ColinB

I have been reading the instructions for my new Class 43 HST and it mentions the control of the fans and the automatic stop and start of them whilst the loco is stationary. I assume the instructions were written around the HM7000 profile. Is that correct?

To be fair to Hornby they don't know what track you will be running the loco on so they just go for the best fit. To be honest I have no issue with this, they obviously do some design as there are a lot of drawbar parts and they definitely are all different. On my latest HD Sir Nigel Gresley the gap looks incredibly small to the point where I wondered whether it would go round my bends (most are very large radius except for a couple), but it works perfectly well.

Of course it should be, in its mission statement it states it is a discussion forum so I see no reason why you can't guess. If it follows previous years ones it will basically be a wish list to be fulfilled sometime in the future. I do though, get the opinion that the new management is trying to run it like a normal business, so who knows?

I fixed a loco for a guy and his drawbar was incredibly short, he had cut a bit off the end of one of those with two holes in at one end, I just assumed he just had end to end track or incredibly large radii. He was saying this wasn't short enough so I gave him one of my really short ones that wouldn't work with my layout, he seemed to be happy. I could write lots about speedo cables and what a pain they are when trying to remove the loco body. I have broke no end of them when trying to fix a loco because I forgot they were there and then there is the case where they fall off the body and wrap themselves around eventually breaking. Other people must have the same issues as you can never get them as spares. Generally when I have fitted them on my locos they seem to spin around the same axis, although on some they don't but they are not that far out. Generally if they don't kink themselves while running I am happy. Why do Hornby just not find a way to attach them to the chassis so the body comes away cleanly.

I have spent a lot of time on Hornby drawbars, surprisingly they are not all the same length. I convert a lot of my models so the decoder is in the tender, rather than in the loco, as it is with older Hornby locos. When I was selecting the drawbar I found some are very flimsy and bend far too easily others are too far apart. Of course when Hornby used the drawbar with the contacts on, they seem to have been all the same length. I found the Royal Scot drawbar to be the best for me and my layout but it really is up to you. Ultimately you can always make your own all it is a piece of steel with two holes in it. Of course with most new locos Hornby have made the decision for you with their new tender connection design.

I took mine apart first time I have ever looked at the conversion. I think I have found why it is so noisy, not a particularly brilliant job, but perhaps that is why it was on EBay. Anyway make of it what you will. This conversion chopped the chassis so that the motor would fit, I think if you are going to chop it you need to add some bracing of sorts otherwise the front and back sections that are halved swivel on the rivets.

It only has the one bogie, from what I can remember it is in the middle. I thought it was a good way to get a nice motorised tram but in the end it was so noisy so I bought a couple of Bachmann ready made ones. The Bachmann ones don't have the detail of the Corgi ones but another issue with the Corgi ones is the weight.

I have got one of these modified Corgi trams I bought off the web, I will see if I can get some photos and work out how they did it. A word of warning, my one is incredibly noisy, I don't know if it isn't fitted properly but it definitely is very loud.

I don't have an agenda, it is not in the list, end of story. When they get the time they will probably add it. Looking at their current range of models it is not in there and when it was it was a Railroad model, so it should not be top of their priority list. Unrebuilt West Country has just been released , a premium product and that is not in the list, so to me that should be higher priority. I thought this was a discussion forum which is what I am doing.

SteveM6 you said "A more realistic assessment is that the team responsible for recording and compiling the various sound files is a small one (I know how many it is but it would be unfair to Hornby to reveal details). These things take time as revealed by the staggered release schedule already published." which to me says they haven't planned that far ahead, or if they have their small team hasn't got round to it yet. If they had it would be in that spreadsheet listed as summer 2024 or so on.

Well Rallymatt we have a list at the top of this forum which if you ask Hornby they will point you to. So there is your answer, it is not on there. As SteveM6 says they haven't planned that far ahead.

All firms run out of budget especially when it gets to December or April, we definitely used to, so all travel gets stopped until the next financial year. It doesn't seem that Hornby are currently selling a class 20 so perhaps that is why it is not high on their priority list. I am surprised though I think they sold a lot of them. I think we all know how big their team, or at least do a calculated guess, we have all seen the program.

