Britannia Builder

That all sounds very odd, I'm running an 8TXS on a DCC track with elink and Railmaster and all works well on either the app or from Railmaster - I can switch to and fro from inside the app. One oddity is that setting up the loco in the app and downloading a new sound file reset the loco address to 3 from the value that I had previously set in Railmaster, which had me foxed for a while. I can only think that running on DC has somehow upset the decoder? Regards, John

Brilliant! I downloaded the app to my wife's old iPad (I'm an Android man) and installed the Class 31 sound file, which is probably the closest thing currently for my Hornby 3-car class 101 DMU. The sound file took about 12 minutes to download. It all seems to work, and the user interface is excellent. In particular the CV editor working on the main track with instant feedback of the updates is so much better than Railmaster's CV editor. Regards, John

I've now tried it out and having F28 on does indeed prevent F1 turning the sound off - slightly counterintuitive, and I suspect it will catch others out. If F1 hasn't been used to turn the sound on, F28 toggles the sound on and off along with the rest of the AFC functionality, so I think I can remove F1 from the precious set of 6 buttons on the Railmaster screen, and relabel F28 as Sound on/off! Regards, John

Thanks Rob, I do indeed have F28 auto function control turned on, to give the whistle on start and the brakes on stop, which I think is a nice feature. I now see from thumbing through the manual a footnote on page 65 which I'd previously missed - 'Please note… ** Functions 0 and 1 are not selectable… they are always enabled during AFC control.' So that may well explain the problem - I'll try it later. Regards, John

I have the same problem - F1 turns the sound on but doesn't turn it off again. I have F1 set up in Railmaster with the caption 'Sound on/off', which should toggle it. I also can't get F20 to have any effect - it's meant to toggle between chuffing and coasting. I thought coasting might sound better on a DMU! I've turned the sound volume CV down from 50 to 10 while awaiting a diesel sound file - I'm planning to try a Class 31 in the absence of any DMU sounds. Regards, John

I don't know if you had a chance to try restoring resource.mdb from one of RM's automatic backups within the railmaster folder, as suggested in my post 4 on page 1 of this thread? If you did, and if it gave the same 'corrupt' message, it might be worth trying one of the earlier backups - you should have up to 7 of them, named by day of the week. I think RM makes a backup each time you exit RM, so it's possible that backups on recent days have been making a copy of the corrupt database (if indeed it is really corrupted, and the message is not a result of some other problem). Regards, John

RM makes backup copies of resource.mdb within the railmaster folder - on my system there's a resource.bak and resource.mdb.xxx.bak where xxx is Sunday through to Saturday. It's possible that I made resource.bak manually, but I certainly didn't make the other seven. I suggest that you rename resource.mdb and then try renaming the most recently modified of the backup files to resource.mdb. If the file has genuinely been corrupted recently, this may fix the problem without losing too much of your loco data. Regards, John

I bought one of these recently, very pleased with it. I haven't taken it apart, but the decoder will be the Class 08 TTS, the same as other recent sound enabled Class 08s. Regards, John

I had an email this morning from Hornby asking me to update my card details for a pre-order which has just come into stock. I guess this is to do with the new tighter checks on online card transactions. I went through the process which successfully verified my card on the Mastercard website, but gave an error message 'sorry, something has gone wrong' when going back to the Hornby website. I tried again, same result, then switched to a Visa card with again the same result. I've emailed Hornby customer services. John

It was probably me, Rob, in this old thread: https://uk.hornby.com/community/forum/speed-curves#post-158006#post-158004 I wrote a small VBA program to update the speed curves in resource.mdb, which would in principle allow one to correct any mismatch between the speeds of the two locos in the consist, but I'm not sure that it's really worth the effort. I've never experimented with consists, nor indeed read the section about them in the RM manual, but I wonder if turning off back emf in one or both of the locos would prevent them fighting against each other? Regards, John

I have a 3-car Hornby class 101 with the power car at one end, and it runs perfectly well in both directions, including pushing up a fairly steep gradient with a 90 degree curve at the top. I converted it to DCC and installed lighting, with fine wires between the cars to drive the lights from the decoder. Waiting patiently for a TTS sound decoder for DMUs! Regards, John

I've noticed the problem described by Flatpack. I use only the small throttles, with 8 locos arranged in two columns so that scrolling is needed to see the last two. Occasionally when clicking a loco control such as a stop button, the panel scrolls rather than acting on the button press. I don't think that the scroll bar is the standard Windows control, because it doesn't respond to the mouse wheel. I suspect that the scroll bar control is occasionally 'capturing' the mouse and responding to it even when it has been moved away from the scroll bar. I think the problem only happens after the scroll bar has been used in a session. So I think it's a bug in RM, rather than a problem with your PC, Flatpack. Regards, John

