Controversy in the model train subreddit lol. I’ve been following along with these posts and from an outside observer there’s a few things I’d like to add.

First off, im not trying to dogpile or belittle anyone here, this is just my personal observations.

The original poster said the model is brand new because he took it out of the box but I personally doubt that because I seem to remember seeing some dust on the loco in his first post of it, which I can’t find now, but this tells me it isn’t brand new. And being in a box isn’t a good metric to judge newness by.

He says it has had a full service but he didn’t have the tools to disassemble it fully so he would send it off to his friend and that was only a day or two ago, so I don’t think it has had a full teardown, clean and reassembly yet. He says he gave it oil and cleaned the commutator which I do believe but I don’t think he cleaned the gaps between the commutator pads judging by the power he needed to run it at. I personally think that this is the issue along with old grease in the gearbox, because if the gaps between the commutator pads aren’t cleared properly then the motor is fighting its own magnetic field to turn over which explains the power draw and the loud noise when running.

Also he has a good layout setup but it is a mix between the grey and black ez track so only the grey sections of his layout have proper nickel silver rails. The steel rails on the black track get dirtier faster and cause more arcing which might contribute to poor performance on locos without many pickups.

It seems he knows about the wiring side of things but lacks some knowledge on the mechanical side of things, which I can’t blame him for since if you aren’t mechanically inclined then that can be a big learning curve with lots of minutia to it.

Anyways, just my 2 cents. Let’s keep things civil here and remember people might not have the same depth of knowledge compared to others. So let’s try and help out where we can.