ColinB

Now you have got it all back together go round the back of the wheels with a cotton bud to get rid of any dirt or oxide and possibly down the pickups. It may be that certain parts of the wheels have dirt or oxide on them that stops it picking up. The other thing is to check you didn't over oil the axles, lots of oil makes a good insulator. The other thing that can be an issue is if the magnet in the motor has lost its magnetism. Try attaching wires to the brushes directly to get the motor running, sometimes if you can get the motor running it removes any oxide on the commutator. You said though, that it worked before you did the maintenance, so my favorite is excessive oil on the axles.

I would use a Peco track cleaner, it works really well. You don't want anything too abrasive as it will remove the plating on the rail.

Right looking at the web your Jinty is very old about the 1980's and has a X04 motor in it. My one is the red LMS version, but I assume it is the same. The green wire connects the two pickups on the front and back wheels, then connects to suppression circuit of a capacitor and inductor, a piece of insultaion is covering mine. From here there is a red wire that connects to the other end of the inductor and goes up to the motor. If look from the top of your chassis with the motor right on top, you will see a spring piece of wire, this is held in place at the top by a brass screw and at the other ends attaches to the two motor brushes. On one side of this sprung piece of wire is a piece of sleeving. The red wire with its piece of copper goes between the insulated sleeve and the brush, if you look at it closely so will see it is the same shape as the top of the brush. On your one it might be all the wires are green. The other brush is just held in by the clip, as this connects it to the chassis, on my one there are no pickups on the other side as it uses the axles. Hope this helps. Looking at your post again it looks like the pickups have just fell out, there should be a slot in front of the front wheel and one in front of the back wheel for them to fit. It looks like they are small sword types.These motors take a lot of current so it may be you just haven't got a good enough connection. Just a piece of extra info, if you ever get hold of the latest 0-6-0 chassis, you will find that your existing body should fit it. I recently did that to mine, which is why the old one is sitting in front of me. I just got fed up with the noise and it would have been a pain to convert to DCC because of the high current.

I have probably in excess of 100 locos equipted with Hornby, Zimo and other decoders, quite a few with TTS sound, Zimo and Loksound. So far the only ones I have had no issues with are the Zimos and Losound. The Hornby ones are perfectly ok if you use them in a modern Hornby, deviate from that and if your motor stalls, because your valve gear got stuck then it is bye, bye decoder. I stupidly put one in an old Hornby I converted to DCC, it hit a point because the pony truck spacing was a bit out and stalled, needless to say it died Similarly with TTS decoders, be careful where you mount them, cooling is an issue, be careful when running them in a hot loft. There are a ton of posts on this site stating exactly that. So yes you have been very lucky. I had one TTS decoder in a HST that was happilly running round the track on a hot day when suddenly the loco stopped, I opened up the loco to check the decoder and it had failed with the familliar burning smell. If you are in to electronics go look at the size of the bridge rectifier SMD diodes on a Hornby decoder, then look at the ones on a Zimo, they are about half the size, which generally means it will pass less current and dissipate less heat (lack of surface area). So now I always check that there is sufficient flow of air around them. For their price TTS decoders are brilliant, I must have over twenty of them, so I must think they are ok, you just have to treat them with respect. One my jobs was working in the Service Bay Diagnostics for a large car manufactiuring company, designing electronic equipment to test modules on the car. To us when a module went wrong it was the really serious, until you realise that the amount that we used to deal with was less than 1% of our total prduction. Most cars go through their life having few or no issues, but to the person whose car dies it is the end of the world. So as I say, you have been lucky.

@RAF96 yes exactly.

@Yelrow that is ridiculous, you cannot quote that. I paid £30.00 for my Fleishmann, but I gather if I wanted to buy it new it would cost £400. If a new user wanted to buy an Elite, they retail for about £220, Railmaster is £80.00. If someone read your post, as you said to me, they would get completely the wrong idea. I bought my Elite for about £100 on EBay, it came with a copy of Railmaster and two accessory modules, but I would never tell anyone that is what they cost. Actually, I did only discus Hornby products only where I do a comparison do I suggest other products. I gather that is allowed on this site. It is like when converting tender driven locos to DCC, would you rather I recommend the user uses a Hornby decoder which I know will die if the motor stalls, or buy a competative product that won't.

This thread was not about how good someone is in testing compatibility it was how easy is it to connect the Select to some external software, which as we have established, it sadly fails. The Select unit is good value for money, which explains why so many people have them and Chrissaf is always writing posts as to how to fix them. This thread asked where the guy could buy some software to link to it, which he can't, so I think we have adequately covered it. I must admit I didn't know my Elite had a favorites menu, it is obviously not that obvious, the Fleishmann remembers it by default. The Fleishmann also has some annoying features, where the Elite actually does it better but the average user wouldn't notice that until they have used the unit for a while. As for people reading this and being put off with buying Hornby products, I doubt it, the Select is probably the cheapest still and with new software virtually does what an Elite does. This thread was covering a specific issue nothing else. As for my generic comments, perhaps they are, I just look at the issue and provide what I think is a reasonable solution. To me Hornby does some excellent products the TTS decoders are excellent value for money, as long as you realise they have limitations, but some manufacturers make better products. The thing that is worth remembering is if someone buys a product and later finds it doesn't meet their needs, they are going to be more upset than if they never bought the product.

