ColinB

I bought one of these loco units when I wanted to fix my old 1980's HST (it was better value than buying a new armature). My one had a five pole ringfield motor in it, which is a much nicer motor, so I suspect this one has too, it is also a lot easier to convert to DCC. I also found that the current draw is such that you can use the HST TTS decoder.

Virtually all my preorders with Hattons got cancelled by them. The Merchant Navy one I ordered of them they originally told me that they couldn't supply it, then they said they could. In the end I ordered it from another source and cancelled the original order. I have been trying to find out if Hattons of late ever fulfils their preorders seeing as they have cancelled virtually all of mine. It is not because I ordered late either, the Thomson loco I ordered immediately Hornby announced it.

It could be the inductive load of motor putting nasty high voltage spikes across the LED. What value resistor are you using? I agree with Chrissaf a bridge rectifier is a better idea, which means you only need one led, you can then also put a 10uf capacitor across the resistor led chain which will smooth the voltage.

Next time you do it use the 2mm tower leds, although the width of the lens is 2 mm the rest of the led is quite chunky. You just drill a 2 mm hole and push it through. I think the base part of the leds where the leads are, is bigger than a normal 3 mm led.

Spares for any Hornby loco are an issue. Sometimes it seems easier to get spares for the 1980's locos than the current ones. It is a topic that regularly comes up.

To be honest, I don't know about those on the Elite, but we used to use those on the Ford car radios and as far as I know they were usually pretty reliable. It might be that it has not been soldered in properly, or a duff component, either way that is not your problem. Your problem is the pain of queuing up at the Post Office to send it back.

I agree with Chrissaf, return to Supplier. It is probably a fault with the rotary encoder (the second knob). They are a sort of switch that gives out two square waves to the electronics as you turn it, it probably has a fault where it is giving multiple pulses. Either way if it is new then return it. Obviously not a day for Hornby and electronics, I powered up a brand new class 37 TTS decoder and surprise, surprise no sound (yes, I have tried all the normal things), so that is a return too.

From my experience (I have several of these), on some of the earlier ones they weren't even DCC ready so I had to add a socket. Of these some there was room to fit it as 96RAF suggests, but on others there was a big weight that took up most of the room. On these I moved everything to the tender by buying the Hornby 4 pin plug and socket, rewiring the loco and mounting the DCC socket in the tender. Of course on the very latest versions there is no issue as they are already wired for the sound being in the tender. The only thing I did notice with this model and several others, that with the speaker Hornby supply, it is a very tight squeeze so I normally use a small iphone speaker, which not only is supper thin but sounds much better that the Hornby one.

Sorry Chrissaf, I must admit I had difficulty figuring out what was actually going wrong. I just assumed he had put more leds on so it was drawing more current to cause the flicker. A capacitor might help either way, although it might slow down the response of the led. I must admit with the modern tower leds I tend to use, the light output seems to be a bit digital, they only seem to change their brightness significantly when I put stupidly low currents down them.

I am pretty sure that the self protection is dependant on whether the decoder can get rid of the heat. It seems to happen on a lot of decoders that are supposed to have short circuit protection , that they just smoke on finding a short circuit. Last week I was using a Hattons decoder to power a length of DC track for testing. Unfortunately, there was a short on the loco and the decoder just fried itself. You might have to be a bit careful putting TTS decoders in old Ringfield powered locos, some of those motors draw more than the 0.5 amp limit for a TTS decoder.

If I understand this right, I am assuming you are only using the Hornby supply to power the Leds. So why not put a 10 uF across the outputs of the 12 volts, that will smooth the output so it doesn't flicker. As it is a 12 volt supply that can go positive or negative it might be better to use a bridge rectifier followed by a 10 uF capacitor, exactly how you power the lighting strips in a carriage.

I don't have an issue with difficulty obtaining spares for locos over 10 years old. It amazes me every time I mail Bachmann for spares for my old split chassis locos, that they still carry them. The issue is with Hornby that they don't carry spares for their current models. They still make class 50 locos, but they have been out of stock of buffers for at least the last 6 months, I could quote very many other examples like couplings. If they don't want to make them then "outsource" it to the likes of "Peters Spares". If there is a market for them then they will get made. That is how it works in the Classic car and bike markets. Lets face it the current price of a Hornby loco is more than many "white goods".

When I saw the headline that was my immediate thought. It is about time someone put a rocket under their spares situation. You can forgive them not carrying certain spares, but the things that regularly fall off or get damaged buffers, couplings, motors, pickups they regularly don't have spares for.

