ColinB

It might be the Loco to tender connection. If it is the same as a lot of my Duchess class locos then it is a pin going into a sprung loaded hole in the tender. As the loco moves it loses connection. On mine I replaced it with a wire connection.

There are two favorites, it is either the self tapping screw that holds the metal brush retainer on, or underneath the metal brush retainer spade connection, is a metal post that it rests on. The metal brush retainer is the piece of spring steel that stops the brush and spring from falling out if you didn't know.

Believe me, I know how frustrating it can be. Firstly your Elite may appear to you like a "brick" as we used to call automotive modules when the update failed, but you can get back into the bootloader by powering up and pressing the "Stop" button. As I said before you have to do this every time you try PC set with a different value. I suppose the good news is the software is using the right comms port, because it managed to tell the Elite how to delete its main program. Trouble is the delete command is probably only 3 bytes of data so it always works. Unfortunately, the Elite is rather old which means its bootloader was written ages ago, now there are better ways to do it but even though you can download new software, you cannot update the system in the unit for doing it. Even modern systems go wrong, my friend's son in law "bricked" his iphone so it still happens and Apple basically writeoff the phone. As RAF96 says it should work eventually, I know that is not much help.

Yes, you will find a post of mine about fitting a resetable fuse. I bought them but I never got round to it, I think I just bought better decoders. I got roughly the same values for my Hornby ringfields, which is why I could not understand how a Hattons 1.6 amp one could die. I replaced it with a Zimo standard £20.00 one and have had no issues since. Since then I have used Zimo for all my DCC decoders, at £20.00 they are £4.00 dearer than the Hornby on discount, but they seem to be a lot harder to break.

It might be that there is an issue with the way your locos is picking up its power. TTS decoders are very "twitchy" about power or lack of it, which means they stop when they intermittantly don't receive power. Then as the loco rests on the track it suddenly finds power again and starts up again. So where your loco was working ok on DC it may well stumble on a TTS decoder. TTS decoders seem to worse at this than normal decoders.

The issue is as I found when converting my ringfield motors, is that the maximum ratings for some of the these DCC decoders are not real life values. On a couple of they the loco stalled at a point because of an issue with the wheels and the decoder fried. The specifications for these decoders ! assume take no account of being squashed up inside a loco body where there is very little cooling. Zimo make a 2 amp version which when I talked to YouChoos said that it should be good for 2 amps. As some consolation when converting my old locos, I blew up Hornby, DCC Concepts and Hattons decoders with obvious over current, although their specifications said I was well within them. The Hattons one was specified at 1.6 amps max, but it fried when my Ringfield based loco stalled at a point.

On my version there were 3 values for PC in the drop down menu, "1,2 or 3". Try it with each different value until it works. It should work eventually. I think the issue is on the values that don't work the PC is downloading the data faster than the Elite can accept it, so it fails. Changing the drop down menu item I assume puts a delay in between each bit of data it downloads, so that the Elite can keep up. The other thing to check is that the com port it thinks, it is using, is right, you check this in Windows Manager.

Yes, it is standard 1980s plus Hornby Ringfield setup. The power bogie pickups up one side of the power and the other bogie pickups up the other side. You just need to clean the axle up from old solidified oil and oil sparingly when you put them back. On some of mine I managed to put an extra pickup on the insulated side of the non powered bogie, which made then run a bit better. On some of the later China made ringfields they did add wheel pickups. Putting pickups on the wheels with traction tyres is a bit of a waste of time as rubber is a brilliant insulator, so unless the wheel is running on its rim it will never pickup power.

It stands for tooling, which as atom3624 has already said means they have changed all the moulds tthey used to make the model. If you watched James May program about Hornby, the previous owners threw away all the previous tooling, so the comment is no surprise. Tooling is what costs the money when making a new model.

I did buy mine secondhand so perhaps the previous owner had issues. Someone asked me to fit LokSound to their one, so seeing as I had the opportunity I fitted mine with Zimo so I could compare the two. Mine doesn't seem underpowered and now I have fixed the front bogie is running really well. Mind you I only ever run 4 carriages max, so perhaps that is why I don't have any speed issue.

Yet again with the front bogie derailing on a loco. So anyway with my success with the Hornby P2, I thought I will remove the spring arrangement with a view to adding some weight. So I removed the sprung metal spring from the bogie and before I went any further check that it still ran. Surprise it runs perfectly without the spring and no weights. Has anyone else had this issue? It seems the spring was preventing it dropping down properly to engage with the rails. It always derailed at the double slip which always seem to be an issue with most of my locos.

