Dead spot in Western Master

[HMWA]

Hi there,

Absolute beginner so this may seem like a daft question. I've got the Western Master all set up and working, the only issue is there seems to be a serious dead spot around the points section. Sometimes the loco moves through fine, sometimes at a slower speed and sometimes stops dead. Does anyone have any advice?

[96RAF]

Does it stop over what is known as the frog - the black plastic bit.

Check that your rail joiners are firm. When the loco stops press with a thumb around the rail joints - if the loco starts up again you know there lies the problem.

[Chrissaf]

The Loco in the Western master set is a 0-6-0. That is to say a short wheelbase with 6 wheels. It may only have 4 wheels with pickups (not sure on this particular point). Hornby points are "Insulfrogs". That is to say, the frog area of the point is largely plastic. This means that as the Loco passes over the point the number of live pickup points may reduce to two.

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It is just a fact of life that short wheelbase Locos and Hornby Insulfrog points do not make good bed-fellows, particularly at slow running speeds. It only needs the slightest mis-adjustment of the pickup and/or its contact with the rail for the Loco to stutter with the symptoms you have described (sometimes fine, sometimes not, it's a lottery). Long wheelbase Locos on the other hand, tend to have multiple pickups on different bogies. These maintain multiple pickup points even when traversing the point insulfrog.

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As the Western Master is a DCC set, the Locos slow running reliability would benefit greatly from being fitted with an integrated 'Stay Alive' decoder. See this thread for more details on 'Stay Alives'. See my post on Page 2 about half way down mentioning TCS brand decoders. Other's on this forum have commented that they retro-fit all their 0-4-0 and 0-6-0 Locos with 'Stay Alives' for this very reason.