# The New Lionel Legacy 4-6-0



## Lee Willis (Jan 1, 2014)

This is Lionel's most recent steamer, just released last week. I really wanted this 4-6-0 because small- and medium-size scale steamers look best on my layout – bigger steamers will fit and run, yes, but they don’t look natural with the extreme stick-out of their boiler fronts and cabs on curves. This is a handsome loco that looks good and runs great. I will run it a lot.

The loco arrived in perfect condition and ran well for two hours (so far) right out of the box.

It has constant-voltage lights and lighted number boards and markers, etc., including lights that operate directionally, and a cab light, all quite nice.

Sound is not as impressive as on more expensive Legacy and Vision locos, but good – about equal to recent PS3 Premier locos I’ve bought in the last several months. It has a rather clunky idle sound but once moving the chuffing is deep and loud, its rate and tone varying very nicely with speed. There is brake squeal when slowing. The whistle is, while not advertised as quillable, able to make very different sounds and tones if I play with tapping the horn button multi times and/or for short or long periods, etc., and with a bit of practice I got it to do something close to quilling. That was unexpected, and a lot of fun. 
The only disappointment is detail, or lack of it. 

This is a $900 list price loco (although I bought it for a bit less than $700). It has great paint, graphics, etc., but where it falls a bit short in this price range is detail. It has no cast in rivets or weld-lines on the cab, or on tender's upper surfaces, and fixed, not opening, hatches of the cab roof, etc., and a minimum of those “separately applied pieces” although it has a real coal load. In fairness, it costs several hundreds less than the latest MTH Premier models, and five hundred less than Lionel’s bigger and fancier Legacy steamers. But I would have been willing to pay a bit more for their level of detail. 

Still, I am quite happy with it and would buy it again . While not a great bargain, at what I paid it is good enough value for the money: It looks good, sounds good, and runs very well, with lots of power and traction: it pulled twenty Menards boxcars up a 2.5% grade, 72 inch curve at a steady scale 45 mph – it was working, but it maintained cruise without complaint, wheel slip, or overheating: Menards cars are fantastic bargains but have noticeably more rolling resistance than Lionel, MTH, or Atlas's best, so I was impressed. 

It is a very attractive loco, it a bit plain in comparison to more detailed (and more expensive) Legacy and Premier locos.








The real coal load looks very good. The cab has nice detail, two figures, and window-glass, but the cab light is annoyingly bright. I plan to mount a small shroud to mute it a bit








Here it is with the Lionel scale Atlantic. The 4-6-0 is a tad bigger, but still at the very small end of the Legacy range of steamers. 








Here it is pulling that train of Menards' latest boxcars . . .


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## njrailer93 (Nov 28, 2011)

absolutely beautiful love the road name


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## Lee Willis (Jan 1, 2014)

Thanks. The New York Central was an iconic railroad, responsible for a good portion of the history of and romance attached to the railroad industry. I mostly model Union Pacific and Santa Fe, railroads that operated where and when I grew up in the American west. But I also have the Lionel vision Hudson J1a, and an MTH scale Dreyfus Hudson, both NYC locos, and they are beautiful.


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## Wood (Jun 9, 2015)

Hi Lee, I am certain the 4-6-0 has a smoke unit but, does it have a chuff/puff ratio matched to the wheel rotation? And, what is the minimum curve for this unit? Looks handsome and like you, I need a smaller engine to roll on my layout. Finally would you post the Lionel product number? I'd like to look it up.


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## gunrunnerjohn (Nov 10, 2010)

The newer Legacy stuff has 4-chuffs/rev and they are synchronized to the drivers. I don't know that the chuff comes at exactly the right place in the cycle, but it would be vary hard to say it doesn't.

The Legacy 10-wheelers handle O31 curves and should be at home on everything but an O27 layout. 

I have this one.

Lionel Legacy 6-11151 C&O 4-6-0 10-Wheeler #377


However, the new one in the 2014 catalog specifies O-54 curves, that's the one that Lee has.

Here's Lee's locomotive.

Lionel Legacy NYC 4-6-0 10-wheeler #1258


The significant difference appears to be the new one supports the new LCS Sensor Track. It probably also sports the new Legacy electronic package as well.

Since the new one is the same size as the one I have, I'm not sure why they changed the curve from O31 to O54, that's quite a leap! I suspect that's a mistake.


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## Wood (Jun 9, 2015)

Thank you John, The model # is key for me. I'm going to check this out.


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## Lee Willis (Jan 1, 2014)

Hello Wood. Good to hear from you. 

