Hi all! So I ended up buying a Canadian National Model Power / MRC 2-6-0 Mogul off ebay this past week. Spookshow had a really good review on this little locomotive, and well, I probably overpaid for it, but finding any small steam locomotive that is dcc "ready" is not really easy. I was actually surprised at how good this little locomotive looks having never seen any Model Power models except in photos, and right out of the box it ran so smooth (on DC), especially for steam. I have a Broadway Limited mikado that doesn't run this smoothly (or well, did). The only bit that didn't quite work out was the head light. It would only turn on once in a while, and was orange. Not warm white, really orange! I think spookshow had some comments about the headlight not being great, and I figured maybe it was a bad contact. So I first opened the bottom plate just to check it out. Everything seems fine there. Bad contact might be further in? So I took off the boiler (it's held together by two screws). Nope, nothing to be found there. Strangely even applying power right to the metal tab under the boiler didn't help the headlight turn on. But now, horror! I reassembled everything and it no longer runs smooth. Sheesh, I think I might have messed up the running gear, probably applied pressure at the wrong place. Anyway, this post isn't about the messed up running. No, I just wanted to share with you all a couple pictures, and how to disassemble the bits to get to the light board. I figured, it's already messed up, so why not go all the way and fix that LED! So unfortunately, I don't have many pictures, only two, but here's how things went! In fact, it's not really that difficult, but Spookshow was right, it is like a Chinese puzzle box. First, you need to get the boiler off, and that's fairly easy - two screws, the screw just behind the rearmost drivers, and the screw at the very front, under the leading truck. No need to remove the leading truck, it swivels out of the way. The screw holds the pilot. You can then lift the boiler off, but will be attached by wires at the rear end, you can swivel it 90 degrees to have access under the boiler. Now, the light board circuit is in a plastic case (called the "boiler under cover" in the parts sheet), and this box is locked in place. First, pry off the smoke box door, it pulls right out like a plug. BE CAREFULL, see that tiiiiiiny little plastic bit in the photo? that's a headlight rear cover that will fall out of the back of the front plate, don't lose it!!! I went sperlunking for it under the desk and I'm damned lucky to have found it again. Then, you need to pull out the smoke stack, because that smoke stack locks the clear plastic light prism and the boiler weight in place. Then you can pull out the light prism and weight out of the front of the boiler. Why? Because the light prism locks the "boiler under cover" in place. Now you can take out the boiler under cover (it's that plastic box in the picture). The light board circuit is inside. And that's it! that's how you disassemble it enough to get to the light board. In my case, the LED was barely working, so I replaced it with a warm white 3mm LED. Unfortunately, at that point in trying to strip the end of the little black wire, I snapped it halfway along the boiler, doh! So I ended up replacing that entire wire. That needed taking the cab off. Lucky, the cab is fairly easy to take off, just pry the bottoms out and it will lift up. The motor cover only has two clips, and that gives you access to the channel for the black wire (in the cab floor). I just took some black ESU wire (perfect size), and replaced the entire thing from tender to light board. Reassembling the thing was fairly easy, just backwards from what I described... Yeah, so it still runs terrible, but I suspect there's some binding in the running gear. Tomorrow I'm going to tackle that. I'll start by removing the running gear, and seeing how it runs. If smooth, just start reassembling and making sure everything is put back together right. I hope I can get it running smoothly again, because the next step is adding a ESU loksound nano! Anyway, I mostly decided to post this because I actually couldn't find anything online about how to get to the light board. Hope it helps someone out there.
