I am trying to help an elderly, family friend here in the UK. He has had a variety of electric model trains in his life, including a G gauge set up in his front yard for several years. When he saw my postwar Lionel steam set (from 1952 or 1953), he was so impressed that he has purchased a Bethlehem Steel 0-8-0 switcher set and is now trying to get it set up with a Legacy 990 Command set. Since he is 81 and I am 72, neither of us is very tech smart. Between the two of us, we have managed to get the train to do almost everything. We can make it run and stop, change direction, whistle and bell, make the steam blow off noises, the lights work, etc. But the one thing we haven't been able to figure out is the chuffing noise. We have loaded the module for the locomotive and the remote recognizes it correctly and the train responds. It just doesn't chuff. Any suggestions? If the thing would chuff he and I would be delighted.

Dave, thank you for that link. There's a wealth of very useful information at that site. I try to send pictures of my set up as it progresses. Currently, my part of North Yorkshire is living up to the reputation of rainy English weather so there won't be much construction activity in the front garden for a while.

Thanks again for your help.

Is it possible or advisable to build an outdoor layout for my Lionel train set?
Does anyone have any experience or opinions about GarGraves track? I see that they offer some stainless steel track and that might be of use if it's acceptable to have an outdoor layout.

Hello. I just joined the forum. At Christmas 1954, my brothers and I were given a Lionel train set. I still have it in the original boxes. Three years ago, I moved to the UK and through Tennents Trains here in England, I was able to put together a controller that operates on the 240v 50 Hz power that is in use here. The train hasn't been run in years but still works fine. I intend to pass it on to my son. I started to create a layout and have a question that is probably very basic but I don't want to bend anything so I'll ask the experts.

I want to change the direction of the curves so as to have both CW and CCW changes of direction. I've got a pretty good selection of track, some older and some newer. I seem to remember at one time there were some pieces of the track that had pins I could take out and put in the other end of the curve but now I can't find those pieces and when I tried that with the track I have now, I couldn't get the pins to budge and I didn't want to try too hard if the pins aren't supposed to come out.