ColinB

I ordered a replacement valve gear set hoping that the unrebuilt Merchant Navy one might fit my unrebuilt Battle of Britain/West Country loco. I compared all the dimensions between the two locos and they seemed roughly the same. Anyway the set arrived this morning which unfortunately won't fit as the point it connects to the chassis is different. I couldn't help noticing how substantially thicker all the rods are compared to all the other ones I have fitted, so is this going to be a new trend for Hornby. No issue about the valve gear not fitting, I will save it as a spare part, should mine on my other locos fail. At the moment I found the rebuilt Battle of Britain/ West Country valve gear fits if you remove the extra bits. In my case I had a set that was broken so the extra bits were damaged anyway, so I actually recovered something useful from scrap.

Have you done a continuity check of your DCC socket. On most Hornby locos the bottom motor terminal is very close to the chassis. On one of my A4s it was actually touching, fortunately I did the check before I fitted any decoders, otherwise they would have immediately failed.

I must admit when I first started with DCC I tried all sorts of decoders virtually all of them worked with the Elite. I have had issues with Gaugemaster ones and some DCC concepts ones. The LaisDCC ones always seemed to work although running the locos they weren't that good but quite a lot of the others weren't either. In the end I found decoders from Zimo, Hornby and surprisingly Hattons were my mainstay. In the end I found the low cost Zimo ones were only a couple of pounds more than the rest and were so I reliable, that I stick to these. I also found that the people at YouChoos were so reliable and friendly, that I would rather give them my business. The only other exception to this rule is the Hornby TTS decoders, they always seem to work ok, although their reliability is an issue.

I put the A1/A3 TTS decoder in mine. I did the same as you and put a post in this forum asking which one people recommended. I got no responses, so as long as it makes a noise and more importantly the whistle is right then I am happy. Originally I was paying £29.95 for each one off a software games company which is not much more than a decent decoder, so that is what I bought. At that price you can upgrade to the £100 one when you are ready, although I must admit when I looked there wasn't one available. After Hornby's price rise and new terms and conditions, meaning no big discounts, TTS decoders are not so appealing.

I use Peco Streamline track so the spacing between tracks is a lot closer than with Hornby. I don't use Hornby level crossings, but one thing I do have issues with is Hornby Skaledale footbridges. I have the full Goathland station, so I use the corresponding footbridge. It means it doesn't sit in the centre of the platforms but at the edges. It is designed for a much bigger gap between tracks, than I use.

Hornby don't make motors, well not of late, so I suspect they are using "off the shelf" ones. So somewhere in China someone is making them, that is how come Sam found one. Trouble is I suspect once there is no demand for thousands of them the Chinese stop making them. I hate to say it but if Hornby were to go bust, then you would probably find some firm in the UK making them. Sadly at the moment if they did it, they would get into trouble with Hornby.

Ok, I have done this loads of times to all my A1s and A3s. If you look at the underneath of your tender near the pin/screw that connects the drawbar to the loco, you might see a rectangular hole in the bottom of the tender. If you have, then you can use your existing tender if not you might need to buy a later Railroad Tender bottom for a Tornado or A1/A4 or alternatively cut your own hole. With mine it already had the hole, so you look down the list of spares available and find an A1/A3/A4 tender bottom that has pickups, generally pick the cheapest as you only want the pickups (Lendons are generally a good supply). I tend to look at the photos on the specialist spares suppliers to get the part number and then do a Google search for the cheapest price. The trouble with tender bottoms is whether your tender top will still fit, so that is why it is a good idea to try and stick with the one you have got. When you get the new tender bottom unbend the tabs and remove the pickups. Next cut two slots in your tender to accept the pickups, I use a heated scalpel or stanley blade. Now fit the pickups. You will need an x9958 tender connector and a x6113 to wire to the loco. I also move the DCC socket the tender as there is more room to fit the sound.

There is no answer to that. I must admit the big advantage of DC ( I run DCC ) is that it is simple so why add complexity. I think I was told once that you can make a non polarised eletrolytic by putting two in series with their same polarities connected together. Never tried it, so I don't know. The trouble is with DC there would be no way to stop loco immediately, at least with DCC you can hit the big red button on an Elite.

You probably could do it with a combination of diodes, electrolytic capacitors and transistors if you really wanted to.

Thank you for the info Going Spare, I ordered the x8114 pack and also ordered some springs off of a Supplier on EBay.

Thank you for the information Going Spare. I will order some SSPP springs but I will also start looking through the spring suppliers for a suitable one that I can cut down. I suppose I could go and take one of my older locos with it in, apart. Then I could measure it properly, but I hate taking a working loco apart just in case something breaks.

