ColinB

This thread is getting far too political, normally it would have been locked by now but I will add my piece. There is a really good youtube video which I assume comes from a documentary about the issues of the Railways, it is narrated by Ben Elton. It highlights the fact that although we moaned about British Rail and its inefficiencies, it could not be run cheaper which is why private companies struggle with it. As to the new liveries, it will probably be about 3 to 5 years for it to happen and probably 3 to 5 years for Hornby to produce one, so I wouldn't hold my breath. Perhaps now would be a good time to lock it.

She is right, but the model railway community accepts it like it does many other things that these companies do wrong. My one works ok for the moment but it is worrying that it could fail in the non too distant future.

That is interesting, you don't say if the HM7000 still works once you have taken it out the class 08. The current limit for a normal Hornby decoder is 0.5 amps, according to the specification of HM7000 the current limit for this is 1.0 amps. So if it works with the Hornby decoder if should work with the HM7000. So I assume you are running the HM7000 on the App because I doubt most DCC controllers would give that message on my Elite is just gives an error message. Now I am not the expert on this device but when I was talking to YouChoos about short circuit protection on their Zimo decoders there is very little time between a short happening and the decoder starting to smoke even with protection which theirs has. There is just not enough surface area to dissipate the heat . So I suggest setting the DCC enabled bit and run the loco on DCC and see if the fault is still there.

I bought a K1 off North Yorkshire Moors Railway in their loco shed shop. Second hand but it looks like it has never been used, even still had the packing piece between loco and tender. Weird really everything else in there was quite expensive but this was a very reasonable price. Really nice loco.

That is a lot. Must be what Hornby are charging, Lendons are a really honest company, they have refunded the over postage for something I ordered on special order, not many people do that. I have never fitted one to Lord Nelson so I don't know, most of them do seem to be roughly the same.

Generally Hornby and all the normal spares suppliers have run out of them. Probably because everyone forgets to remove it before they take the body off. They should have made it attach to the chassis which is what I think other manufacturers do.

This is probably off topic, but programming is one thing the Elite is exceptional at, the downside is the lack of an enter key, pressing the rotary know doesn't quite hack it, especially when said item gets old. As to running locos I think everyone knows the system I favour, but even that has a few issues.

The 21 pin is a better bet anyway they fit better. The trouble is the new 21 pin pcb that you can buy as a spare doesn't fit the DCC space in a Duchess tender without touching the edge, the earlier 21 pin part fits a lot better but they cost a fortune if you can get them.

I don't know why you are saying that, what is wrong with you guys I get this from 96RAF all the time. As I said there will be guides as to the discounts allowed, all companies do that, now if you want to discount more then that there are ways without breaking the law to stop it. Just do a bit of lateral thinking. They can take away your Hornby franchise, sure you can sue them, best of luck with that as a small retailer. Anyway this has nothing to do with the subject so just leave it at that. "Too Tall" came up with probably the best reason Hornby increased the price that Retailers pay for them. They are hard to come by, so the good old "supply and demand" curve kicks in.

Thank you Going Spare I knew I read it somewhere. There are many ways to enforce it without breaking the law. As I quoted with the Levi case, it also happens with lots of products. With cars it is totally different, I had a friend in Sales that explained it all.

No I am not, if you read my actual words, there will be a guide, no mention of price fixing. So if you want to you can discount more but when was the last time you saw a newly released model for less than 10 % off. In actual fact on many occasions if the model price goes up between preorder and fimal sales by the retailer you have to pay more. In fact on one of my locos I ordered from a retailer they actually mentioned that. In law that is "hear say", end of story.

Really I am surprised. I was on there today looking up loco part numbers for the SS Flying Scotsman and the Hornby Dublo A4s and they were still in stock but then that was as far as I looked. Then in some respects I suppose they would be they are really expensive items.

Ok there is a guide that says basically 10% discount. There are lots of rules like that, remember the Levis saga. If I remember rightly it was 10 % discount for so many months, then you can can increase it, which in effect is what happens. A lot of this stuff is guide only, for the reasons you state. Either way the price has gone up, they are still the cheapest.

