Wire for wiring up DCC sockets in Hornby tenders and general wiring.

[ColinB]

I convert many of my old Hornby steam locos so that the DCC socket is in the tender, it makes it easier to fit the sound decoders etc as there is more room. I have struggled to find the right sort of wire to use, even resorting to wire off new 8 bit sockets that come ready wired (the ones from New Modellers have long lengths of wire on them). I found 7/0.2 wire is too thick to solder into the 4 pin socket PCB. Some people do DCC wire, but generally this is a PTFE based product and does bend very easily and is a pain to strip. Then others sell single code wire wrapping cable that again is not really suitable. Anyway I found this 10/0.1mm Electrical Wire at Eileen's Emporium, absolutely perfect

[Deem]

It might be relevant to you or may not, I bought Hornby Tornado which was converted to Hornby TTS by previous owner and had 2 wires going from loco to tender to have speaker in Tender.

I noticed the Loco would make strange noise as it would go over the points or get stuck because the wire used by previous owner was quite thick. I try to control the wire with various way but wire will become loose and have same problem.

My solution was to install iPhone speaker bought from eBay for £4.99 plus postage

(https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/265204537557)

and tucked it to, smoke chamber along with decoder and Loco is running fine. No more 2 wires going into tender.

Depending what loco you are converting this option may or may not work for you but a option to be considered. Sound is slightly and only slightly better than genuine speaker in my opinion.

[ColinB]

Generally on all my Hornby locos I resite the DCC socket to the tender, mainly because it is a lot easier to fit the DCC decoder without shorting any wires. In my early days with DCC the amount of times I trapped a wire while trying to get the chassis to fit into the body, quite often shorting the decoder. On one I was so worried about trapping a wire that I managed to trap the valve gear and damage it. The only ones I tend not to do it with are the unrebuilt West Country / Battle of Britain locos where because of the slab front and square shape, there is loads of room inside. I use those iphone speakers, vast improvement over the original Hornby ones. Road and Rails do an even better speaker that I now use.