Guys, I just went upstairs and ran the ten-wheeler on my BEEPWorld O-36 loop. I can't say for sure that it can handle O-31, but it was perfectly okay with Atlas O-36. It and its tender handled it well and still had a smidgen of gap left between them, so I think they are really set up so that O-31 might work. The O-54 listed in the features has to be a mistake. 

I like this loco more and more as I run it more. The four chuffs seem synchronized with the drivers but like John says I can't tell (and would not know how to) if they occur at just the right time in each revolution. That is a bit more rivet counting than I'm capable of doing, and frankly if you think about it, it can't really be more than 1/8 revolution off of correct, can it?I think it would be hard to tell even if you knew just when in the wheel revolution it should be synchronized. 

I've been looking at pictures of 4-6-0s - Santa Fe and others, from the 1900 - 1925 period, and studying the detail in those photos. As I said in my original post, the lack of detail bothered me - still does, but . . . Most late ten wheelers (this looks more 1920 than 1887) did not have rivets on the sides of the cabs - many of their cabs are completely smooth sided, as this model. But all of them had a lot of "stuff" hanging off of their boiler shells - many different and different sized pipes, valves and other "stuff." In fairness to Lionel, a few early ones do not and are very simple looking, with few details to be modeled. All of that "stuff" may have been added later on (1925 -->) for all I know, when most of Santa Fe's remaining 4-6-0s were converted to oil. Maybe the coal burners were "stuff-less" and simple looking when new. Regardless, I am going to add a bunch of pipes and all in the pattern of one of that later ones and maybe convert it the tender to oil.


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## Wood (Jun 9, 2015)

Good to see your posts Lee, O36 is good enough. My yard is all O42 so I am good to go with this. I like this steamer because it has that workhorse look. The newer big engines are beautiful, but to big and my layout is hard nose and dirty. I like it that way and I like those everyday hard working rigs that made the railroads work. That 4th picture with those beat up Menards boxcars is what really captured me.


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## Lee Willis (Jan 1, 2014)

Wood, you will love it, I am sure. I love mine more and more - was running it this morning. Just a perfect loco - not big, yet big looking, (hope I make myself clear). And post pictures when you get yours.


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## Patstrains (Jun 13, 2015)

The 10 wheelers in real life did not have a lot of exterior detail compared to other locos of the same style. We only have 2 left at the store.
Thanks
Pat
Patrick's Trains
WWW.Patstrains.com


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## gunrunnerjohn (Nov 10, 2010)

Lee, does the cab light go off on the 10-wheeler when it's moving? To dim it, you could paint it with yellow paint, that would give it a more "old time" look and dim it at the same time.


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## Lee Willis (Jan 1, 2014)

gunrunnerjohn said:


> Lee, does the cab light go off on the 10-wheeler when it's moving? To dim it, you could paint it with yellow paint, that would give it a more "old time" look and dim it at the same time.


Yes, the light goes off as soon as it starts to move. It is just way too bright when it is siting at idle. The light juts out from the top of the firewall and shines brightly straight back on the tender and coal I thought of painting it yellow or gray to dim it, but I worry the heat would urn the paint off, maybe setting it afire?. I was thinking a small metal shroud that just reflect the light down only onto the cab floor might be better.


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## gunrunnerjohn (Nov 10, 2010)

Lee, that's an LED, so there is no heat to speak of. It won't affect the paint at all.


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## Lee Willis (Jan 1, 2014)

It is so bright I concluded it really was incadsecent. But I reached my left pinky finger (no use risking an often-used finger) and was surprised - it was very hot to the touch. Not incadsecent hot, but several seconds of steady contact would burn a finger, and maybe, paint. 

I think it is an LED, but I wonder if it is maybe being over-driven? It is so bright - really much, much brighter than any other cab light I've seen. I wonder if maybe a series resistor for it was left out or incorrectly sized? If so, I will find out soon: this afternoon, when home, I plan to sit the thing on idle while I work on the layout for the whole afternoon. Four hours of sitting in neutral with the light burning ought to settle the matter for good: up to now that light has never burned for more than several minutes at a time.


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## gunrunnerjohn (Nov 10, 2010)

It could have a problem, I've never noticed any LED getting hot at normal operating currents. A white LED at 3V operating voltage and 20ma (maximum current) should dissipate a massive .06 watts. That's not enough to raise the temperature more than a degree or so, so something is wrong in your engine.


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## Lee Willis (Jan 1, 2014)

You're right: other LED's I've worked with get no more than slightly warm at best. 

