ColinB

Before you do any of this check the 4 pin connector between loco and tender, sometimes they are not fully home. That loco has tender pickups and the decoder is in the tender so it could be that the motor is just not connected. Generally if you can read the decoder parameters then it sounds like it is working properly.

Yes Jadlam had that instance a couple of years ago which they put up the price of some hard to get item. I must admit of late they have been pretty good, I have bought quite a few models off them recently that were priced very competitive. All I will say about Olivias is that if you want an item that has sold out everywhere else, they will have it, often at a price plus inflation if it is quite old. Generally I normally deal with Bure Valley as I would rather support a preserved railway with my purchases. Like a lot of other people my Hornby membership lapsed once I stopped getting the discount with them. I forgot Jadlam also do a points system a bit like Hornby, I recently got £5.00 off an already discounted loco because I had collected enough points, plus they do free post and packing.

Well they are not anymore. Bure Valley were doing Dwight D Eisenhower for less than £250, I got mine from Jadlam which was about the same price as they do free post and packing. Everywhere else they were about £280 going upwards.

I must admit I am surprised, 500 units is not a lot to sell and I doubt China likes doing a production run that small. The original HDs were about £280 which seems a more reasonable figure. If you Google that model, Hornby is the only one selling it at that discount. Mind you the new A4s have that dodgy tender connector, I must admit mine work fine, but it seems there have been issues with it.

I bought one this morning, I was amazed at the price reduction. I did buy the class 87 City of Glasgow at full price less 10% and now it is on a discount. It is surprising a couple of years ago you couldn't get the first Hornby Dublo Duchess of Atholl for love nor money unless you pre ordered it off Hornby. I picked up the HD Dwight D Eisenhower for a nearly good discount price, so obviously not many people wanted that one either.

This has been going on for a while, a luxury leather firm (maker of high class leather wallets) found because of the failure rate in China it was cheaper to get them made in the UK as it was cheaper and easier to manage. I know with PCBs I went to an electronics exhibition and a guy was saving that he could made a PCB for roughly the same price as one sourced from China. As I have said on many occasions a lot of stuff is made by machine, so it is probably the same machine whether it is in China or the UK. Watch Jenny Kirk's YouTube video on Dapol making wagons in Wales and lets face it their design may be old but those wagons sold by Dapol aren't that expensive. It is a British and US disease "lets outsource everything then whine like made when the Suez Canal is blocked".

Sam did a review of this loco and like me he assumed that they had updated it. It appears from his review that they changed the spring on the rear pony but not much else. It still has traction tyres which probably explains the poor running and no DCC socket. It is amazing that Hornby has sold out of them but there again it is relatively cheap. The downside was it still doesn't have a decent cab and no glazing to the windows. I am tempted to buy an old one and add a DCC socket and pack it full of "stay alive" to see if you can get a decent performing loco.

Yes I looked at this then realised that they don't do it in code 100, unless they have changed it.

Peco track is brilliant, I use code 100. You have the option of more track pieces and points come in two types insulated frog or electrofrog which has no dead spots because of the plastic frog. I have used it for the last 30 years. The only negative is it age hardens, so avoid secondhand track. To be honest I don't know why people get so wound up with the difference between DC and DCC. You can wire your layout for DC and then just wire how many tracks you have together. My layout was originally DC with isolating sections and switches, all I did is connect all the positives together and all the negatives together and attach them to DCC.

You have obviously not watched the program on the "Yesterday" channel called Train Truckers. According to the program it is quite often it is cheaper to send locos by road rather than use the main network tracks. I assume Network Rail charges them a fortune. I think the North Yorks Moors Railway said the same during one of their programs.

The issue with a lot of the "stay alives" I have used are that they are just a big capacitor/capacitors, diode and a few resistors. The ones that work properly have a transistor/fet in the circuit plus a few other components. This avoids the capacitor charging up during the short programming cycle. If you look at the powerbank it has one as does the LaisDCC one, both of which work really well.

When I first started on DCC a few years ago I was really surprised how easily these devices fail. I worked on microprocessor development as my job. Other than one make of micro which you just looked at it and died (I am sure someone got something out of that deal) most were pretty robust. With the DCC I found a certain make seemed to be more robust than all the others. If you read my posts you will know which one. All the others just seemed to die for no apparent reason, a lot I suspect, the current rating was way below that stated in the specification. Often I would just be running the loco up and down and it would start to smoke followed by the usual short circuit and this was on a metre of track so no transmission line issues.

I would agree, I will add though, the choice of "stay alive" is important. Some I fitted you couldn't read anything back off the decoder, but the modern ones seem perfectly ok and transform performance.

That is very worrying, I had that issue with a couple of TTS decoders I just put it down to the fact I heat shrinked them to stop them shorting. Since then I have tended to either loosely cover them or insulate where they are going. Trouble is every one jumps down the road that it is the loco, I recently bought a sound decoder off a different supplier, when I got it, it kept failing in one direction, the supplier kept saying it my setup even though I pointed out to him that it had happily been running with a Zimo decoder. In the end I just gave up and put it down to a bad experience. In the case of HM7000 I imagine it is a case of trying to make sure there is some airflow round it, difficult if you have squeezed it in. I did notice when I was looking at the pcb things like surface mount diodes used for bridge rectification were a lot smaller than fitted to the likes of Zimo and LokSound decoders, so perhaps keeping them cool is critical.