I think Peters Spares has them. Just do a search on Ringfield.

I too was in electronics, I must admit the leds from China (and sometimes the UK) are so cheap now that I just usually use them.

I find it amazing that Hornby haven't got them as spare parts, but then there are a lot of things about Hornby I find amazing. I have dealt with ekmexhibitions, I think they are what is left of East Kent Models, they sell quite a lot of Bachmann and Hornby spare parts. Seems to be a decent firm to deal with, I recently bought a brand new split chassis Bachmann motor off them.

What controller are you using? I have found that certain controllers don't always read properly. Sometimes you might get better results by trying to read the actual CV. I find with my Elite sometimes it gets it wrong reading say Manufacturers id from the menu, but has better luck reading CV 8 directly.

I bought my last lot off EBay, as for the bearings I imagine there is someone on this site that will probably advise you. Are you sure there is something wrong with it? I haven't really checked mine but they were not the most precise of mechanisms. Remember it has to be pushed by the tender because it is tender driven so you don't want it too tight. Have you tried it with the loco to see if it actually works, usually the big concern is the loco sliding on the wheels rather than them turning.

This is the setup as fitted to Percy, I would have shown you my actual setup with smokey Joe, but I could not easily get the loco apart.

That is why I use the 6 pin socket, it fits on top of the motor, as you need no headroom as you do with an 8 pin socket.

I agree with "Going Spare" check all your pickups on the loco, the other thing I have also noticed is some points are not entirely flat so 0-6-0 locos with small wheelbase pivot on them. Then of course it depends whether you have live frogs or not. I use Zimo decoders in virtually all my locos, they run perfectly straight out of the box without the need to play with CV values, all "stay alive" does is to stop the loco reacting to transient loss of DCC signal. If you are really at a loss I find YouChoos are really helpful regarding matters with Zimo decoders.

I converted my Smokey Joe to DCC using a 6 pin DCC concepts lead and socket (they seem to be the most robust lead). I would recommend you use a relatively high current DCC decoder, the "CAN motors" fitted to those seem to draw quite a lot of current. Because of the high current I would suspect that puts any of of the TTS decoders out of bounds as they cannot source sufficient current. I would fit a 6 pin Zimo sound decoder with a Sugar Cube speaker that would probably fit in the available space. You are talking serious money for a Zimo sound decoder, so I don't know if you still want to fit it.

That is a weird one, normally you associate that with it defaulting to thinking the DCC signal is DC. Generally on TTS decoders DC running is turned off, so unless it is an old decoder that should not be the issue. I know it involves more expense but have you tried replacing the TTS decoder with a normal decoder and see if the fault is still there. I have recently been trying to upgrade my old Hornby HST by using the later bogies and from what I remember the pickups are pretty good on these. It could be one of those wonderful TTS decoder faults, which is why I suggest trying a normal decoder.

I agree with Chrissaf but I think it seems to depend on your browser settings. On some website it works on others it seems not to.

Ok, I will do the bit about how I know about the ports, I used to design all the start up and initialisation logic on most of the microprocessors I worked on. So I can probably work out what is going on, it is called about 30 years of experience, but personally I am not really that bothered and really it may be of interest to me but I sure nobody else wants to know. That doesn't really matter in this case because I was talking about my actual experience with DCC decoders and testing on a length of track with a standard Elite controller. Put the diesel with the lights on the track, power up the Elite, it goes through the "Welcome Screen" flashes a few lights and around that point puts DCC onto the test track. I know this because I have used a tester in the past which shows a led and if there is a short on the track this is the point the Elite error message displays. Display goes to default showing loco set at 3, now if the diesel has lights the front lights come on. Now if I decide to drive the speed the loco lights switch off and after this the loco lights only respond to function F0. It happens with most of my locos, the only thing I haven't checked is if it still does in if I program the loco to a different address as generally I only use the Elite to test new DCC decoder setups. Now LokSound ones, do some really weird things, the one in question I got given when I changed it to a Zimo for someone. Programmed the address, put it on my main layout it runs perfectly OK. Now if you put it on my test track, as the Elite powers up the LokSound loco basically behaves as it was previously on the main track, it is as if it defaults to its last settings, before it gets its new command. I have noticed it do with some of the other locos with LokSound sound decoders in. I could go into what I think is happening but again I doubt anyone is that interested. I don't know what is special about F0, some decoders use the front lights to tell you that the current has overloaded, so perhaps it is something to do with that. As I say on a lot of the decoders I have blown up the front lights stay on all the time.