ColinB

I bought one of these off Hattons at a really good price of £139 about 2 months ago. I don't know what price Hornby were selling these at but that was a really good price. As someone else stated Bure Valley have them at a pretty good price and there is the plus point that you are supporting a heritage railway. The big joke of it is that this model predates all the huge price rises, so this is probably the price they originally sold at.

Adding the resistor is a much easier way. Does anyone know the value? My Thomas is quite old so I don't think it has one. CVs are a wonderful thing until you decide to reset the decoder then hey presto they are all gone and don't get me started on CV29.

I am surprised about that, from what you are saying the DCC is working correctly so it just sounds like the motor just runs a lot faster. Hornby on their 0-4-0 locos added a resistor in series with the motor to slow it down. You don't say whether you bought the Thomas new or if it was secondhand. Sometimes Hornby will use the same looking motor in many models but with a higher speed. As motors are hard to come by people like me replace the motor with something that fits and works. I got caught out with the new Princess motor, it looks the same as the motor that powers the old design of Princess but as the gearing is different, runs at substantially higher speed.

Really bad news for Hornby, I may gripe about them but he was the inspiration for getting things done.

You could buy the firebox fire led assembly from Peters Spares, I bought a few to retrofit to my older locos. It contains a bridge rectifier or equivalent to get it to DC, to drive the led so that it will work on DCC. As one previous contributor has said it is probably one of the diodes has failed in the bridge rectifier.

If it is a loco with the decoder in the tender check that the 4 pin plug that connects the loco to tender is pushed fully home. Also check that there are no loose wires on the plug. The two centre ones are the motor control. Most of my sound decoders when they die take out the sound first so I would be surprised if it is the decoder, but I suppose it does happen. Of course it could be a duff motor which is very possible. Try it on DC or another DCC decoder.

TTS decoders in my experience are far more vulnerable to a bad DCC signal, more so than a lot of other DCC decoders. I noticed it with my Zimo DCC decoders. What I suspect is that either your loco or tender pickups are not working properly. Because the Ruby decoder is a lot better at working with loss of a DCC signal you probably haven't noticed. So the loco works but not as well as it should do.

I don't know if this is of some help. I found that some connecting rod screws are not always the same size, I even put a post on the subject many months ago. So is your 9F new or secondhand, it could be that you are right that the one in question is bigger. I know I have sometimes swapped bolts around because the ones nearest the valve gear interfered with it because they were slightly bigger. The other thing to check is that the posts on the wheels are pushed in correctly from the back of the wheel. Sometimes on mine they move out so the conrod is closer to the wheel than it should be. I know you said one is sticking out further than the others but it could be that the one on the wheel in front of the one in question has pushed out.

Road and Rails and YouChoos do very suitable speakers. If it is a 21 pin decoder, on the PCB it plugs into you will find pads labelled S+, S- or SP+, SP- which are the speaker connections. No need to solder to the decoder. If it is an 8 pin then you need to solder the speaker to the supplied lead once you have cut off the original speaker.

Yes I would agree with you on that one. Recently on a couple of orders I have had issues and the nice lady in Customer Sales sorted them out. Then we come to Email responses, that really does let them down, which is probably why it takes so long to get through to them sometimes on the phone. I must admit that they have never been that fast with any of my returns, the brand new City of Lichfield returned via Bure Valley (who I bought it off) took over 2 months, then it wasn't really fixed properly. TTS decoders generally about a month, perhaps they are a bit sensitive to HM7000 decoder issues.

The 130 page manual is more a user specification, so perhaps we should stop calling it a manual. Anybody involved with computers and electronics knows that nobody is going to read all 130 pages. I have been on enough technical writing courses to know that presenting that to the general public is not going to work. I also know that for most of the equipment I designed people very rarely read the spec, but there again sensible people write an abridged version for people to read. I learn very quickly that if you want an easy life you make the data easy to read, unless you want to be inundated with trivial requests. I wanted to know the maximum current rating which to me was one of the most important part of the specs, and there it was buried in a load of other data, if I remember page 70. I buy loads of decoders I only read the parts that are important to me, similarly in my old job when presented with a 130 manual describing how a microprocessor works I generally would only scan the parts that were that important, so I don't expect anyone else to read one. Hornby should have done what they did with TTS, created a simple manual for the decoder and a separate manual for the Bluetooth app or put it as a "help" menu on the app. How many people fully read their mobile phone manual?

So how come the person that answers the customercare@hornby.com didn't point the requester to the right one? It is not as if Hornby is a huge organisation.