I don't know if this has anything to do with it but Bure Valley has increased the price of the 21 pin HM7000, the 8 bit is out of stock so they are still at the old price. Bure Valley was discounting them more than other retailers, so perhaps Hornby reminded them of the rules. Bure Valley are pretty genuine, so I doubt they would reduce their discount and thus increase the price without a reason.

Thank you for the information, I didn't know that. Other than the old Hornby ones I pick up in secondhand locos most of mine are relatively new. As you probably know when I started with DCC I tried all different types, I won't list them but some were terrible.

The tester just takes the place of the loco and it is a known entity. The loco may have wiring faults, a faulty motor, so all the tester does is allow you to test the decoder before you put into a loco. A common complaint from some Retailers is that it is the loco is at fault if the decoder doesn't work, been there with a certain sound retailer. Fortunately most are ok, but it gives you the knowledge that if it doesn't work on the tester then there is no way it will work on the loco. Also things like function outputs, if you wanted to test those on your loco you would have to wire up leds and series resistors in your loco to test they work. This is already done on the tester so you can check them out easily. The tester is not magically going to fix a decoder, it is only a means of making testing easier.

For LaisDCC here is a mail I got from CM models Colin can you try writing 4 to cv8 and cv30 on a test track. This should do a factory reset on the chip and set the loco number back to 3 It did work, occasionally LaisDCC decoders get lost, I have no idea why.

Oh I think I know what the issue is, the six pin connector is inserted upside down, the table they are referring to is the connections table. I am always doing it get the connector round the wrong way and wonder why nothing works. Of course the track input is the centre two pins so the decoder gets powered not matter which way round it is connected.

The Manufacturers Ids from DCC website. That is my table that I extracted and put into an Excel spreadsheet to work out what is fitted into any locos I buy. The one on the DCC website is much larger but as I said they are the only ones I use.

Yes, I do have a Flying Scotsman and yes you fill it with water and press F1 and it should start steaming, even while standing still. Now according to posts on this website and others sometimes you have to fill it with a little more water to get it to work initially but in my case it worked straight away. This is a thread on this forum about it.

The Manufacturers Id s are as follows:- Hornby 48 Zimo 145 LokSound 151 LaisDCC 134 Gaugemaster 65 Appel 174 Dapol 154 DCC Concepts 36 There are more but these are the only ones I use. So for a Hornby decoder the request should come back with 48 or 30 in hexadecimal. The Elite it appears displays as normal values so my Thomas the Tank fitted loco it comes back with 145, which is a Zimo decoder. For a Hornby it should read 48. Now if you get XXX or FF or 255 (can't remember whether if it fails it defaults to hexadecimal) then it has not read properly.

I must admit that is what I generally do. The crossed wires will have no effect on the motor running, so it might be there is an issue with one of the wires not being connected properly or possibly you have blown the motor driver. Generally though in my experience if you can read the Manufacturer Id, switch on the forward and reverse lights, you haven't blown the motor drivers, generally if these blow you get a lot of smoke and a short across the DCC bus. It may be there is a fault with the motor driver on the decoder not being soldered correctly, in which case it is a return to supplier.

I was recently trying to add "Stay Alive" to my 6 wheel Peckett it did work but because of the space limitations eventually blew up the decoder, probably because I couldn't insulate it enough. Anyway one thing that did come out of it was I redesigned how the decoder fitted, remembering I bought mine with DCC fitted. If you soldering skills are up to it, replace 4 way connector with the Pecket 6 pin one which is thinner and slightly shorter. Make sure you insulate it. Now buy a Zimo MX616 or MX617 direct fit 6 pin decoder, which is really small and I suspect it will fit in the same space. Again insulate it, Pecketts having a lot of metal are a real insulation issue. Unfortunately I don't have the 0-4-0 version but looking at your photo I think it should fit. I think I had issues with Dapol 6 pin decoders driving these sort of motors I don't know why, I just assumed that were designed for N gauge motors, they just didn't work that well.

That is exactly correct, sometimes one reset doesn't work so do it twice by repeating the procedure. The Orange and Grey wires don't really matter that much, if they are round the wrong way your loco will just run backwards when the display says forwards and forwards when the display says backwards. For the moment just check it works properly, There is a CV you can change, but don't lets go there yet.

No, it won't, you need to enable the sound by pressing function F1 on your controller.