The timing information typed into the speed factor screen definitely updates the Factor column in Resource.mdb, but I haven't been able to work out how it converts the elapsed time to the factor. It probably compares the time entered with the time that the loco should have taken at the correct scale speed, and updates the existing factor in the same proportion. I've just used trial and error to get a reasonable result. NB the speed curve entries are for 5mph, then 10mph and multiples of 10mph up to but not greater than the maximum speed (eg up to 80mph if the max speed is 85mph) Regards, John

This thread may help to explain things: https://www.hornby.com/uk-en/forum/post/view/topic_id/14725/?p=1 Kind regards, John

If the locos respond to the cruise and shunt buttons but not to the speed slider control, it could be that you have the 'send real-time speed data' option turned off. See this thread: https://www.hornby.com/uk-en/forum/168-update-problems-with-speed-sliders/?p=1 Regards, John

I have a Hornby Peppercorn A1 'Bon Accord', which I think is the same as a Railroad Tornado with different livery. It used to hesitate over points in the way you describe. I then fitted a TTS decoder (decoder in smokebox, speaker in tender) and this made the problem a lot worse because the sound decoder stopped the loco dead and ran through its start-up sounds after each interruption. If you don't want to buy a decoder with stay-alive, and don't have the dexterity to solder a stay-alive capacitor to your existing decoder, an alternative option is to fit pick-ups to the tender wheels. I did this as shown in the photo and it completely cured the problem. /media/tinymce_upload/82c576d6bf3e99975159e1e59de3077d.jpg The A1 tender has plastic lugs conveniently placed to which phosphor bronze pickups can be glued. Regards, John

I thought this was an interesting idea, so I tried to set up a Railmaster macro for one of my TTS locos that has a firebox light - either to shovel coal when turning on the light, or to turn on the light when shovelling coal - but unfortunately Railmaster doesn't allow you to set up a macro on a latching (on/off) function. Regards, John

I think this is the thread that you are looking for: https://www.hornby.com/uk-en/forum/post/view/topic_id/27840/?p=1 It seems that deleting the loco in Railmaster and then setting it up again is the way to solve the problem - there's obviously an intermittent bug in there somewhere. Regards, John

Is it perhaps the problem described in this thread? https://www.hornby.com/uk-en/forum/railmaster-has-limit-on-the-roster-of-64-active-locos/?p=1 If so there seems to be a workaround involving placing the locos in smaller groups. Regards, John

Hi Chris Interesting to see the meanings of the pink and green backgrounds and to see that there can be a mixture of scale speed and non-scale speed locos on the same system. I tried entering a max speed of 3mph in the speed factor popup, but it won't accept a value of less than 5mph so the 3 cannot have come via that route. I then patched a maximum speed of 3 into one of my locos using my program that updates resource.mdb, and that did reproduce the behaviour that KNAP reports - it shows 3 in green above the slider, and the shunt and cruise buttons push the slider up to the maximum (I didn't try actually running the train!) The loco data must have been corrupted, so setting the loco up again from scratch is probably the best option - or KNAP could try setting a realistic maximum speed in the speed factor popup. Regards, John

Sorry, I didn't zoom in far enough - it is indeed showing 3 rather than 2. Are you using scale speeds in RM? The fact that the other two locos show 127 at the top of the sliders suggests that you are not - if you did, the sliders would show the max speed such as 80 or 90. If you are not using scale speeds, I thought that the sliders always showed 127 as the max speed steps at the top of the scale. Regards John

It appears from the small number at the top of the speed slider control that the maximum speed for your new loco is set to 2 mph (I had to zoom in on the image to see it). This might explain why RM is requesting maximum speed steps when you ask for a speed of 6mph. I think that the maximum speed can be set in the speed factor popup that you get by clicking on the stopwatch icon in the loco setup screen. Is it possible that you have inadvertently set this to 2? Kind regards John

Hi Tricky My ini file did indeed have the line Reset eLink on start=1 I changed this to 0 and it removes the delay so that the start-up is as quick as it used to be, and it still connects ok. Has this ini setting been there all along I wonder, but never previously acted upon? Regards, John

I've just downloaded this - I previously had 1.70 rev 0, which seemed to work ok with my Windows 10 elink setup. This new version does work ok for me, although the initialisation time is noticeably longer and it seems to send a couple of commands to the elink before getting to the point-setting sequence - it turns the lights on my class 101 off, then on again a couple of seconds later, which previous versions have never done. Update: on checking again, it's turning the entire track power from the elink off and then on again during initialisation. Regards, John

I used 7 strand 0.2mm, outside diameter 1.2mm for the speaker wires. I've also used 7x0.08mm, od 0.6mm for decoder to LED wiring. Both seem satisfactory, and flexible enough for links between loco and tender or between carriages. What size do you use? I'm no expert! Regards, John