I doubt if it is anything you are doing wrong otherwise all the others would eventually die. These are a relatively new device so it could be the normal failure rate. I doubt it is static, you would be incredibly unlucky for this to happen. It is probably just the normal failure rate, it is a new product with new processes. I have had one failure in the four I have bought so far, for TTS I think it was higher but I bought more of those. Model railway electronics seems to be a minefield, more so than the field I worked in.

They generally crack because the nylon age hardens, the new one should stretch a little. With a lot of mine it was wear on the teeth. Trouble is if you file it too much it will slip on the axle. I must admit I usually just push them on. You could try filing it a little there might be bits left from the moulding process but be very careful. This is not the ideal answer but I suppose if it fails you can buy another one.

Usually they side on the axle and when they reach the knurled bit in the centre it is tight fit. So are you saying it isn't going over the axle to reach the centre of the axle. It is a Lendons one so it should fit.

You can fix the bogie issues. If it is a late one, try and get a longer shouldered bolt for the front bogie, Hornby shortened it which causes issues. The other fix if it hasn't got it is to fit the later type sprung bogies from a Princess Royal (Hornby don't market the Duchess one as a spare) and bend the bogie bracket to fit.

Bought a nice renumbered A3 off Rails for £50 with motor issues. I don't know if many people know this but there are a batch of motor mounts out there where the slot is not long enough. Get the rat tail file out and hey presto problem solved. The loco is a renumbered Minoru I suspect although it is hard to tell without a box. I also moved the decoder to the tender as it is easier to fit (no so much can fall off when you take it apart). I was really pleased. It now runs really well.

The big issue is and there seems to be a common failing with a lot of web sites in that there is no facility to update your credit card details for an order. Most retail packages you buy the item and pay. Model Railways being that you order and pay in two years time probably makes it difficult.

Thank you, I can see your problem. Hornby have supplied you with the bogie plus bracket, so you need to remove the old bracket. On the photo second from the bottom the second screw from the right, the one right in front of those front wheels needs to undone. The old bracket will now come off. You probably need to move it backwards slightly because there is a plastic tab from the plastic cylinders (those black things in front of the bogie bracket). There should be enough room to move it back to release it. Be careful you don't want to snap the plastic off. Once released from the plastic tab, it should drop out. You don't need this anymore, but don't bin it they are gold dust, but save the screw you need it for the new bogie. Now with the new bogie as shown in the bottom photo attach the bracket so that the rectangular cut out feeds into that same plastic tab, now comes the tricky bit screw the bogie into the chassis using the screw and hole where the old one attached. I say tricky because the screw is small and sometimes falls into loco or anywhere where you don't want it to. You can make it easier by either using a magnetised screwdriver or something like a sliver of black tack on the head so you can attach it to a screwdriver head. Hope that helps, I have just done it on mine and there is enough room to move the bogie back to release it from the tab. Just for your information it is a Railroad bogie because the head of the bogie bolt is at the top, rather than at the bottom which is the case for the super detailed one.

The biggest issue is space and height. The other consideration is how Hornby have mounted the 21 pin connector in the tender. On some of the loco the 21 pin is located upside down to avoid the mounting screw heads for the PCB mounting. With HM7000 these screws foul one of the connectors, so they raised it up by turning the board upside down. If this is the case the 8 pin socket will be hard up against the PCB so you won't be able to get the header in. As to the converters generally the big issue is whether the function outputs are wired in, sometimes you have to put a connection into the adapter to enable them. This a steam loco which I assume has no lights so it doesn't matter. Unfortunately you need to try it. If it is anything like my Coronation loco, space is incredibly tight in the tender because of the sloping coal bunker.

To be quite honest I don't why you are all going at Sam, he is entitled to his opinion last time I looked we were still living in a democracy. If you don't like what he says just don't go there. He recently did a couple of review on TT models and if I remember they were quite complimentary. He just stated that at the moment it is not going anywhere. which is pretty true as the number of releases are minute compared to the number of Hornby OO ones. Hornby have released more Hornby Dublo models in the last 6 months than they have TT.

You obviously weren't around during the dot com boom where companies who owned literally nothing were worth a fortune on the stock exchange. People bought them because they thought the company would grow exponentially like Microsoft did, a lot of people lost a lot of money. So they are betting on the new management turning things around. For a start the new management hasn't been in long enough to show any difference, we are seeing some of the more negative actions at the moment (screwed up models) but that is detail that the City is probably not interested in. It will probably take at least 2 years for the new management to have any real noticeable effect.

Unfortunately the photo just adds confusion, I suspect Firehawk has a Railroad model and so all they want to see is a photo of it attached to a model similar to the one they own. There is a fundamental difference in how the superdetailed bogie attaches to the bracket as opposed to the Railroad one. Also if lets say the user has lost the bogie bolt and the new bogie issued to them doesn't have a bolt included, again that could be the issue. I have built about 10, A3 from wrecks and sometimes when I order a bogie it comes with the bracket sometimes it doesn't. Hornby's part number only applies to the bogie, the bracket is one of those items that has no part number. I can order two of the same part from Lendons sometimes it comes with a bracket sometimes it doesn't. Often I buy a Tornedo bogie just for the bracket. So that is why it is so important that we know what parts they have. I can probably upload photos of both types of bogie, I have lots of spares if this is of any help. As I said there is thread that covers this anyway, for some reason Flying Scotsman front bogies if bought in a set from Amazon seem to fall off.