I left it sitting brightly in neutral for nearly four hours and it got warm but not hot. to my fingner, shining as brightly as ever. I got out my 3X reading glasses and a bright flashlight to take a look (holding it off the track with in in my hand and only three inches from my eye.) 
It looks like a very tiny bulb, - it could be either a grain of wheat incadescent or a glass-capsule LED - hard to tell. It is mounted behind a 1/8 inch or so diameter hole in the casting of the cab's firewal, that lets the light through. the bulb or whatever it is does not project out the hole, and in fac tit is only partly inserted in the hole from the otherwide, it is about 1/8 inch inside it the hole. When I feel a bit of heat, I'm feeling only the metal around the hole: I cannot actually touch any of the glass. It could be the light heating the metal or that the heat I am feeling is from Legacy electronics. 

Anyway, I tried holding various "filters" over the hole to find one that blocks enough light. What worked best was a square of paper cut from a manilla folder! I had trouble trying to figure out how to neatly glue that on so it would stay and look good.

In the end, I picked up the loco in my left hand, held it nose down so the hole the hole that the bulb shows through is facing straight up, and with a pencil point dipped in yellow glue, filled the hole with yellow glue like i do when filling gaps in models, filling the hole completely until surface tension had a big round drop of yellow glue beaded up in the hole. I set the thing to sit in a corner with its nose down and will let the glue dry overnight. 

tomorrow morning, when I test it, if the bulb is incandescent it will probably burn the glue out in a few minutes, maybe burning the bulb out too (at this point that acceptable: annoying problem solved!). If it is just a too-bright LED, as I'm betting it is, it will be fine. 

Either way I will report what happens in the morning.


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## gunrunnerjohn (Nov 10, 2010)

Sounds like a plan.  My 10-wheeler has a cab light, but it's not overly bright, I wonder why the second generation got so much brighter.


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## Lee Willis (Jan 1, 2014)

John, as to why this is so bright, it could be that they just ran out of "dim" bulbs at the factory (I'm having trouble resisting various jokes at this point, but moving on . . . ) and a "diligent" worker started substituting brighter light bulbs in order to keep production moving. 
That happens: I've recently taken apart eight WBB 44-tonners, as you know. The three screws that hold the circuits to the body inside them are all fine threaded - basically machine screws. Except on one of the eight. Someone had rammed course-thread (sheet metal type) screws - black, and of the right diameter and length, into those holes and cinched them down. Clearly they just wanted to keep production running. 

----------------------- As to the "yellow glue trick" ---------------------

I thought filling with yellow glue would be the end of it, but nooooooo . . . . 

Here is the loco out of the box, with light as bright as an aircraft landing light in the cab.









Here it is four hours ago, with a good solid 1/8 inch of yellow glue filling the hole that the light shone through. It dried perfectly, to a nice round bead of a lens, smooth - and very clear. I'd estimate it cut light into the cab by only 25%. I could have lived with this, but . . . see what i did in the next slides down.









I figured no harm in painting the surface of that dried glue, since I would not be painting the glass directly, which I figured would have been a problem if it is an incandescent bulb, so i dabbed on some yellow and let it dry. Now it is very muted, but as you see in the final photo . . . 









Through the paint, the light is just about perfect!


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## gunrunnerjohn (Nov 10, 2010)

Looks good, the sucker is still plenty bright.

FWIW, I normally use incandescent bulbs in my Super-Chuffer upgrades, and I run the 12-14V bulbs off around 8.5 volts and get a nice glow in the cab.


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## Lee Willis (Jan 1, 2014)

gunrunnerjohn said:


> Looks good, the sucker is still plenty bright.
> 
> FWIW, I normally use incandescent bulbs in my Super-Chuffer upgrades, and I run the 12-14V bulbs off around 8.5 volts and get a nice glow in the cab.


I see nothing wrong with using them in a loco or when you only need one bulb or so and heating will not melt nearby plastic, etc. The main reason I go to the effort to put LED's in passenger cars that don't have them is because if I want to run a full train (twelve cars) with incandescent bulbs, it often pushes current draw up to around as high 8 Amps just for the lights, leaving little left for loco motors within the normal 10 amp limit of the ZW-L. LEDs cut that lighting load to just an amp or two.


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## gunrunnerjohn (Nov 10, 2010)

Lee, you know my feeling on LED lighting for passenger cars, I've sold around 600 lighting modules for passenger cars, both in kit form and bare regulator modules!  I'm really sold on it for that purpose for just the reason you mention.

I also like warm-white or yellow LEDs in headlights as they have much more of a "headlight" look to them, the power use is secondary for that use. I use them for markers and class lights as well.

I like incandescent bulbs for number boards as they disperse the light over a wider angle and provide better lighting. I just run them at lower than the rated voltage for a cooler running light, same with the cab lights.


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