I made two very happy discovery today allowing me to use my newly refurbished Bachmann Shay in pusher service.
The Shay is outfitted with an older Enhanced Railboss board, My Head End Power Car for M-11 “Shorty” is equipped with the current model Railboss Plus. The Plus board features the ability to toggle between between two Railboss Plus boards. When second board is an older Enhanced series, the toggle works as an on/off-line switch for the Plus board. The Enhanced board ignores the toggle setting. When toggled on-line both locos respond to the radio. When toggled off-line, only the Enhanced board (Shay No. 5) responds to the radio.
The second discovery was that when run simultaneously from the same radio, both my Shay and 45 Ton diesel start together and run at a very close speed.
This allowed Shay No. 5 to be assigned to helper service today to so 45 Ton Diesel M-11 could manage a train that exceeded locomotive capacity as determined by TrainOps.
Here is No. 5 shoving against Caboose 10 heading up the steep grade at Coal Dump Curve…
Once No. 5 is outfitted with a rear coupler, operating practice will be to place the caboose behind the pusher for crew safety.
Once the switching location is reached, M-11 is set to off-line and it becomes the brakes while No. 5 cuts the train and shoves cars into the facing point sidings. No. 5 handles all the switching duties, coupling outbound cars to M-11’s train until the entire consist is made up. Then M-11 is set back to on-line and the train continues.
Here M-11 leads coming back down-grade with a few coal hoppers…
And if that wasn’t good enough, with No. 5 pushing on the tail end down-grade M-11 does not surge!
BTW, that Shay is a real stump puller. When I forgot to switch M-11 back on-line, No. 5 pushed it skidding on it’s wheels along with an 8 car train :]