ColinB

Has anyone else had issues with delivery of this item? Get two mails on Saturday of Shipment notification. When you click on the link, DPD are saying that they are still waiting for the parcel, so obviously not made it out of Hornby yet. Last time this happened I phoned up Customer Service and they sorted it, but before I do that I just wanted to see if it is a global issue.

I converted all my Bachmann split chassis to DCC. Admittedly in the case of the A4s it involved a lot of machining around the motor mounts to insulate the motor but other than that no issues. The Mainline ones were a different issue because the wheels turned in the axles putting the quartering out but in the end I bought Bachmann chassis and did the necessary split chassis conversion. The only real issue I had with the DCC was finding enough room for a socket, in the end I used 6 pin ones and Zimo direct fit 6 pin decoders.

F0 should switch on the lights, I have an Elite and that function always works. Best idea is do what I do with models where I don't know the lighting functions (it even happens on a lot of new models where they forget to tell you) basically go through each function and see which one does the lights. Generally Bachmann locos have forward and reverse lighting on F0 and cab lighting on another function. Check the underside of your loco to see if there are any switches to switch them off. It is a 21 pin decoder so you cannot get the fitting wrong, the only other issue might be a wire not connected inside the loco. It might be that the body is not on correctly sometimes the lights connect via spring loaded pins that if the body is not on properly don't connect. Forget options 1 and 2, I doubt they effect you. I use a lot of Zimo sound decoders, unfortunately not on my class 37s but then it sounds like it isn't one programmed by YouChoos.

You could do what I do buy an old Lima diesel (because they are cheap) fit it with a DCC decoder and "stay alive" (Powerpack as the diesel will run without power for about 20 seconds) so it runs over the dirty track then buy an old Hornby track cleaning wagon or a Dapol one.

As I said previously, just buy one of those very thin ones from Road and Rails. To be honest again as I said before, this loco has so many pickups you don't really need it.

So China is following Germany in the Hotel California model. I must admit I never realised this happened. I know that to make anything in China you must have a Chinese Company as a sponsor.

96RAF is the best person to answer this. They don't take PayPal which is a bit unusual. You are right, the prices look very suspicious.

On my phone it takes about 25 minutes, it has been pretty consistent over all the downloads I have made. I did say early on that I thought it was excessive, compared with the systems I worked on, but it is what it is. A lot is determined by the piece of reprogramming software you put on the module when you made it (called the bootloader). Unfortunately this piece of software cannot usually be changed so you are stuck with it, so I doubt you can speed it up much.

I know I didn't use them for that same reason for a long while. In the last 6 months they have done some pretty reasonable offers many where the difference between them and another Retailer is more than £50, which is why I have bought off them. I definitely wouldn't preorder off them. Things have changed a lot since those times, Hornby ditched their tier system I imagine because it is really difficult to shift non essential retail items. I suspect Jadlam have done the same. Should the good times return who knows whether they might do it again but at the moment I just don't think many companies can get away with it, except one that has been mentioned in this Forum. That one in particular causes warnings by the Administrator on RMWeb whenever their name is mentioned.

Just had notification that they want the money. My credit card has changed since I first ordered it, so it needed updating.

I did think that, but it is worth checking that connector just in case it is not that good a connection. If you can read a CV it means the decoder is working, generally if the motor drive dies so does the decoder. Perhaps it is just a mix up on the loco id. The Duke of Gloucester has a cheap 3 pole motor as fitted in a lot of the Railroad models, I upgraded mine to a 5 pole one. Unless of course the motor is stuck, on one of my 5 pole ones the magnetic poles clip fell out and jammed the motor.

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.