ColinB

The guy that told you that is talking rubbish. If done properly it will run on DCC as well as it will run on DC. As you say it has pickups on the back bogie, which is the most important part. The decoder makes a huge difference and I suggest that you get one that has a higher current limit than a Hornby one. Not that I have any shares in the company but I have found that Zimo ones seem to work very well with Ringfield motors and believe me I have tried very many different makes. I converted my 1980s HST and it runs well, the only issue I have is the pickups which are not as good as some modern locos. RAF96 is right is his analysis, your Ringfield motor is going to have diffuculty picking up current on the traction tyre side of the bogie, but that is no different to DC, and I have found that it will on bends and points where the flanges touch the tracks. It sounds like yours is one of the last Ringfields so I suspect it is a 5 pole one so it will run really well. It annoys me when these "so called" experts say things like this, but then it proves they know very little. I have converted about 20 of my old locos and yes they don't run as well as my modern ones, but that is not because of the motor more to do with their design (tender driven locos). Hornby have learnt a lot in 20 years. As for the traction tyres being only on one side it because Hornby originally made a geared wheel for traction tyres so they could only fit them to one side. I suspect your model has the wheels where you remove the gear so they could have done as you say, but I have a class 66 from 2016 with traction tyres and they were still fitting them to only one side. I have noticed on the newer class 66 bogies they have put them on alternate sides.

Eventually found it, it was the copper connectors that connect to the pcbs in the body, thay weren't pulled out far enough, so I assume they weren't making a contact.

I have lots of locos with sound I think they are great. Without the sound to me it loses the realism. You do have to very careful what speaker you use though, it makes all the difference. The TTS decoders are really good for the money. I have several Bachmann class 66s fitted with TTS sound and about 3 fitted with Loksound (2 of the Hattons I had to as that was the only way to get the correct lighting functions). The Loksound are a bit better as they mix the sounds but other than that they are all sound roughly like a class 66. There again we all have our different tastes.

I have converted about 4 of these which I had accumulated over the years. Two of them there was room to fit a decoder in the loco body, on the other two there was a huge weight in the way. What I did with these two was buy a 4 pin lead and connector as is used on current Hornby models and moved the DCC socket to the tender. Putting the DCC in the tender also means there is enough room to add sound. To be quite honest I should have put the DCC decoder in the Tender on all four, it makes life so much easier. These are one of the few locos where a 90's version isn't much diffent to a current one, for some reason Hornby never used Tender drive on this model. I forgot to mention. A lot of these have speedo drives attached to the valve gear remember to unscrew it before you remove the body or else you will break it. I am always forgetting and you can't get them anymore.

I have a Dapol Track cleaning wagon, the one with the motor and vacuum. It is never worked very well as a track cleaner, which I assumed was because it couldn't pick up power from the dirty track to run the motor. So I added DCC so than I could add some "Stay Alive" to improve things. Anyway after that didn't work that well, I analysed the pickup mechanism. To me the pickups seem at least 1 to 2 mm too short, most of the time barely touching the conductive pads on the body, so of course they only occasionally work. I cannot imagine a manufacturer would make such a big mistake so am I missing something? I bought the cleaner from new so it is entirely standard. I noticed Gaugemaster are now selling it, does anyone know if they have improved it?

This is for information only. I wanted to fit a TTS decoder to my old Lima class 66. I tried unsuccessfully to get it to work but I suspect the motor was hitting the current limit of the TTS. So I was thinking of putting a new Hornby drive unit in as you can still obtain these, but this meant modifying the chassis to take the new motor. Imagine my surprise when searching through "Peters Spares" to find you can buy the new Hornby chassis as a spare part. I then thought will my old Lims body fit? Well I ordered the motor bogie, the new Hornby chassis and a new non powered bogie and amazingly it all fits. The body the weight the cab units, the only thing that didn't was the buffers. So if you want a better Lima class 66, this is obviously the way to do it. Of course my TTS now works properly.

@richmarsh that is exactly my point. I can see your point having got it to work properly I don't blame you for not wanting to touch anything. I can think of of a few reasons for it doing this, but I will keep them to myself.

