Scenery & engines

After applying some more fine brown foam to the area between Furnace and Stanley I moved back into the workshop where I started the process of converting the new Mantua 4-6-2 to DCC.

I first placed the engine on the test track and hooked up a standard DC power supply to make sure the engine ran smoothly. It did. However the front headlight did NOT work.

Earlier I had taken the tender apart and looked at the wiring which was confusing to say the least. It is one of those DC/DCC engines so there is more wiring than is needed for straight DCC. Also there were nine (9) wires going to the engine versus the normal six (6). So what where the other three (3) for?

Of course the only way to determine what was what was to disassemble everything and run some checks. And since I had to do this for the headlight and I was going to remove all of the unnecessary wiring, I had a go at it as you can see from the picture below.
(This is the 4-6-2 Mantua disassembled with the wires marked with their color. They had all been painted black so you could not determine their color by looking at them.)

Seems five (5) of the wires in the plug are NOT USED and were just heat shrunk together in the engine. The wires that are used are the motor plus, motor minus, headlight plus and headlight minus. The engine does NOT have any pickup from the drivers!

At least this setup provides plenty of extra wires to the engine for uses such as cams. So before this engine goes into service I will probably add pickups to most of the drives and a cam input. That will still leave two (2) unused pins on this Mantua plug.

As for the headlight I may go to a light bulb since the LED sticks out of the light fixtures on both the engine and tender.

This has not been my month for engines!

(Anyone who would like the wiring diagram for this Mantua plug let me know and I will forward it to you.)