Conrail's Amoskeag Northern Line | Atlas/Tomix Track Cleaning Cars in N scale

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Atlas/Tomix Track Cleaning Cars in N scale

Written by Ian MacMillan

Saturday, 18 December 2004

Tomix Track Cleaning Car

With the release of the Atlas Track Cleaning car, I decided to pick up its sister car in December to give it a shot on the 220' of main line on my N scale Pittsburgh Line layout. For this review we will be using the Tomix version, which the Atlas model is based off of.

Tomix:
MSRP: $64.49
Retail: $44.95 Average online price
Atlas:
MSRP: $59.95
Retail: $45.00 Average online price

The cars come in a typical plastic jewel case and are neatly packed in foam for safe transport. Each car included an instruction sheet ( In the Tomix box very little is in English), three dry-type discs, three moist-type cleaning discs, vacuum fan disc (installed), disc changer tool, brush and sponge. The car is ready to run out of the box and is only available with Rapido couplers.

Controls

Rapido couplers are pre-installed and truck mounted on the units. For those of us using Micro-Trains or other knuckle couplers, we need to use and "idler" car. I used a Walthers MOW ballast hopper with Micro-Trains trucks and couplers on one end, and the stock Walthers Rapido and trucks on the other end. This allows you to use ths car in your regular trains. There is currently no converstion kit out there to convert the car to Micro-Trains, and it does not look like there will be at this point.

Ok from left to right. First knob is your power control with the settings "Off", "On" and "CL-Power". Next is te cap for the liquit cleaner well. Pull this off and pour in your favorite track cleaning fluid. Last is the shaft for the motor. The grayish screend area to the right is where the vacuum stores what it picks up. On the underside we can see the trucks, which carry power to the motor via springs on the trucks, the well for the sponge or brush, which is where the liquid track cleaner comes out, the motor with the "Dry Type Disc" installed, and the rear truck.

Underside

The motor can take 3 types of attachments, the "Dry" type which is used to
grind away dirt and other junk on the rail, a "Wet" type that cleans, buffs and shines the rails when using a liquid track cleaner, and a "Vacuum" type that sucks up everything in on the track and puts it in the storage bin. Be sure to pick up some replacment cleaning disks and brushes when you buy the car as they dont last really long, and you can never know how long they will be on the market.

While there is no provision for DCC and the instructions state not to run the car on DCC layouts, I had no issues running it. I was however able to covert 3 cars to DCC for customers using NCE and TCS z scale decoders. I hooked up the car so that the spinning motor was hooked up to the leads you would use for the motor on a locomotive install. This allowed the customer to set the speed of the cleaning motor. While you have to remove one of the weights to have a place for the decoder to sit, I used sticky weights and lead shot in the compartment that holds the decoder to bring the weight back up.

Rating (out of 10): 7
Purchase?:
Price: $59.95

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