Running temperature

[Grumps2012]

My railway shed has been extremely hot over the past few days,  can anyone advise the maximum temperature to run locos? One of my locos started behaving very erratically yesterday, track is okay, decoder CVs were as I set them up so I thought maybe it's just too hot!

[GWR 14xx Tank]

I would suggest that if you are feeling overly hot, your trains and locomotives probably will be too! DCC decoder chips are quite small and are on small plastic circuit boards, so these will heat up quickly if the temperature is quite hot. Some components do behave weirdly at high temperatures, but as long as there is no permanent damage, when the tempeature drops, they should still work fine.

 

Maybe keep them in a cool drawer / cupboard? (I don't know how big your collection is!)

 

14xx Tank

[Anton Stedman]

Hi

 

I have a similar problem with my loft layout. My solution is to take my locos from the loft at the end of the day and place them down in a display cabinet which is in a properly ventelated room. I only take them up again on days I use them, instead of keeping them in the loft. Of course if you have lots of locomotives this might not be easy but I currently only have 5 Digital ones. The other 5 analogue ones, I leave in the loft as they are, in my opinion, more hardwearing.

 

Hope this helps,

 

Anton

[ColinB]

I don't think you have an issue with the DC locos, they should be designed to work in heat, lets face it they must export to hot countries. The big issue seems to be DCC decoders. This is purely my experience, others may have better experiences. If it is hot a lot of DCC decoders especially TTS seem to have difficulty getting rid of the heat generated by their devices, in my HST case the loco was happily doing loops and just died. Normally, it is something I have done wrong but in this case it just stopped and suddenly became a short circuit. The other issue is if the loco stalls, like gets stuck on a point or the valve gear gets stuck, then the DCC decoder is having to source probably twice its normal current, so you get a lot of generated heat within the module,  which it cannot dissapate, so again the decoder dies. Some are better than others, Zimo seem quite good, I have not had one die on me, but some of the others are extremely poor. TTS seem particularly bad but then they are bigger circuits, so generate more heat. Shrink wrap is good at protecting the module, but makes it more difficult for the module to dissipate heat. So yes if it is hot, be careful. 

[81F]

This might explain the problem I had with one of my locos. However the biggest issue was with the liftout section where the track had warped enough to derail my train of 21T hoppers. Having relaid the track I found that the expansion joints are causing a similar problem with the hoppers that just klif slightly.

 

Interestingly I don't seem to have the same problems with the 21T mineral wagons which use thge same chassis so have put it down to the Hoppers being lighter. I am therefore awaiting 30 10mm ball bearings which I hope will make up the weight (2 in each wagon).