Yes, you are right. There is probably something wrong in their code, but you nor I is going to be able to fix it. Usually, with these types of faults it is very difficult to reproduce once it has been fixed. When I have encountered these sorts of faults in my previous profession, it is normally a case of looking at the code and trying to figure out how it could possible get it wrong, so a fix can be put in for the next batch. The purpose of this forum is how to fix it so it works, which has been covered.

RAF96 I would suspect by doing what he did the fault has been fixed. It would be interesting though if you play with those values, what happens. It probably was programmed wrong at the production plant. The thing that is more worrying is that there might be a batch out there with the same fault, but at least there is a post now on how to fix them.

I am not surprised they want them back, they will probably analyse what is wrong and you have a splendid example. As I said on the previous thread doing what you did shouldn't have made any difference but for some reason it did, which is probably due to something weird happening in the software. At least Hornby are doing all the right things, which will long term, probably mean that they will sort it out. We all make mistakes it is just how quick we at fixing them, that is important.

As Jane says on this loco it doesn't really matter if you get it round the wrong way. On diesels or locos with lights if you get the connector round the wrong way the lights won't work, but it won't damage anything. The only thing is the controller says forward you loco will go backwards and vice versa, if you get the connector round the wrong way. Most of the time though you probably won't notice. I must admit unless it is a diesel and I can't see a marker for pin 1, then I just insert and hope for the best. You can run the loco with the tender lid off, so you can check it against your other locos. If you are going to turn the header round, make sure all the power is off.

It is probably the same as an Adams. On mine a used a wired 6 pin decoder and changed the connector. Wired 6 pin decoders have a shorter wiring harness are generally smaller.

That is really screwy according to the data sheet all you have done is enable DC and DCC running. I could understand it if bit 0 was set. What might be interesting is if you change it back to 2 and see if the fault is still cured. I don't know the detail of what these things have, but I am wondering if it keeps a local copy of CV29, that you cannot see. By changing it, it forced to software to reread it and cure the error.

Either way I am going to have some spares. I only need one. The class 50's secondhand, go for stupid money, this one had a missing buffer so I got it a lot cheaper.

I would endorse that about TTS decoder and current. Once I found out that they had a current limit, so I knew it wouldn't blow up I decided to put one in my Lima class 66. It kept stopping and starting as it hit supposely the current limit. It must have been that as when I put back the original decoder (not Hornby as I needed a higher current limit) it went back to working perfectly ok. I did put one in a 5 pole ringfield based HST but that failed due to overheating. So if it is not a modern loco with a low current motor, I would forget TTS. If you do want to go with sound then you can get Zimo sound decoders for less than £100 and CoastalDCC do LokSound decoders for considerable less than the £120. There are alo a load of generic ones that are about £75.

I do mine in a different way. Rather than trying to screw a parallel thread nylon screw into a self tapped hole (which is asking for trouble) I tap both holes out with a 3 mm tap, and then use 3mm nylon screws for both brush holders. That way you don't have to worry about mixing them up when you put it back together, and it is a neater solution. On the very late motors with the thick brush base plate, I found you can tap out the plastic with 3mm tap and use short laptop screws. The other thing that I found was incredibly important is to add extra pickups to all the wheels.

It is out there, it is just in peoples heads. It is a bit like going into a Ford Dealer and if you are lucky there is a Storeman that knows exactly what part fits which car and what other parts you can use. Coming back to Hornby even though they are assembled in China, they are designed in the UK, so each designer knows which parts go to make up the completed model and I assume that they make up the parts lists. I even found that people like parts suppliers don't always know, like when I asked for help on a A4, 5 pole ringfield motor gear retainer. After 3 mails I got the answer "I didn't know you could do that", but certain people do know. As was the case with the Fowler Tank drive gears, someone on another site had compared the gears and found that they used the same part on the A3 loco.

I ordered a set to do my own comparison. I will let you know.

