Cleaning Locomotive Wheels with Josh Clark
Josh ClarkDescription
Josh Clark has a quick video on cleaning locomotive wheels. If you notice your locomotives and trains aren’t running the smoothest you could try cleaning the track. He also recommends cleaning locomotive wheels on occasion. This could be every once in awhile depending on how often they are run. His method is quick an easy, only requiring a cloth and goo gone.
For the cloth, he uses old white t shirts that are cut up. It’s a fine soft material, perfect for cleaning locomotive wheels. He sets the locomotive on the track and places the cloth sprayed with goo gone flat on the track. It is important to always run the locomotive forward onto the cloth and hold it in front so it is pulling the cloth the right way. If you try to reverse it it will just bunch up the cloth. Josh turns the throttle all the way up and holds the cloth down as the train rolls over the cloth, running the locomotive back and forth across it.
To dry the wheels he moves the cloth over to a section without goo gone and again runs the locomotive over it. He recommends applying lateral and vertical pressure. The throttle is then brought back down to zero. The same method for cleaning locomotive wheels is now used in the reverse direction to clean the other half of the locomotive. Josh makes sure the wheels are dried thoroughly so there is no residue spread throughout the layout.
Hey, welcome. Today, I've got a quick video for you guys on how to clean the wheels of your locomotives. If you've noticed that maybe your locomotives, or your trains, aren't running the smoothest, you could try cleaning the track. Another thing that I would recommend doing on occasion is cleaning the wheels of your locomotives every once in a while, depending on how often you run it. So it's really quick, it's really easy. The only thing you really need for this is a cloth. And then I use Goo Gone. That's what I used to clean the wheels of my locomotives. And after the cloth, what I actually do is take old white T-shirts, cut 'em up into little sections. It's a really great, fine soft material that cleans wheels perfectly, and will lay over the track. So we're gonna set the locomotive on the track. You might notice a little humming noise. That's just because it's a DC locomotive on DCC track. We're gonna slide this back here. And we're gonna just put the clock, which we'd previously sprayed with Goo Gone right here in front of the locomotive. And one important thing about this technique is to always run the locomotive forward onto the cloth and hold it in front so that it's pulling the cloth this way. If you try to reverse it, it'll end up just bunching up the cloth. So you'll see what I'm talking about here in just a second. I'm going to turn the throttle all the way up. I'm gonna hold the cloth down again. Maybe occasionally, it might wanna jump off the track, that's okay. So we're gonna slide it back off where the Goo Gone was. And then to dry the wheels, we're just gonna go over a piece of the cloth that wasn't sprayed with Goo Gone. You can apply a little bit of lateral pressure and some vertical pressure. We're gonna bring the throttle back down to zero, slide it forward, and then we'll do the same thing in the reverse direction. And this is what I was talking about where you wanna make sure that you're always going forward onto the cloth or reverse onto the cloth. So the same thing, I'm gonna hold it down. Go back and forth just a little bit here. And then we're gonna go on to a piece of the cloth that's not soaked with Goo Gone; just to dry off the wheels to make sure we don't get any of that residue throughout the layout, or we just leave it on the wheels. It's generally a good idea to go and clean it those off.
Do not use GooGone on locos with traction tires. It softens the rubber into a sticky mess that eventually breaks and comes off. Voice of experience.
nice idea but a lot of stress on the motor and running gear. What do you recomend for rolling stock?