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….......--- Loco Wheel Cleaning – Easy and Cheap ---

Most all of the locos I've bought since getting back into N scale have been used older locos. Most look like they never were used and most run well out of the box but some don't run so well. Most of the times the truck wheels are not clean. I've tried different methods and bought a name-brand wheel cleaner for around $30 and didn't find it easy or effective to use. Using a paper towel saturated with cleaner and laying on the tracks has helped some but other times it just doesn't seem aggressive enough on some wheel sets.

While washing the dishes the other day, yes I'm the dish washer and Dottie is the cook most of the time, I was thinking the rough side of the sponge I was using looked promising as a wheel cleaner. I'm sure someone else has probably done this but with that in mind decided to post the following since it seems to work really well.

My first candidate for cleaning was a N scale DC GE U30C that I wanted to put a hardwired decoder in. It wasn't running very well on my test track. Would stall at slower speeds and wouldn't run at all at low speed. Let's see if that can be fixed by a simple cleaning.

Above we see the sponges that can be bought about anywhere. The contact cleaner was ….

. one I decided to try after researching cleaners. Not cheap but decided to give it a try. I'll also try a couple other ones I already had from pre-railroad days.

I cut the two parts of the sponge away from each other and later cut the yellow one in half again so that it was about the same thickness as the other side.

I used the test track I built to test hand-laid turnouts I've been making. Now that I'm happy with this cleaning method I'll probably make a cleaning station out of a short piece of track that I can hook to either my DC power pack or my DCC++ command station depending on if the loco is DC or DCC. It will have a shallow well at the end of the track for the sponge that will set the top of the sponge a little higher than the rail height.

Cleaning is fast and easy (see instructions above).

Hard to see in the picture above but it was obvious when viewed the wheels were much cleaner than before being cleaned. The real test though would be back running on the test track.

The loco ran great but I decided to go a step further and used the other part of the sponge in the same manner.

You can see the wheel marks on the sponge so from that I'd say more cleaning took place but not much. The loco ran great after the first cleaning so not sure this second step is doing much.

So after just the first cleaning the loco went from not running well at slower speeds to running really, really slow with no hesitation and being able to stop and start multiple times without any help from me.

I like this so much that I threw a quick cleaning station together that can be plugged into either my older DC throttle or my DCC Command Station. I've taken a couple more locos to the cleaning station that ran well but now they run even better. Here on out any time I have a loco that is having a little trouble the first option will be cleaning the trucks as it just takes a minute with this.

If you aren't happy with the results of cleaning wheels it isn't going to cost much to try this out.

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