ColinB

I read about this on the other railway website before the friendly administrator shut it down. There is always a risk when things are not entirely under your control as a company. In Hornby's and a lot of other companies, they don't control their production or the Shipping. The issue for Hornby is that they are getting to the point for their large locos where they may become out of reach, price wise for most people. For the price they are now charging it becomes less of a "throw away" item so I think they should seriously start looking at the lack of replacement parts if they fail. I doubt that they will move it from its current location other than to India, which is cheaper but even less reliable. One of the things in the old days was if you preordered the price was fixed, but obviously that has gone out the window. Just think you can buy a new TV for the price of your loco, that sort of sums it up for me. How long before this thread gets canned by the administrator?

I had lots of issues with my tender driven locos "skating" where the loco part slides across the track without turning the wheels. I eventually tracked it to the valve gear not being perfect, but it took a long time. It got even worse when I added extra pickups. As I say I eventually sorted it, but once I found that I could get the later Hornby chassis to fit, it became history. The other issue with the ringfields is the amount of current they can draw. I did replace a lot of mine with the 5 pole variety, but even so, it limits the type of decoder you can use.

The trouble with the one on EBay, ellocoloco it is tender driven. I don't know if Hornby improved the pickup arrangement on their later tender driven models, as the early one I owned, always had issues on bad pieces of track. Mind you, you could do what I have just done, buy the tender driven one and fit a modern Hornby Railway chassis. A3/A4 chassis seem to be reasonably cheap, you might need to do a bit of machining with the Dremel, but the finished article is very good.

So now we have censorship and you guys wonder why less people are contributing. As for my guess probably when they replace Railmaster with something new, or possibly buy in an externally developed product. 2 years to get out of Covid and hopefully if they keep making a profit probably 2025. There are some useful features in the the latest DCC specification which if implemented should be mainstream by then. Mod note. Colin, it is not censorship. Please read carefully the very first Discussion Starter post. It stated very clearly the requirements for contributing to this thread and what would happen if those requirements were ignored.

I think PTB, TTS decoders have an over current trip, 96RAF can probably enlighten us. Trouble is whoever designed the software forgot to restart it if the over current was no longer there. I could write a book on the issues I have had. The thing that does worry me is as in your case if they go wrong after a year. I must admit I am amazed how they have managed it, electronics is generally incredibly reliable.

I have had a lot of issues with TTS decoders. In your case though I would check that the loco you are putting them into is not causing them to fail. Then there is the issue of if it is fully insulated and none of the PCB is touching the chassis. Finally what loco are you fitting it to, these things are critical on current, so no trying to run Wrenns or Ringfield motors. They do have an issue with heat, which causes them to fail. I must admit of late, not so many have failed. I did have one I bought which just buzzed a bit and then did nothing else, needless to say I returned it.

I bought some very expensive electrically conductive grease for my Bachmanns and Hornby locos where they use the axle as a conductor. Be careful with it though, as if it gets in the wrong place it can cause issues.

You don't say whether you bought this Black 5 new or secondhand. I know it is a long shot but if you bought it second hand check to see if someone has added a Stay Alive circuit to it. Seems very weird, I have had other makes not accept the reset command but TTS is usually pretty reliable. Sometimes though, you have to do it twice.

I have been doing a lot of work recently upgrading my tender driven A4s and A3s to loco driven. Every chassis I have bought has the rigid hanging pony truck, I got the impression that this has been standard on the A1, A3 and A4 chassis for a long time, even the Railroad versions.

I must admit I have never noticed on mine whether it clears the track or not, the dummy part tends to shroud it. The 4-6-2 locos where it is fitted would quite happily run around the track if you removed the front and back bogies. In fact I normally do this if I am trying to investigate why a loco derails.

That Flying Scotsman article is really interesting, full of facts that I didn't know.

What it might be if it isn't any of the one Chrissaf mentions it might be the four pin socket in the tender, The socket is connected to a PCB. On one of my locos the track was broken between where the wire solders on and the connection to the plug. The other thing that also happens is the pins move backwards in the plug, meaning that individual pins don't connect properly. When you inspect the plug, check for any broken bits of plastic also broken or bent pins inside the socket. On my loco not only was the track broken, but the pin had come out of the plug.

They did make one with smoke deflectors. I think it was in BR livery.

This is going a bit off subject. I must admit I have found the Bachmann ones worse, the weight of the wire tends to pull the pins out of the connector. The Hornby ones are perfectly ok as long as you appreciate that you have to be careful with them. As I said in a previous this type of connector has a limited number of uses, even if they were gold plated there is a limit. I have used the ones on EBay on a couple of locos, the trouble is, the extra weight of wire means the tender doesn't move so easily round bends and of course you can see it.

