Alas, the traction drive on these Brio locomotives seems to have a pretty short life. According to a Brio rep, the only hope is to indeed give it a good firm solid whack down onto a hard surface (table or floor) in an attempt to get the internal pressure gears to settle down and get more traction. There's a 50/50 chance it might work. There is no other solution. Attempting to open it up will create a mess because it's almost impossible to get all the tiny loaded springs back into place. At least the lights and sounds still work, and it can be easily pushed around the track--it just will no longer do so itself...
This happened to me with two trains. Lights and sounds worked but wheels wouldn't move. I kind of whacked it a few times on the side with my hand, pretty hard, and moved the wheels a bit by hand, and they started working again. Kind of old fashioned I know but at least I didn't use a hammer :-) Good luck.
If your Brio locomotive is beyond help, you can try what we did to save ours. Ours was over 10 years old, so we really had nothing to lose, so we did a little surgery, and it turns out the motor was frozen.
The Brio screws will unscrew with a philips and a light touch; be careful not to strip the screws. Remove the four from the bottom. The tender car will then come out, and you can pry up the bottom of the engine to see the gears, and further back, the motor. We were unable/unwilling to remove the entire bottom, but you can see the gears and motor just fine.
We determined that while there was fuzz (carpet?) in the gears, there was nothing restricting the gears (they turned freely).
We then took a chopstick and spun the motor a few times, all the while putting the power on in forward and reverse. All of the sudden the engine gave a crazy spin, and then worked like a champ again. Put the screws back in (remembering the tender car), and voila. Working engine.
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