eLink Western Master Short Circuit

[JohnRichard]

Hi all,

firstly please excuse me, I'm VERY new to all this, having recently puchased a Western Master set with eLink. My first set since being a kid.

Yesterday I took it out of the box and assembled it to check everything works ok. After some fiddling around with drivers and software, the loco came to life and happily shunted and cruised both forwards and backwards on demand from the railmaster software.

Just as I was happily watching it go in circles round the track, it stopped dead, followed by the sound of the USB on the pc disconnecting, then a second or so later reconnecting.

The system seemed to think there was a short circuit, and following the on-screen prompt, I re-set everything and tried again. Now when I ask the loco to move forwards or backwards (cruise or shunt) it moves about 1cm, and stops, then the eLink disconnects and reconnects from the PC and the whole saga starts again.

I look the body from the engine to see if there was any obvious short circuit inside, nothing to be seen.

As a brand new set, I must say I'm massively disappointed for the thing to stop working not 5 minutes after first running.

Does anyone have any ideas? I have checked for updates and the software is the latest version, the firmware on the eLink seems to be the latest version too. Do i have a duff engine? (Unfortunately I only have the one so I can't check with a different one.) If it is faulty, what now? The chain shop I bought it from is some 3 hours away (purchased on holiday,) so can't take it back to them.

 

Thanks in advance

[Bigskybirds]

 I had a similar problem with is set, the short was caused when the train passed over the point. It appears your particular loco my have corrupted itself and the DCC chip requires resetting, that I beleive is to write the value 8 to CV8. I am sure someone will confirm this.

Do not worry about taking it back to the shop, telephone Hornby Customer Service they should be able to help you, they did in my case by replacing the elink power supply and point.

[JohnRichard]

 I had a similar problem with is set, the short was caused when the train passed over the point. It appears your particular loco my have corrupted itself and the DCC chip requires resetting, that I beleive is to write the value 8 to CV8. I am sure someone will confirm this.

Do not worry about taking it back to the shop, telephone Hornby Customer Service they should be able to help you, they did in my case by replacing the elink power supply and point.

 

Thanks for that, Unfortunately it still seems to be the same. I re-wrote CV8 to read 008 but the troubles still persist.

 

The decoder read fine, so I'm assuming that it isn't blown.

[2e0dtoeric]

Temporarily take your loco off the track - make the track into a short length - with nothing else attached except the controller - put the loco on that, and see if it works.

If it does, there is a track fault, so look for a 'foreign body' a track pin, a strand of wire, anything metallic that can bridge two rails. If you can't find anything at all, remove the point, to see if that is the problem.

[JohnRichard]

Temporarily take your loco off the track - make the track into a short length - with nothing else attached except the controller - put the loco on that, and see if it works.

If it does, there is a track fault, so look for a 'foreign body' a track pin, a strand of wire, anything metallic that can bridge two rails. If you can't find anything at all, remove the point, to see if that is the problem.

I've just tried it, with a short length of track only and nothing else connected, it still does the same thing. I'm suspecting the Loco has a fault then and not the track.

[Fishmanoz]

Hi JohnR, welcome to the forums.

 

You may have an actual short circuit but you may also have a problem with your Railmaster (RM) setup, common enough for some people.  To eliminate that, go to the RM forum, to the 2nd top locked thread Setting Up and Getting Started and go through the things in that to make sure you have done everything needed.  Take particular note of the last post in there from HRMS and particularly the correct values in those 2 lines in your ini file.  If you first started RM after connecting everything up and installing the eLink driver, they should already be there, but if you started RM not connected, they won't be.

 

After doing all of that, report back and tell us how you sent.

 

PS.  When you reply, better to just use the text box at the bottom of the page with the green reply button, rather than the blue one in my post.  Then you won't repeat everything others have said.

[JohnRichard]

 I've wired up a small 0-4-0 "Smokey Joe" with a DCC decoder and tried it on the same track, works fine. Re-tried the supplied 0-6-0 and still had a fault.

 

Needless to say the fault has been identified thern as the Loco. Hornby still to get back to me on my enquiry but at least I now have a loco that works so I can start building my project without worrying that something else is at fault.

 

Thanks for the advice everyone.

[96RAF]

@JR

In event of a tardy response from HCC you may wish to copy the  email that you sent to them to Adam the forum admin and ask him if he could hurry them up, adding any HCC query ref number you may have.

[Fishmanoz]

Or you could email HRMS from the email facility in the Help window of RM.  They actually reply in reasonable time.