Problem fitting Sapphire Decoder in DCC Ready Flying Scotsman

[Duffster]

Hi, I'm just getting back into Model Railways and I'm dribbling with excitement over DCC. I've been trying to fit a Sapphire DCC decoder to the DCC Ready Flying Scotsman (not the tender driven one). Problem is that the Hornby guide shows the chip going

 

into the front of the engine but it's too big to fit here. The only space I can see that will accommodate the chip is at the rear of the cab behind the motor flywheel. Problem is that the wires are just too short and I've already broken the red wire off of

 

two decodersa trying. (Time to test my soldering skills.)

 

Any ideas appreciated.

[58001]

The Hornby R8249 basic 8-pin decoder fits and works fine with the Flying Scotsman. There is not much space in the boiler of a steam engine to fit the decoder hence a small one is usually required. More recent designs of locomotive put the decoder in the

 

tender to avoid this problem.

[Fishmanoz]

Duffster, you should be able to fit the Sapphire, but you may need to extend the wires by soldering extra length onto the red, black, orange and grey wires, being the only ones needed by the loco. Or you may be able to buy a longer harness.

 

While

 

the 8249 will work as 58001 says, the Sapphire will give you access to lots of CVs so you can fine tune your loco,and access the fuel functions in the Sapphire if you wish. The 8249 is a very basic decoder with virtually no access to CVs beyond, ID, accel/decel,

 

consist etc which you change via the menu system in Elite or RM. If you are using Select, you will get exactly the same performance from both decoders as Select can't access CVs itself.