I need a compression spring for a Battle of Britain chassis, the one that makes the third axle sprung loaded on older models. Does anyone know if X8114 springs will work? As usual you cannot buy them separately and according to the Service Sheet they should come in the accessory pack, but looking at what comes in the accessory pack only the spring for the pony truck looks to be included.

I must admit I find it amazing that Hornby charge more for the 6 pin DCC decoders than the 8 pin ones. As 96RAF points out, they are generally the same decoder but with a different connector on the end. I must admit I use Zimo decoders as their 6 pin version is smaller than the Hornby one and they give you a wiring diagram so you can rewire it to be a 8 pin one if your space is limited and you want a really small decoder. This is the Hornby forum so I will say no more in case I upset someone.

This subject seems to come up time and time again. It is pretty difficult most of the time to find room in the loco for one decoder let alone two. Then we have the fact that there is only one socket. Usually the instructions that come with the loco, of late it tells you where to fit the DCC sound decoder or normal decoder.

I had something similar with a Bachmann decoder. One of the things you could do is check that there is a decoder in there, if so then it may well be the same fault. As you started to dial up a speed the loco buzzed like made, then as you increase it even more, then the loco moves. The buzzing stops you going any further, as in my case I was frightened something might blow up. As I say when I persevered the loco did actually move. I even opened a topic on this forum but got no sensible answers. There is a batch of Bachmann decoders that seem to do this, I took one out of a loco last week, works ok but makes a buzzing sound initially. I think there is even a YouTube video somewhere complaining about it. It might be an idea to take out the decoder and replace it with another type, I use Zimo, but I also found the Hatton's ones work ok as long as you aren't trying to drive a ringfield motor. Hornby ones are ok but you have make sure the motor current is not outside its limits (they go bang).

The other thing I do remember was that it needed a super clean track.

I have got to admit I have never used the 18 pin Omni decoder, but I have used the 8 pin. Perhaps it was me but I was not that impressed by its performance. I will say no more.

If in future you want any small screws, then you can get good quality laptop screws from www.laptopscrewsdirect.com in quite a number of lengths, they are perfect for model railways locos and are really good quality. Generally Hornby use m2 screws for their parallel thread screws. Bachmann tend to use m1.6, I don't know what Oxford use I would guess m2. For any other screws EBay is your friend, generally they come from China in virtually any size you want. I am always fixing and modifying locos, these are the sources I use for my screws.

I have the Heljan turntable. Originally I had an old Triang one, which did look more realistic than the Hornby one, but it was so noisy. Anyway the plastic disintegrated so I was forced to replace it. The Heljan one is wonderful and as a previous contributor said, once set up it always stops at the correct position. It is also amazingly quiet.

I had exactly this fault with a couple of my tender driven locos, that is why I hate them so much. You push it along manually and it works perfectly. Couple up the tender and it slides along the track. You need to examine the wheels and the valve gear, in my case one of the wheels was very sightly buckled that was one of the faults, the other was the cylinder block was adding a little extra resistance. I spent hours trying to fix it especially as I had just added extra pickups. In my cases even with the buckled wheel it was the valve gear not moving absolutely freely that was causing the issue. You will be interested to know that the tender driven body will fit the later loco driven chassis, you might have to machine away a couple of webs dependant on the model year, but it does fit, if you really get fed up with it sliding.

What might be a good idea before you start ripping bits apart, just in case a wire is not connecting properly. Open up the tender, remove the DCC header from the socket and let it hang out the way making sure it doesn't touch anything. Now get yoursekf a DC header and plug it in. Now check that it works on DC. If it doesn't then you have an issue with wiring.

Before you fit the new one check all the pins of the socket with a multimeter, just in case there is a fault with the loco that is blowing them up. Check especially that pins 1 and 5 are not connected together (you will get a low resistance value, but if it reads 1 ohm or less then you have issues). Check also that pins 1 and 5 don't have short circuits to pins 4 and 8 ( make sure any header in the socket is removed when you do this). Usually when mine die there is normally a burning smell. The other thing to check is the 4 pin socket on the front of the tender, the PCB has very fine copper tracks, I have had a couple where the track has actually broken.

Yes 96RAF I agree entirely, running a DCC enabled loco with DC. Even if re-enable CV29 it still doesn't run as well as if the DCC decoder is replaced with a DC header. You be amazed how many locos I have picked up off EBay as non runners, only to find that they have a DCC decoder in them. On one of them it was LokSound v4.0 unit, sound was a bit rough but it worked.

Nop, drones use carbon to make them, then there is the batteries and the paint.

I know, I just get fed up with people going on about the carbon footprint. If they hadn't of chopped down all the rain forests we wouldn't be in such a state. As to the price rise, surprisingly I seem to have most of the locos I ever want. I think all the issues over the preordering system with Hattons has put me off that idea. If by chance the ones I preordered turn up then good, if not then I will spend the money on better sound decoders for my existing locos.