ColinB

I would have thought if you had the wrong worm drive it wouldn't mesh properly with the crown gear (I think that is what they call it). The motor looks exactly the same as fitted into the range of 0-6-0 locos and amazingly they are really cheap from Hornby, I have just ordered 3. Slow running I would have thought would be more of a motor issue. Lendons also do the bare motor, it comes with a brass worm which looks a bit finer than the black one, so you might have to take it off and put the black one on.Have you tried turning the motor by hand just to check that it is meshing properly, if it is not meshing properly that might be why it is running slow.

On mine I watched it go round when I was trying to identify the issue. The front bogie sort of oscillates going up and down, so of course it takes minimal effort for it to lift off the rails. As I say the Fowler tank does it, as does the Railroad A1 and the Bachmann 4mt tank. With the Bachmann you can bend the spring clip and that cures it. I thought it was just mine until I was fitting sound for a friend and noticed his did it. If you just run them on straight track then there is no issue. The trouble is it is a compromise, if you make the spring for the bogie too strong it lifts the front driving wheel off the track, similarly make it too weak and it derails.

Firstly you don't say which turntable you are using. I assume it must be the Peco turntable. I would use a digital encoder instead of a potentiometer and use two digital input ports to read the signal ( it is a gray code). Sounds like an interesting project, sorry I cannot be of more help. The mechanical bit is the most difficult.

To be quite honest most parts are made by robots, which generally are sourced from Germany. I used to work in automotive and when you walk through a car plant there are virtually no people except at "End of line" when the cars come off the line. It really comes down to cost of land, energy and those sort of things and sweeteners from Government. You do find in places like Turkey they use labour rather than machines as it is sometimes cheaper (machines can cost millions), so a lot of the time it comes down to EU or Government grants. The last project I worked on before I retired, we got our PCBs from China, until I went to an exhibition and found you could get a better product sourced from the UK, surprise, surprise they both used the same machinery, but the guy in the UK didn't have all the transport costs. The trouble with products from China is that 10% is considered a reasonable failure rate and of course there is no such thing as intellectural property. As someone said to me once it is much easier to "Outsource" to a supplier as it is not your fault when it all goes wrong whereas if you source from within there is nobody to blame other than yourself. So if your PPE don't arrive from China, it isn't your fault for picking the wrong supplier, you were just let down.

Sorry you are both missing the point, the front bogie is so light it derails on its own, nothing to to do with pony trucks, the Fowler/Stanier tank suffers from the same issue. So nothing to do with flangeless wheels etc. I double checked my loco, you cannot easily add a tension spring, what I have done is glued a sliver of phosphor bronze weight to the front bogie to give it more weight, this corrects the issue. It is not my idea, it is from a previous post on this site identifying the issue raised by someone else. You cannot add the flanged wheels to the pony track, it wouldn't go round the bends, if you removed the front bogie then probably the loco wouldn't derail, but that is not practical. The Railroad A1 suffers from the same issue but the fix for this is to add the spring.

He says it derails, it is nothing to do with the pony truck. If it is the same issue that I had, the front bogie pings off the track on a curve then next point or straight the effect derails the loco. So basically you have to stop the front bogie disengaging with the track. It is a common issue, as I said the Railroad A1/A3s do it, as well as many Bachmann tank engines. As I said previously, there are several posts on this site identifying the issue.

@Andy_Mac I entirely agree with what you say but now we have got to the point where we can only get it from China. I regularly want small screws to fix my locos every time I do a search on EBay nobody in the UK does them, so I have to buy them from China. Blame it all on the "Iron Lady" she thought the future was "Shopping Malls" and we can see where that has got us, even the ones in the US are dying. Having said that some of our industries did need a big kick up the backside. I am a retired electronics/software design engineer and all through my career I seem to be always kicking my managers into doing the right thing, sadly quite often they didn't and people lost their jobs. Either way, this does not solve the issue of the expensive flexitrack. I don't know if Peco still make that in this country. Amazon is really expensive for some things, so it is always a good idea to search in other places.