It cannot contain a chip as the author said it moves about a centimeter backwards and forwards they generally don't do that. I suspect it is a case of the motor is just "gummed up" and needs cleaning. I have had it happen to many of my old Wrens.

To me it sounds like something is stopping the motor from moving properly. I would check for stuck valve gear. As Going Spare says, it would help if we knew what type of Flying Scotsman it is. Like late 1970's with motor in loco. early eighties with motor in tender or later with a modern motor in the loco.

You don't say what loco it is. If it is a loco with a tender with the DCC decoder in the tender then check the 4 pin connector that connects loco to tender. It might not be pressed fully home or possibly one of the two centre wires has fell off. If not that, then it might be one of the motor wires has fell off or worse still the motor has failed. Generally in my experience if there is anything wrong with the decoder the sound is the first to go, so I suspect your decoder is still working properly.

Again you are falsifying the figures. R3099 was a special edition version of the Flying Scotsman so it will have been one with all the bells and whistles. The Flying Scotsman at £134.49 is the Railroad version. The correct comparison would be to compare it to R3990 Doncaster which is £252.99.

It is the good old Supply and Demand curve which is why I said you have to wait for the financial results. Unfortunately, you guys are falling into the trap a 1990s loco was probably made in Margate by hand with no automation. Even the painting would have been by hand, so any comparison is a waste of time. A modern loco is made in China with the painting fully automated, even the design cycle will be shorter because CAD is infinitely quicker than doing all those engineering drawings by a draughtsman. As I say it is all academic, if they are too expensive for the next generation then it will all eventually die.

According to a guy at work whose second job was running a small village store, Tesco never loses money on anything. They might sell it at "cost" but I doubt it.

In the end we will find out, if Hornby has huge losses at the end of the financial year then we will know that they are not selling enough. If they make a huge profit then we know their strategy is right. Perhaps it may be worth booking a trip to the steam fair in Dorset. If anyone wants to go on about prices being equivalent, them may I suggest you put colour TVs and laptop computers into the model. Other than locos the only other thing that has risen in price at such an alarming rate is the price of bricks, 10 pence per brick in the 80s, about £1.15 now.

I would imagine fetching files over the internet from the Hornby server into the app should be a pretty tried and trusted method, people have been doing that for a long time. The Bluetooth app is probably the culprit, there you are dealing with a flash memory reprogramming which is always problematic. Now here is a question for 96RAF, do they use an open or closed loop download. Open loop is where they just transfer a number of bytes, wait a time period, then transfer some more bytes. Closed loop is where the host (Bluetooth device) transfers a number of bytes, waits for the target to respond that it has programmed the number of bytes correctly, before the host downloads the next bytes. I know from experience the Elite reprogramming uses open loop as it is dependant on a user input delay function. The trouble is flash memory programming, which is what you are doing does not always take the same time. Anyway just a thought.

Admittedly I don't use Hornby point motors, but I do use surface mount ones. I ordered a big pack of 1.6 mm self tappers off EBay. The seller was in China but 4 weeks later they arrived and worked wonderfully. They were also a lot longer than what you can get in this country. I hate buying things from China but for screws they seem to be the only place to get them.

P-Henry thank you for the information.

Thanks for the information Moccasin, I eventually found them on EBay. Would you believe someone filled mine with lead shot. I broke it trying to remove it. I know they are a bit light but I doubt the loco would be able to pull it with the amount in mine. It was heavier than my heaviest loco even the Wrenn ones.

Actually we seem to go around and around in circles on this one. I just think that Hornby are pricing themselves out of the market. Yes we can all complain about the prices but the thing is if they really are appealing to over 65s then they have an issue. Yes of course these people generally have spare cash to buy the locos but the problem is they will only buy the obscure ones, as they probably have virtually all the other models in the catalogue collected over the years. Now I really like my new retooled Evening Star, but to be quite honest when it is on the track it looks virtually the same as the old railroad one.

Does anyone know why the Arriva Wales Mk3 Buffet car has a different arrangement of windows to all the current Mk3 Buffets that Hornby does. On the kitchen side there are 4 large windows, one small elongated window and 3 normal elongated window. On virtually all the other Mk 3 Buffet cars that I can find they have 3 large windows and 5 normal elongated windows. I am trying to source another buffet car to fit my second hand Arriva one that someone has butchered and I would like some new windows and bogies. So the easy option is to buy a second hand not so rare one and swap the bits over.