I asked this very same question for an unrebuilt Battle of Britain/ West Country class. The response I got from Hornby was a link to the released list which is at the top of this forum. I must admit I am surprised they haven't got one. It appears for HM7000 they appear to be collecting new recordings and not far from here is the Ongar railway which has one. So it is probably one of the closest to Margate. Perhaps they have run out of Budget for this project.

I must admit I so far haven't had that much issue fixing my locos, Hornby generally use a lot of the same gears and motors across models. The strategy of buying broken second hand strategy works unless it is like the Royal Scot/Patriot where the valve gear is incredibly flimsy and most second hand chassis have them broken as well. I too have found what spares Hornby do are generally cheap it just annoys me that they don't do replacement buffers for most models which on a lot of their models have a habit of pinging out. The thing I do find interesting is the varying prices for the same part. As I said many parts are spread across their locos so the part will appear for many different locos and will have a different part number and price.

As I said spares for a 35 year old model are probably easier to get than for the latest Hornby release, Peters Spares has very many of them. I don't think Hornby make additional spares when they do a production run, what spares that are available seem to be what was left after a production run. I have even purchased DCC sockets as spare parts in Hornby packaging which have obviously been used. Trouble AndyMac your arguments are perfectly valid or were when the locos were about £100, now that many are £230 plus not so much so. Incidentally most locos with the right spare parts can be fixed within an hour, even using an emergency plumber, that is cheaper than a new loco.

I can understand your frustration, surprisingly spares for a loco that old are quite often easier to get than spares for a recently released model. I have been down this road before. Surprisingly when I was fixing my old Bachmann split chassis locos I got the spares off Bachmann UK and they were as old as your Mallard. Incidentally Ford are required by law to keep spares for vehicles for 10 years, if you go to Daventry you will see this huge warehouse where they keep them, plus after 10 years the aftermarket starts making them. With a lot of their models Hornby does share parts, but it does need a bit of detective work to find them. The thing that really annoys me is in the motor industry we have spares which are called fast moving parts, basically parts we know will break so we make more spares available for them. Hornby does nothing of the sort, couplings, buffers, bits that drop off while you are trying to fit DCC, try getting them as spare parts. What parts are you after exactly? If I knew I could possibly point you in the right direction.

This one is pretty easy to remove, one screw under the NEM coupling, obviously after removing the NEM coupling. The only risk is the NEM coupling so be careful as you lever it off. The loco and tender should pull away easily as it has the new coupling. I have just done mine to check whether I had put a decoder in it. I did to test it but eventually I will put a Zimo sound decoder in it.

I know, I checked after I wrote the post. I think I paid about £280 to £290 for mine, retail price was about £320, so all of them are being sold at a profit. I just assumed the way the post was written that they were being sold at less than what I paid.

I have the green one and the blue one, I know, I got carried away with the preorders. I think you will find the green one has an 8 pin the blue one has a 21 pin. I get the opinion I am unusual in that I run my HD locos, most of the original ones were bought by collectors so having DCC fitted is probably not much use. Just do your research as to prices, generally though I have found the DC versions seem to fetch more as an item. Obviously the DCC fitted ones will fetch more because of the decoder but not that much more and most people if they are buying sound want Zimo or LokSound. Once you take off the price of your sound decoder you usually find that you are selling the loco for a lot less. I didn't even realise that people were selling their green HD Sir Nigel Gresleys, they were sold out when they first appeared.

Why would you want to do that? A study of prices on EBay highlights that DCC fitted locos are generally harder to shift and don't fetch a price that reflects the addition of the extra electronics. You are far better off replacing the DCC/HM7000 decoder with a DC header and either selling the DCC/HM7000 separate or keeping it for another loco. Generally studying the prices on EBay and from personal experience it is easier to shift a loco with no decoder fitted. I suppose this is the point where that socket you fitted rather than hard wiring the decoder pays dividends. I think you will lose less by selling the loco and decoder separately, but then that is entirely my opinion.