I have a Fleishman Twin Centre, once you get to grips with it programming a turntable is also very easy. For a manual originally written in German it is excellant. As I said, the Hornby products are good value for money, but as I also said, to get the best out of them you need the railmaster software so we are talking £300 for the Elite plus Railmaster. I am lucky I got my Fleishmann for £30.00 as it had no leads, I took a gamble and won. I also had to buy the upgrade software and a USB to RS232 lead. Now would I have paid full price for it, I don't know, but it really is a good product. Even though I am a PC programmer, if I was going for a new DCC controller I would probably buy a system that I could control from a digital pad, the one YouChoos sell looks promising and when I enquired about writing my own interface it appears it is possible. The system that Sam uses to do his loco tests looks easy to use.

When mine screeched it was the bearing behind the brass drive wheel. I squirted some silicane lubricant on it to cure it. The other thing that happened a lot with mine was the traction tyres squeeling especially in the case of the Britannia where I didn't have exactly the right ones. Funny it only did it after the loco had been running for about 10 minutes.

Ok, we will keep this generic. Do a web search of DCC decoder suppliers and generally they supply DCC controllers. So you follow the links and I think you will find what you want. The Germans and US seem to be a bit more professional on this, providing some decent products. It appears to get the best out of Elite or Select you need the Railmaster software, as the major failing of both of these products is the abity to remember settings, which is not an issue, until you start to program accessories which becomes a pain if you have more than a couple of points. I noticed this when I was looking into programming my Heljan turntable. Unfortunately, without a suitable lead the Select cannot work with the Railmaster software. It is a shame that Hornby didn't further enhance their Elite controller, it is a good product for when it was developed but without the ability to save settings it is severly limited going forward.

The wheels are definitely a good thing to do, mine runs much easier. Because of the weight of the levers, it is quite a decent carriage.

I must admit the Gaugemaster DCC decoders seem to be the worst ones I have and seeing that they are more expensive than the Zimo budget ones, I cannot see the appeal. I must admit I have not tried the Ruby series, but the old ones were very poor on my layout picking up the signal compared to a Zimo. As to programming I wonder if is a function of the track and leads as well as the controller, I know when I used to design microprocessor circuits reading was always an issue as you have to read the signal at a certain point of the waveform, if there is a ton of noise on the signal then it can get it wrong. So really it depends on the length of your programming track, length of connecting leads and how well your loco picks up the signal from the track. Even when using my Elite to program and read back TTS decoder data it sometimes takes the Elite a couple of goes to read a parameter, it obviously has some "retry" strategy, but even then sometimes I have to do the process again. I don't do a lot of CV programing other than to reset the decoder, or set CV150 on a TTS diesel decoder and or course setting the loco number. I assume they are suggesting the Ruby range as it very small, as I say I tend to use Zimo decoders as they are very small and very rugged and I get a really good service from YouChoos and so far have never blown one up that wasn't my fault. I agree with the previous contributer LaisDCC decoders are OK, seem to be tons better in the 21 pin format as compared to the 8 pin, but again that could be a function of the loco I fit them to.

I see your issue, I Googled it and that doesn't help. As it is DCC ready I would say that it is loco driven, Hornby don't seem to "DCC Ready" Ringfield motor types as the current tends to damage a Hornby decoder if it stalls. I suspect the tender is probably the same as a tender driven one, but with the motor and drive removed and different wheels. They seem to use up all their old Ringfield based tenders on their Railroad models, my Railroad Mallard has the same. It does mean the tender has lots of weight. I found the Service sheet and as Troublesome Truck said it is loco driven.

From what has been said it sounds like this came with TTS already fitted, so yes I agree with the rest it is return job. Obviously your one has tender pickups, before you send it back, check that none of the tender pickups are bent and touching things they shouldn't, just in case it is something simple.

Just found a big disadvantage of my one where it collects the bag one side and trows it out the other. If you are using streamline double track then there is not a gap big enough to put the "pickup" hook, that is probably why Hornby changed the design.

If they are NEM couplings, then all you do is pull out the coupling from the NEM pocket and clip the Hunt coupling into the NEM pocket.

If it is the same as mine as said previously, you can rewheel it quite easily. Now I have updated mine, my bigger question is did the Triang short coach like I have actually exist. I have a Bachmann one that is a full length coach, but my Triang one is severely shorter, also the corridor connections are offset rather than being in the centre of the end. With decent wheels with proper back to back spacing it happily goes round the railway without derailing on points.

