ColinB

I can only comment on my experience, I use either Hornby Elite or a Fleishmann Two track controller (for my main layout). Most of the decoders work fine, it is when you have to program them that issues arise. From my experience Hornby decoders (TTS and normal) seem to be perfectly ok as are Zimo ones. I have a list of the ones that are not, generally they fail when trying to write the address, or they are not that reliable at doing it. Surprisingly the LaisDCC also seem to work perfectly well, seeing as they are very cheap. The only issue I have with these is their performance with intermittent DCC signals, but quite a lot of the others suffer from this as well.

I was interested in these, do you have a webpage? When I Google them all I get is their retailers who are charging £39.95.

Oxford rail don't mention this and when I mailed them for a suitable decoder I was told buy TCS. At the time they were expensive and nobody had one. I don't know if the guy that designed this has left the company but there is room for a normal Hornby/ Zimo decoder. All you have to do is release the coal from the coal bunker, which on mine clipped in and a space opens up in which to put the decoder. Whoever designed it mean it to go there because if you notice there are loads of cooling holes around it to allow air in. Forget the gaugemaster omni, it is about 1 mm too tall.

Hattons are probably cancelling more orders because as now they are the only "big box shifter" they probably had the biggest amount of orders. As I said in my previous post they did send me the Thompson A2, Chamossaire, which was a big surprise as they had already cancelled my order for the BR version, along with about 3 other preorders. So either Hornby didn't have many orders for Chamossaire, or I was higher up the list. I cancelled my blue Merchant Navy off them, so I will never know if that would have got supplied. It will be interesting to see how many of the special diecast Hornby Dublo models get cancelled. Trouble is I preorder the locos I like, probably like many other people, if this continues you might as well take your chances when the model gets released, at least by then there are probably a couple of reviews on them. So Hornby need to be very careful that eventually they are not left with a warehouse full of models, because people can't be bothered to preorder.

Oh dear, I wonder how long before this thread gets shutdown. Something really weird is going on. When Hattons cancelled a lot of my orders I started ordering from other places expecting them to be cancelled. So far I have received everything I ordered, in fact in two cases I received double, where I assumed (wrongly) that at least one of them would cancel. I even received one preorder from Hattons, but perhaps it was a A2/2 and Hornby were beginning to worry about shifting them given their initial quality issues. You could think it is Hornby trying to grab the market selling direct, I mean Dyson seems to be pushing that at the moment. Trouble is from my experience, I don't think Hornby are that geared up for all those after sale issues (generally a week to answer a technical question, if or course they answer at all). Last couple of weekends I have purchased some really cheap current models off Amazon, at least 20% off. I am led to believe that these are actually sourced by Hornby, so selling a Duchess at about £40.00 below Dealer price doesn't make sense.

I have this loco but I can't remember how the pickups are wired and knowing how flimsy the valve gear is I am not going to take it apart. If it is like most of the Hornby locos of this era then the pickups press against a moulded casting which is about 2 mm diameter for one side and a brass solder tag for the other. Over the years this connection doesn't work that well, so what I get is some relatively thin wire and hard wire the pickups to these wires.

Thank you for the information. I think I might have found a couple of spare chassis on EBay, so hopefully they might work. I am beginning to understand why it was designed it such a way, I think it is because it is a narrow body so the motor has to be at an angle to miss the wheels.

Does anyone know if a R2633 "Planet" Patriot body will fit the Railroad chassis. I am assuming that the Railroad version must be more robustly made than the chassis on my one. Not only is the motor mount seriously wrong but they seem to have made most of the metal parts out of the equivalent of chewing gum. It is unusual, as on all my other Hornby locos the mechanism is first class, this one looks like they let someone new on it. I know that this chassis suffers from "metal rot" which I suspect is half the issue, but even ignoring that, the motor mounting and retaining bracket are not really that good.

Generally when a TTS expires it goes short circuit and often smokes. So it sounds like as 96RAF says, a wire dropped off or a pickup not working. This may seem a funny comment, but it has not been very hot lately, so it probably hasn't died (they seem to die more frequently in hot weather). The only other thing that kills them is if the capacitor across the motor goes short circuit, which has happened to me.

Originally they moved their production to China because of cheapness of labour and the Chinese supposedly have smaller fingers to add all that added detail. I think the biggest issue Hornby now have is remoteness of operation and dependency on world wide events that effect shipping. As to the quality of their motors and pickups, in my experience the modern motors are far superior to the old ones, the only issue is when they fail it is a replace job rather than being able to fix it. The other issue is that the locos are now so detailed quite often bits fall off them when you run them on the layout, but then we asked for added detail. Of course the other bug bear of mine is lack of spare parts, but that is another story.

There was a guy on EBay that was selling 1.6 to 2 amp DCC capable decoders. Zimo also do a very high current one.

I had exactly this same fault with the white wire being permanently live. In my case I had accidentally shorted it to the blue wire in the wiring, so the output driver had gone permanently short circuit, making it live all the time. Sadly to fix it, it is a return to Hornby.

I think Bachmann took a different approach, the pony truck moves from side to side, I don't know if it works any better. The Hornby system seems to work. I think several people on this site have tried changing the wheels to flanged and found that it doesn't work. The new Merchant Navy loco in blue is wonderful although the one in black doesn't have quite the same appeal (my one looks a bit plastic). I have the City of Edinburgh in black and the finish looks tons better.

