American Flyer 303

I was given an old American Flyer set with old rusted track and the cars beat up quite a bit. The locomotive was an Atlantic type, number 303. It wouldn't run with the American Flyer transformer, and I thought something was wrong with the motor.

The motor was fine, but the reversing unit in the tender failed. It's a very common problem. There's a little tab which advances a drum to switch between the three modes: Forward, Neutral, and Reverse. The tab often gets stuck in the up position, and if the locomotive is in neutral mode the motor won't turn.

Once the reversing tab was moved back down, and the contacts on the reverser drum cleaned, the motor began to run. It had years of old and dried lubrication to defeat, but eventually did so. After a few minutes of running, it loosened up and started to run faster.

With a running motor, the next thing to do was check out the model. There's a smoke unit, and a chuff piston. The chuff piston pushes the smoke out of the smoke unit, synchronizing the exhaust to the motor speed. Cool!

An electromagnet is used in place of the traditional permanent magnet. This takes up a good amount of space, but in S scale they can afford it. The lack of a permanent magnet means that screws and screw drivers aren't attracted to the model when not running, so it's easier to work on.

The next step in restoring this locomotive would be to disassemble it again, clean all the old lube and apply new. It's probably going to be a shelf model, so I'll put that off for another day.