Why is it every fault is a back to back issue. I have had a lot of back to back issues on my old Hornby Ringfield based locos and they definitely don't do this. For a start they either derail or you hear a clomp as they jump over the point or they stop and blow up the decoder. To be quite honest most modern locos are better than that. The way the front bogies are designed makes it virtually impossible, I know because one of the things I have done to my old locos is replace the wheels of the front bogie to new ones. I had exactly this issue with an A4 and a Bachmann diesel, I imagine it is a large radius point, either curved or a normal large radius turnout. As the loco turns it is possible for it to short on the guide rails of the point, it took a while for me to work it out. I wondered when I bought the new Peco electrofrog points why they had the facility to isolate the frog, this why. So what I did is isolate the "frog" as Peco recommend but don't use a switch off the point to power it, use one of those autofrog devices, the problem will disappear. Actually thinking about it, it was a renumbered Railroad Mallard that caused the issue, so there must me something about its wheel geometry, but as I said the Bachmann class 47 did the same.

@morairamike what the hell are you on about, the configuration of the loco has no effect it doesn't matter if it has a two wheeled or four wheeled front bogie, you can still add pressure to it, also the bogie can still bounce about if the design isn't correct. As for the pony truck, read my post properly, I said use the spring off a pony truck to exert pressure on the front bogie, it is the only one that is stiff enough. Modern locos don't have a pony truck spring because as you rightly said it is fixed, so you have to buy one that fitted an old loco. This idea is not new, I got it off a previous post identifying the same issue. Anyone who owns this loco will be fully aware of the issue.

Yes, I had this issue, the front bogie is really floppy and pings off on any curve, mine are large sweeping bends and it still fell off.. There are two things you can do, either add a bit of weight to it, in my case a sliver of phosper bronze ( I am into building clasic motorcycles so I got a bit at an autojumble) or which I think is a better solution, get a spring from an old Hornby Ringfield based A4 or Duchess or the like pony truck and put it under the screw that holds the front bogie on. This is so it exerts some force on it. You might have to adjust its length to get it right, but it works. I did this fix on my A1 Tornedo and another A1 that had similar issues.

To avoid going further into PPE and eventually politics a really good example is Wrenn locos. I am old enough to have been around when you could buy them new. They were always expensive, but once they "shut up" as the owner retired, the prices shot up. An unrebuilt West Country loco went from £100 to £400, especially if it was blue. The unrebuilt Battle of Britain/West Country Wrenn locos still fetch premium price, which although are solid don't really match a modern Hornby loco for detail, but even the new Hornby West Country/Battle of Britain fetch premium prices secondhand.

@VESPA No it is not that the error is at the host end. As I said in my earlier post Hornby admitted to it. Trouble is normally in most organisations you would walk up to someone's desk and mention there is an issue and it gets resolved geneally very quickly. When people work remotely, as is the case at the moment, issues take days to get resolved, I used to work for a multinational, on one occasion it took flying to the USA to resolve one issue, it is amazing what standing at someones's desk can achieve. It is very easy to ignore an email.

@bulliedboy It is really concerning, my card was a standard Visa card that I have had for years and it had the right expirary date. Sorting out payment is sort of important to any business, so I am surprised they have not sorted it out. I remember in the last days of BHS just before they folded, I would go in there and they were so short staffed that nobody was manning the tills. I thought at the time, you have got to be losing business, as I watched people come up to the tills and walk away. I suppose for Hornby retail sales is probably a very small part of their business.

Firstly, I am really sad to see Track Shack gone, I only realised they were there in the last year, their service was exceptional. As for profiteering, whenever you look at EBay or Amazon it is always a good idea to do a Google search at the same time. I recently wanted a particular Hornby loco, no longer made, on EBay they were going for silly prices, I eventually found one at a model railway dealer for less. This has happened with Skaledale mdels as well. People sometimes get carried away with EBay. As for the SL100, isn't that the 1 metre long length of flexible track, if so, I can understand why it is expensive. For that price I imagine it had free postage and packing, Royal Mail won't accept it as it is too long for their equipment so you are talking private courier, hence the price. If you are going to buy flexible track, it is either your local model shop or the bulk order from Hattons or Rails. It is one of the few items I regularly buy from my local model shop, although he complains that he makes very little profit on it.

Yes, I am glad I am not the only one it annoys. I was thinking of writing to them and mentioning that a good software upgrade might be to use the ACC key in certain instances as an enter key. The problem is as you pust the knob down to enter something it moves slightly and puts in the next number, again you could easy fix it in software by remembering the value before the switch was pressed and not change the value if it happened withing a certain time of pressing the switch, but I must admit it isn't something you think about in design. It is easier to just multifunction another key. The Fleishmann has the same system but I haven't noticed it doing it, but I suspect that bit of software is a bit better, mind you the Elite is tons easier to use, so they got that right.