The issue with unplugging is that the more you plug and unplug it, the bigger the risk of a pin bending or the plastic disintegrating, which I have noticed has already happened to one I am using for development. The other more important thing is those connectors are usually only rated for about 10 connections, so not a good idea to plug and unplug them. As for using the pin, yes you can do that, some of my locos are like that, but you still have the issue of the wire not being long enough to have them spaced out separately in the foam. Alternatively you can make the wire extra long so you can separate them, then figure out what to do with the excess wire when the loco and tender are coupled together. If you disconnect all the parts from the drawbar then you have the issue that there is nothing to stop the drawbar moving up and down. Those copper fingers do a sort of damping action on the drawbar stopping it "flopping" down. On mine I had to replace the drawbar screw with a different type to stop it doing that.

It is a shame you cannot buy brand new "ice cube" boxes, but I can see the issues in making them being as there are so many types. It is just that on my Hornby locos with a tender, I locate the DCC socket to the tender and wire it with a four pin plug and socket, it gets rid of that drawbar connector that either gets broken or "shorts out". Trouble is the loco is now connected to the tender permanently, so I then have to "hack" the foam in the old box to make them fit.

I originally did wire some of my locos with 7/0.2 wire. In the Lima ones where I put a Hornby chassis and the new type of bogies, I found it to be too thick causing a bit of a drag when the bogie turned. I suppose it is what you are happy with, plus you do have issues wiring the 4 pin socket with 7/0.2 wire, it doesn't fit in the plated through hole.

Does anyone know what type of wire Hornby use in the locos. I know it is not 7/0.2 as I have tons of that. It is just that when I am rewiring locos for DCC or building up a loco, the wire that gets includes with their DCC sockets is just the right size. I have tried buying DCC wire, but all the stuff I have found is PTFE based, which is inflexible and a pain to strip ( yes I know how to do it properly having done an apprenticeship in an Avionics supplier). The stuff I buy from YouChoos is great but a little too thin, for wiring motors and pickups. Yes it works, but very easy to break. I assume I can get it from RS or Farnell, if I know the SWG or x/x size.

Don't do what someone had done to a loco I bought recently. The loco was a Duchess of Sutherland repainted and numbered as a Duchess of Hamilton. It was of the later design with the loco in the loco and dummy pony moulding. Its previous owner had put it into an old "tender driven" box. It must have got sold to a toy dealer, who puts it on EBay thinking it is the old one. So does everyone else, including me, when with 5 minutes to go I noticed the later valve gear. I bought it for far less than I thought it was worth, admittedly it needed a bit of work, but it was still cheap especially when I opened it up and found a LokSound v4.0 sound decoder, which was set wrong so obviously the loco didn't run. So the moral of the story is if you are going to put it into a box, either use the proper one or use a generic one, just in case you are not around when it gets sold.

Eventually found it. The brand new tender bottom I bought for the Britannia had several faults, why it sometimes let the decoder start up and sometimes not, who knows. If I had moved the loco between DCC on and off events that would explain it, but I didn't. The wonder of electronic and dodgy Chinese soldering.

I just wondered if anyone else has had this problem. The TTS decoder only works on about the 3 rd or 4 th powerup of DCC. You switch off the DCC and the decoder fails to work. You power DCC off and on again then it eventually works. This is the third unit I have bought that has this issue, so obviously not a one off. I know I can return it, but it is a pain especially when I had screwed it into the tender and changed the loudspeaker.

I agree with atom3624 some do come up on EBay quite often. Some people charge exorbitant prices, but they they still have the same item several weeks later. Others than genuinely want to get rid of clutter they have accumulated over the years charge more reasonable prices. There are a couple of Sellers that charge the absolute maximum for spare parts, how they ever sell anything fascinates me, I don't buy off them on principle, no matter how desperate I am. One of them you can always tell because they use the same background, looks like a set of curtains.

That is what I did with my old Hornby coaches, the old ones had plastic wheels. The only real issue is that Hornby make them in packs of ten, which means one pack does two and a half coaches.

I generally convert all my locos that have a tender to have the four way lead, either by buying the later tender base, if the tender top fits or doing a filing job on the tender base so that the socket fits. I got so fed up with either shorting wires or breaking valve gear when I tried to squeeze the electronics into the loco. The only exceptions are the unrebuilt Battle of Britain and Merchant Navy classes where the bodies are so wide and the valve gear simple, that it makes the job a lot easier.

I could write a book about the issues I have had with TTS decoders. I must admit that of late they have been a bit more reliable although recently I did have to return one where it just "popped" once and then no sound. It is only because they are so cheap that I buy them. It sounds like a return to Hornby, you say they are new, but from what people are saying, Hornby haven't made them lately. From what you are saying you have tried them in different locos other than the class 20, as I had one issue where the sound disappeared and found it was some weird interaction with the motor on that loco ( I eventually fixed it by buying a Zimo sound decoder).