followed the train around the layout, smartphones out, as though it was an AAPRCO excursion.

I’m happy to report that all the prep work paid off. Over the course of the trip, just one car derailed in one spot (one of the aforementioned shallow-angle diamonds). It was the Fujifilm caboose—pretty ironic thing to happen at a club formerly known as the “Kodak City Model Railroad Club,” don’t you think?