I had the same issue, in my case the card was valid and yes the website update didn't work. I phoned up Hornby Customer Relations and did it all by phone. When I mentioned the website wasn't working the person on the other end said that it was not working today ( that was the 5th of August). There is already a thread on this. I think Hornby are having internal process issues, as I say my card was valid, I know that because I paid YouChoos later in the day.

Yes RAF96 that one would fit the PCB, I would have to change the knobs, that one has a "cut out" whereas mine has splines. The ones I fitted work perfectly, in fact they must have always been a bit dodgy as control is much better now and I have 3 spares. I didn't realise that was the one from the Elite. The thing they don't mention in the spec is that when you sample the two edges you have to wait a little after the edge happening as because it is a mechanical switch you get a bit of switch bounce as the edges change. I imagine as the switches get older so the "bounce" gets worse, which is why the software gets confused. The really good thing about the Fleishmann is that you can control two locos simultaniously. The Elite one obviously comes from Japan or China.

Well I mailed Fleishmann and basically got an answer which basically said we don't know. Fortunately the Chinese ones arrived and actually worked, the only issue is that the spindle is too long. I could try to shorten them but given how fragile these things are, I will live with it. I don't know if Elite uses the same encoder, but it will be similar. Interestingly once I got the old ones out, it appears they were made by Alps, but it appears they no longer sell them on RS or Farnell, well not that style. In garytheskate's case I would say his encoder meeds replacing as that is how my Fleishmann first started showing a fault.

I have one of these, in fact I have just converted it to a 5 pole motor and DCC (I got bored during lockdown and Peters Spares were doing "Gordon" five pole units). The tender should just unclip from the base, no screws. You might need to use a knife down one side between the tender top (coloured plastic and bottom which is black plastic) to get it to unclip, unless someone has glued it because it was always falling off (they usually are so loose they just fall off). As for the drive it can be loads of things the favorite is the either the motor brushes, armature or the little brass gear has become loos on the motor shaft. Either way it is generally fixable, Lendons has replaceable armatures.

Even with the J36, I had to fit a sugar cube speaker as although the round speaker suppiled does sort of fit I found the top plate didn't sit right. I would go with the sugar cube speaker it is better sound and easier to position. Be careful though on some sugar cube speakers there are are spring connections that need insulating, they are the sort of thing that move as as you put the body on and short out the decoder. Does the J36 sound like a Fowler? It is just that sounds a good idea for my Fowlers.

It has to be the wired version as the "direct fit" is too long with the pins. With the wired version you can wrap it, so the wire sits at the bottom of the barrel and the decoder at the top. I am sure it shows you in the instructions or it might has been on this site. If you want to go mad they do a super small version at £34=00.

There was a post about this a few weeks ago. I know my Zimo locomotives do sound in analogue mode, but as Chrisaf says it is uncontrollable. TTS Decoders don't do sound in analogue and on the new ones even the basic running in DC is disabled. If you want sound you really need to go DCC, that way you get the sound tailored to that particular loco, especially the whistles which seem to vary between locos.

Usually the glue doesn't stick that well to Hornby plastic, so probably if you wedge a small jewellers screwdriver under the fishtail, it will lever out.

Well I used a 6 pin Zimo one, I think it was a MX617. This is my personal experience but I have found that a lot of decoders have a thermal issue. The Zimo definitely fits, I don't know about any thermal issues as I just tried it out on a small piece of track to make sure it worked properly.. The thing you get with a Zimo as opposed to a Hornby decoder is that it has been designed to drive larger motor currents, so the design should dissapate the heat better.

What might be a good idea is to revert to dc and see if you still have the issue, but I doubt it. I know it is a pain to get to the DCC connector without breaking the coach end bits. Looking at the service sheet it has two traction tyres. They may have degraded, my Pendolino ones did, I had only used it when I first bought it and two years later after being stored, they were shot. As I say you should hear the wheels slipping, just watch the wheels as it goes up the incline you will see if it is slipping. The decoder should not make any difference to top speed although I did have a LaisDCC one that did, but that was well faulty and it wasn't Hornby. I eventually used it as a pure light switch in a DMU dummy end. You do know you need two decoders one for the main loco and the other to just control the lights in the dummy unit. What you could also do is remove the capacitor across the motor that sometimes gives issues. In my experience Hornby decoders either work or basically burn out if there is something wrong, so I suspect yours is working ok. These units don't weigh much, so the traction tyres are critical to their operation.