Thanks Going Spare. I checked the shape and they look about the same. My main concern was the hole that they fit in. I have some Bachmann ones that look the same but the hole is slightly bigger and I didn't want to drill the body to take the bigger mounting bush. If not I will wait, it looks like Hornby are expecting to get new ones in. As for the comment about them all having different part numbers, that is true but from what I have found from experience and members on this site and others, is that Hornby quite often use the same part across different models. So often the part is the same but just has a different part number, most manufacturers do the same, it reduces development time and production costs. The step plate is part of the ladder and just clues on top of the buffer. I know as one of mine fell off.

To be quite honest it doesn't really matter, I am just answering the question. The Elite doesn't always work with all decoders. It could be because there is "Stay Alive" present or just an incompatibility with certain decoders. It seems to be an issue with newer designed ones. So to the average user as long as they know which controllers work with which decoders that is all that matters. I just don't use the ones that don't work with my Elite. Sometimes it is just the Elite gets itself in a muddle, which is why I suggested turning it off and starting again. Incidentally I didn't mention code, just how it was implimented. I will add the one really good bit about the Elite is the ease with which it sets up the read of data, basically the menuing function, the Fleishmann can read CVs but it is not so easy. The only issue with the Elite is the lack of an "Enter" key , using that push button with the rotary encoder means it quite often enters the wrong value. That is why I use the Elite for programming and my Fleishmann for running the main layout.

All I can say is the Fleishmann does it differently and quicker. The NMRA requirements will just say how to read it probably with a timing diagram, probably similar to many other communication specifications I have read and implimented over the years. How you decide to do that in your software is usually up to the implimentor. So if they decide to read it five times or once they probably will still meet the specification, but I will have another read it of it, just in case. It can also depend on the devices (integrated circuits) you use to do the implimentation. From what I have managed to read DCC does not have a dedicated IC to do the hardware layer so I assume most of it is done in software and again this is highly dependant on how it is coded. Either way without the technical jargon, I have found with some devices Elite doesn't always work as I am sure do many of the other controllers on the market at the moment. I did contact DCC Concepts asking if they had had any similar issues, but they seemed to have decided not to answer my very poilte email (and yes it was).

I am assuming that the decoder still functions. The decoder doesn't have any "stay alive" connected to it, because that can cause that to happen. I have had issues with the Elite doing the same with certain decoders, DCC concepts and Gaugemaster but Bachmann did seem to work ok. The only thing I did notice and this is weird, is turn the unit off wait about an hour and then try again. This is only a theory, but I think the Elite has a bit of a timing issues with some decoders because when mine didn't work I tried it on my second controller (a Fleishmann) and it worked every time. I also noticed that the Elite takes two attempts to read data whereas the Fleishmann did it in one. So I don't know if the Elite takes two readings and compares them or not.

Does anyone know if class 31 buffers will fit the latest class 50 loco? You can still get the class 31 buffers but not the class 50 ones. So if these fit, I can use them. I probably can get anything to fit if I try, but I don't want to damage the model.

It isn't you just have to be careful. As I say getting the tender top is usually the most difficult bit. Just take your time and don't be in a rush. Just make sure the decoder is insulated, there is a lot of metal in the tender for it to short out against. Oh, and buy one of those tools for removing the 4 pin lead. If you are going to take the tender apart it is a good idea to separate it from the loco, to avoid one of those 4 pin wires breaking.

It is not a basic question. Anway on this model the DCC decoder is in the tender. So you read the maintenance manual that comes with the loco and it will tell you how to get the tender body off. I did mine but I can't remember if it is one screw or two. Normally you unscrew the screws (you will need a small philips/posidrive head screwdriver) and pull the tender top either forwards or backwards (again in the instructions). Once the tender lid is off at the back of the tender you will see a rectangular socket with 8 pins. Into this there will be an 8 pin header, bit like in your PC, if you have ever opened it. Remove this header, and put the decoder header in its place. The decoder should have something to indicate pin 1, as will the socket, so make sure pin 1 goes to pin 1.If it is a Hornby decoder you will need to insulate the decoder by placing it in a bit of heat shrink, or a plastic sleeve of some kind, if you use some other manufacturer it should come ready sleeved. Now just put the tender back together and you are done. It usually takes longer to get the tender lid off without damaging it, than fitting the decoder. I forgot to mention, you need an 8 pin decoder.