Did you try my suggestion of isolating the frogs and putting in an autofrog device? As I said previously, it worked for me. What I did with mine to test it, I cut the links to isolate the frog. With your Mallard because of the long wheelbase it should go over the point even though there is no power to the frog. If it fixes the issue, then add the autofrog so it works for slow moving or short wheelbase locos.

I was watching "Sams Trains" review of this loco last night and he highlighted most of the issues with it, but surprisingly he did not have an issue with the front bogie derailing. So either he got a good one or I got a bad one. What he was saying though, was that this is marketed as a non Railroad vesrion but the reality of it was that it was only really Railroad quality.

I doubt they will beat the Hornby price, unless Hornby have changed it. I paid £2.99 a motor which is cheaper than anyone. I wonder if they will ever get round to sourcing the base plate X8019SK.

This is one of the few locos than you can run without the tender, well on mine you can, so you could try it without the tender The tender is very loosely coupled to the loco so I don't think it is that and anyway it is not heavy enough to do that. As I said previously you just had to watch the front bogie to see the issue. I had the issue with the tender lifting the loco on my Schools loco so I know what you mean, but a Schools tender is substantially heavier than a P2s. Anyway I don't have the issue anymore since I added weight to the front bogie as I keep saying. That was on the advice of another member. As for the sound, my TTS is in the loco so I squeezed a sugar cube into the front of the smoke box, but since I got so much distortion I am putting an ice cube in the gap above the pony truck area. I could move it all to the tender, but I added a front light so I would lose that function. Anyway, for me the subject is closed I know how to fix the derailing.

I assume they are X04 motors, ringfields take more than modern locos, but not as much as the X03/X04 type. As Chrisaf says if they are X04 motors it might be that they need remagnetising. If they are ringfields you can buy replacement armatures either off EBay or Lendons still do them. I think that is a better solution than CD drives.

So it looks like you are all set, don't use a Hornby decoder they are a bit suspect with Ringfield motors stall current, Hattons ones seem to have a similar issue. The reason I know this, is both sorts died when the loco stalled at a point, the back to back spacing was wrong on the front bogie. I replaced them both with Zimos and have had no further issues.

I solder to the outside of the rails, you can hardly see it. I have found it is better to use separet flux as the solder runs quicker and you don't need so much heat. The less heat you use the less likely there is of melting the sleepers.

As you have a lot of room in the loco, change the speaker to an Iphone one. You will be amazed at the difference. It is also an awful lot easier to insulate.

I did mail them saying that it was not a critism but were they thinkiing of improving the tails. I have not received a reply as yet. The thing is, it is a good idea, but if word spreads that they easily pull out it could ruin a quite promising venture.

I did actually get a guy on EBay to make me some that just clip under the PL10. He doesn't seem to be doing them at the moment.

Hornby themselves have the later motor in, I have just ordered 3 and had them delivered. I assume you were looking at Peter's Spares. They are also very cheap. The Hornby version is motor plus pickups plus 4 pin DCC connector.

I toyed with this idea for a while, you can get circuits that you put in line with the bank of points switches that will basically latch the signal and drive an LED. A guy on EBay was doing them. The problem I have is that I want to know the actual point has switched and the only way I can see to do that is to put something across one of the ouput tracks to tell if there is voltage there. You could probably do it with a bridge rectifier connected to one side of the turnout which would drive an LED. On the Peco Electrofog points with the frog wire you could probably use that.

I know @Friendly Fryer I often complain about things like this, but I get told off on this site. Mine is a Railroad version so I suppose there is some excuse. The thing I cannot understand is don't they ever test any of these models or is it the normal response "that will be alright when it is at production level". Sadly I have heard that phase far too often and it is always wrong, sometimes as with cars the "Buyer" does a "cost save" without telling the Engineer/Designer. I was testing my P2 out last night just to see if I was seeing the same issues, it doesn't derail but the TTS decoder was definitely doing some really weird things. I also noticed the sound is pretty distorted. That TTS decoder is over a year old so it looks like I will just have to accept it. At one point it just suddenly slowed down to a crawl, I thought "oh no there goes the decoder", then after I took the speed to zero and increased it, it ran quite happily. I am now in the process of trying a better speaker (it was a sugar cube).

If you are going to the effort of converting to DCC, one enhancement I would suggest is making the loco pickup power on both wheels. You have to be a bit careful you don't increase the "drag" on the wheels too much otherwise the loco will just slide, but it is definitely a worthwhile improvement.