I did get a mail back saying that they were looking into it, so we can only hope. The reason I was using them was I found that the NEM ones are always uncoupling, it got so bad on my Bachmann Mk1s that I bought the Bachmann permanently coupled option, but they give issues when you want to decouple them.

Just to let you know, the replacement Hornby wheels do fit on the old axles. So quite an easy fix really, it is just the cost of the replacement Hornby wheels that is the issue.

As I said in a previous post, I used a 6 pin wired (you need it wired so you can wrap it) Zimo decoder from YouChoos, the £20.00 special. It is slightly smaller than the Hornby, not that it matters for the Rocket but it also has a better specification.

OK, this is my last post on this. When I refer to RS232 I mean the method of communication, data bits, stop bits CLS signal etc. Go read a PIC manual about the implementation of the serial port. So there are quite a number of protocols that use this method. Then you have what we call in the profession the physical layer, these are the voltages that the communication protocol uses and the devices to achieve this. So if you look at a diagram of RS232 data format and RS485 they use different voltages but the same data format. So normally RS485 is 12 volts, now I am confused are Hornby using 12 volts for their end or 5 volts, obviously the USB end is 5 volts as it has always been. Hornby may well use their own PIC to do the conversion, but generally most people up to quite recently use the FTDL device, well they do in the motor industry. So they must be using the PIC chip that handles USB, unless they are doing it in software, I am sure the PIC with USB came out much later than the Elite, but again I could be wrong. Anyway for me it is not an issue, I have a Fleishman that uses an RS232 cable and comes with a manual explaining how to implement computer control. Surpisingly because PCs don't have RS232 ports anymore I have a USB to RS232 lead which I had to use to update the software. I cannot remember if Fleishmann use true RS232 or the 5 volt equivalent, I obviously did when I bought the lead.

I finally figured it out, after some web surfing. RAF96 you are right the Hornby system is 5 volts whereas the Lenx etc are 12 volts (I thought they were all 5 volts). The big thing we are missing is that it is basically RS232 with different voltage levels and a different connector. Most microprocessors only use RS232 as a communication protocol unless it is a special and more expensive. So as far as I can see, correct me if am wrong, what you actually want to talk to the Select box is a USB to RS232 lead, but one that has as its logic levels at 0 to 5 volts rather than -15 to +15 volts (I might be a bit wrong but they are somewhere about these values). You can buy these off RS to connect directly to micros. So basically you have to change the connector on the RS232 end to the Xpressnet connector. Some of the cables just come with leads so it is easier. I suspect this is what Hornby were going to do, this is what we did to the last product I worked on. As I said correct me if am wrong. If I had a Select I would try it out. The Elite probably has the FTDL chip internal to its circuit board to convert to RS232 so you don't need a special lead. The other issue with this sort of product is support, making sure it works with all versions of operating systems with different platforms as you have to load a driver, so from Hornby's point of view it is a maintenance nightmare so it may well not be the "bean counters" that made the decision to sell it.

This is quite standard to have 5 volts at one end and 12 volts at the other, a lot of the USB to rs232 converters have 5 volts at one end and the weird voltages that RS232 has at the other. On my projects at work we used them all the time, normally our supplier was always buying the wrong one. It is an FTDL chip if I remember rightly that does the conversion plus some ic from Maxim to do the voltage conversion, even negative ones, so it might a PIC in there or it could be an ARM processor, but who cares, it might even be an asic. I used to have to include their .DLL to get the USB to work. I must admit I haven't got as far as searching the web for the lead, I just did the check to see what it was and who used it, but it appears several manufacturers support this protocol. As I said Lenz along with a couple of other German manufacturers support it. The DigiKeijs DR5000 that YouChoos sell, even supports it. I hate to say it, in electronics very few people make things if they can buy them off the shelf, but now I know what I am looking for, I can do a better search. I doubt Hornby would have made it, they might have taken a standard one and modified it. The German manufacturers seem to be more up to speed on this stuff. The finger trouble happened when I converted the web address ro plain text, I am sure I only highlighted the web address and wrongly I just assumed that is all it would do, that was after I had two fatal errors trying to post mainly because of the web address bug.

I measured the old Triang axle against the Hornby replacement. They are virtually the same size, so if you are worried about the loose fit with the replacement wheels, then you could take the wheels off the Hornby axle and fit them to the Triang. Obviously, you would need to set the back to back spacing, but you could do that against a spare set once you have replaced one axle.

I went and retrieved my one from the loft (I had been sorting my old Triang stuff to get rid of it). It is easier than I said, the wheels just clip in. So pull them out by slighly pulling on the bogie to release them. I tried a pair of Hornby replacement wheels in the bogie, they fit but are a bit loose but they fit and it looks like they won't fall out. The thing that is also interesting now I have the replacement wheels on one side of the bogie and the original Triang wheels on the other side there is about a 1 mm difference between the back to back spacing of the two wheels. I might buy some more replacement wheels and see how it runs.