I suppose there isn't a Duchess running at the moment hence why no HM7000 profile. I think my one has the DCC socket in the tender so if you want to put the speaker in the loco you need to do a bit of rewiring. I think we have already covered the options available. It all depends on what you have to spend. My one is quite old so it has a TTS decoder in it, as they were very cheap at the time. The HM7000 without powerbank and TTS I found were very susceptible to a bad signal from the track whereas the Zimo decoders seem to be a lot better.

Look LT&SR_NSE, I am sorry I upset you all I was doing was pointing out that there are other products available which a quick search of EBay would highlight. This is am information forum so I am sharing the information I gained when I tried fitting "stay alive" to many of my locos. To be honest I got most of the information off Digitrains when I just asked them if there was a "stay alive" that didn't mess up programming on DCC. If you think I am wrong you are quite welcome to criticise me, in my field of engineering that is how we learn. Incidentally all I said is that there are other smaller packages which there are, LaisDCC do two that are much smaller. I needed one to fit into a Bachmann diesel shunter. As to 96RAF I know we have discussed this over and over again, it seems to be if the "stay alive" has some more elaborate electronics the issue of it interfering with programming is no longer an issue. I assume they must use a combination of zener diodes and transistors to delay the charging of the "stay alive" capacitors which when I looked at the circuitry on the LaisDCC and Train O matic ones, seem to back this up. A lot of the others don't seem to have this. Hornby get round this I assume by controlling it via the micro which is what I suspect Zimo do on their sound decoders. I just wish someone had pointed all this out when I started fitting "stay alive" to my locos. Last time I asked the question on this forum and others I just told to remove it when programming. When I get the time I will work out what the circuit is, my analogue electronics is a bit rusty but I will get there in the end. As to adding a LaisDCC "stay alive" to a HM7000, it would have to be done at the 21 pin socket end by soldering to the correct pins, that way there is no way it would invalidate the warranty of the HM7000. As to whether it would work, I suspect it should as people are using HM7000s in their Accurascale locos which have "stay alive" prefitted, so it obviously doesn't harm it. I forgot to add, yes the LaisDCC "stay alive" works just like the Hornby Powerbank. Admittedly the LaisDCC is fitted to my Hornby 4P locos and my Hornby 0-6-0 ones whereas the Powerbank is fitted in my Sir Nigel Gresley and P2. It works exactly the same. I did find the time period it lasts, was longer on a Zimo decoder as opposed to a Train O Matic one but that is probably dependant on the hardware design of the decoder.

From what you are saying Will it sounds like there is a fault with the decoder. Believe it or not usually finding the decoder using the App is quite easy. Send it back to Hornby, they will test it and either tell you there is nothing wrong or give you a new one. When you get it back select one of your locos that has a socket and test it on that using DCC. Once you are happy it works on DCC then use the App to do the load profile bit. That way you know you are starting with a decoder that works, so any issues are with the App. The App is a bit "clunky" but it does generally work.

I have done a lot of tests on different types of "stay alive". The original ones I used gave me the issue that I couldn't read parameters in programming mode. After I found out that others didn't suffer from the same fault especially after testing the one in my Accurascale class 37, I figured that there must be different types of "stay alive" and what circuitry they use around the capacitors. The LaisDCC stand alone pack achieves this really well, as does the Hornby one. I could also list the ones I have tried that work as "stay alive" but are useless in programming mode. So be careful what you fit.

Well firstly if it is blown up then I am sure you can send it back to Hornby for a replacement. I recently had one fail, it just stopped working when I refitted it to the loco with "stay alive" added, and they replaced it. What you should do in future is fit DCC sockets, Hornby do these as spare parts and it makes life so much easier. I am usually pretty critical of the Hornby HW7000 but I have to admit every one I have bought works perfectly when I load it. I quite often have to delete the App and reload it as the scan logic I found gets confused but in your case you only have one so that shouldn't be an issue. When we had all the problems with the Android app not being available I ran mine on DCC with the default sound so if you have not got the Bluetooth part to work, it should work on DCC, so that may be a way to see if it works. I have converted all my old Hornby, Lima and Bachmann locos (even those with split chassis) to DCC and I always use a socket. You can always use a 6 pin if space is a premium like on the Bachmann split chassis locos. It makes testing so much easier as you can easily convert from DC to DCC, plus upgrade decoders easily and believe me there is always room to fit one without machining the loco.