I have a City of Sheffield Duchess type loco which needed the drawbar bolt. I searched the Service Sheets to find it is part of the accessory pack. You cannot get the accessory pack any longer and it is not an easy bolt to make. I ordered the later drawbar that includes the bolt, but it is a different shape. I enquired at the Spares Suppliers and got basically no joy and got told it was discontinued. Well I am converting a Patriot loco, so that the DCC socket is in the tender as it is a bit of an issue squeezing the decoder into the loco , although there is room, there are issues with catching wires as you push the body onto the chassis. So to make things easier I order a tender bottom that has the cut out for the 4 pin socket. So I ordered X6388 and to my surprise it came with exactly the right drawbar bolt for my City of Sheffield. I still cannot figure why it is included with the tender as the tender bottom does not include the drawbar and I am sure it is too long for the tender mount.

I was just about to raise a post on this, I am getting the same error. It appears to have started about a week ago.

I do that, but is is just so much easier putting it all in the tender. You can still slice a wire as you line up the body with the chassis, and not know anything about it, until too late. I once broke a Merchant Navy's valve gear ( not very difficult to do) trying to squeeze a TTS decoder in. I was more worried about not slicing a wire than what else was touching the chassis. Obviously Hornby and Bachmann came to same conclusion as most of their decoders are now in the tender.

I got the opinion when I was repairing one initially fitted to a Bachmann that Loksound v3.5 sound decoders were an obsolete item. When I contacted South Western about a replacement, I was told they no longer support this version and don't do the cheap (£30.00) fix for it either. This is where you send them your old one and they send you a new one. I even contacted the German Headquarters and got roughly the same response. When I was looking at the decoder trying to figure out why the input diodes had just blown, I did notice all the "hot" components were on the underside and very near the 21 pin connector, which is not so good as it doesn't get much cooling, I think they have fixed it on their later designs. So basically while it is working leave it alone, once it fails, bin it. In my case I had nothing to lose, as even if I blew it up trying to fix it, I had lost nothing.

What you can do if you want to, put the electronics in the tender (good idea as much more room and less to damage when you squeeze it back together). Do what I did with my Tornado. I searched Peters spares for the latest tender bottom that will fit (check tender top location screws) then basically swapped all the bits from the old tender to the new tender bottom and added an electrical connection to the loco. The main reason I like putting the electronics in the tender, is in the early days of fitting decoders I blew up a couple of decoders as they touched something as I tried to squeeze them in and on another broke the valve gear as my focus was to not catch any of the wires. In these days where valve gear spares are hard to come by, I would rather lower the risk by not taking the loco apart unless I absolutely have to.

It sounds like it is Hornby using up spare parts. Turn the tender upside down and see if you have a 4 pin socket on the underside . If so you could buy a 4 pin lead and wire it to the loco so that loco and tender are connected together (pins 1 and 4 to pickups, pins 2 and 3 to motor), then you can put the sound decoder in the tender. If it does not have the socket, then hopefully there is a DC ready socket is in the loco. There is just enough room on these locos to fit the TTS decoder in the loco, but you will have to buy a small "sugar cube" speaker to replace the Hornby supplied one, which won't fit. Or you could put the decoder in the loco and runs leads to the speaker in the tender.

If it has a socket in the tender then surely it must have a connection to the main loco. What might have happened is the person that owned it before (I am assuming you bought it second hand) broke the 4 way plug that connects loco to tender and just wired the loco internally using the broken leads. You might need to buy a 4 pin lead and reinstate the connection from loco to tender, then fitting sound is quite straight forward. The only other thing might be, that someone has added a different tender, so you have two sockets one in the loco and one in the tender. Putting the sound in the tender is such a good idea as there is more room and less chance of damaging the valve gear or decoder trying to squeeze the TTS sound decoder into the loco area.

Normally if an ESU sound decoder fails, the company normally does a deal where they replace the broken decoder with a new one for the cost of £30.00, but it doesn't cover this early version, as I found out recently. They also use a 100 ohm loudspeaker which is unusual. Hornby also used them on the City of Sheffield Coronation class.

Hornby don't do them anymore, why I do not know. As I am always saying they are the same hardware with just a different set of software loaded. I gather Hornby has to order a batch at a time, so I imagine at the moment they see no market for that flavour of TTS decoder, so they have not ordered a new batch. This might be a long shot but have you thought of contacting Hornby Customer Service, they might be able to help.

I am not an expert on this but definitely the hardware is the same. In fact other that the speaker size all the TTS decoders are the same, it is just the software that is different. I am sure the A1 is meant for the new recently built Tornado, whereas the A1/A3 is more applicable to the old A1/A3 locos such as your one. As I say I am not an expert but I am sure it probably isn't much different, surprising really as the A1/A3 is probably the easiest one to get at the moment in the UK. It is also the cheapest. I don't know if they would send it that far but I got my last one from https://www.365games.co.uk/. I am using them in the Thompson A2 latest release from Hornby, I am sure it is the wrong one but at least it is sound and probably few people would know the difference.

I haven't looked lately, but the Hornby website was doing X8809DM incredibly cheaply. I replaced the 4 pin plug with a six pin socket, so that I could use normal 6 pin decoders.

The thing is that makes any loco DCC compatible. I have several Wrenn locos which to convert require drilling out the brush holder putting a plastic sleeve in and using a decoder that can supply high currents. By that definition it is DCC compatible. I think they should highlight that it is a job that has to be undertaken by someone that knows what they are doing. I refuse to use the word professional as some of those don't seem to be that good. I think it is an unfair description. I can convert probably any loco, even the Wrens if I wanted to, but then I have many years experience of doing microelectronics so no real issue, but I appreciate it is not an easy task for everyone. The only ones Hattons do dismiss as not DCC compatible are the split chassis Bachmann models, although in reality these can be converted to DCC.