ColinB

Well it looks like this part on one of my A4s. On all my A3s Hornby never fitted one or it fell off.

Not quite Bulliedboy I think they are around £254. Fortunately I have most of the Hornby locos I will ever want and the ones that I do buy at the moment include decent sound for not much more. To me it has to very special to justify that price.

The only thing I noticed on my P2 and Tornado was the lack of pickups in the tender but that was easily rectified. I did as you did replaced the 3 pole motors with the 5 pole motor in the P2 and Duke of Gloucester. The only thing I do like is the sprung buffers but not for £50 more. The sprung buffers do have a tendency to "ping" out so that is a bit of a downside. As you say they are good models.

I think they did when under the previous owners. By cost reducing, that is not the final price but how much it costs to make it, that way you can make more profit. Unfortunately as my company realised a badly planned cost reduction can cost you more as the warranty claims go through the roof. I think that is also what happened to Hornby.

Clever, Hornby, somehow the two don't mix. I assume it might be the period where they tried to cost reduce their models, Sam of Sam's Trains was on about it. The Duke of Gloucester was one of its products. I think in the end, it cost more than it saved. I repair a lot of Hornby locos and clever is not a word I would use to describe their design. One I have been repairing lately is a Royal Scot/Patriot where someone thought to save a cross member on the valve gear, they would come up with an arrangement where it pressed into the chassis. Now I don't whether it was meant to be a tight fit but on the ones I fixed they full out. Unless you tie the top of the valve gear together with wire, you cannot run the loco without its body for fear of it falling out and jamming the valve gear. It probably explains why you cannot get them as spares, they broke so often that they got used up quickly. Then we have the really amazing arrangement of how the motor is held in, then using a self tapping screw on an undersize post to hold it. Even without Mazak rot it was never going to work that well.

What you are supposed to do, although it is a difficult job is remove the solder from the two holes with a sucker or braid, take each wire, strip, twist and tin it and then push it through the hole. As it is what we call a "plated through hole as you solder to the board on one side the solder will flow to both sides of the board, making a really solid joint. I have noticed Hornby and lot of people just tack the wire to the edge of the solder pad, removing the solidity that a "plated through hole gives you".

Well Fazy you have been very lucky one I bought new and it was lying in the box. The other one had been weathered and obviously looked after but it fell off as the guy was packing it up.

I suppose this is a bit of a moan but does anyone have a Royal Scot/Patriot where the reversing level has not fell off. I bought a brand new Scot and there it was in the box the reversing lever having fallen off. Since then I have bought a number of broken ones to fix and surprise, surprise, no reversing lever. Finally I bought a weathered one off EBay really nice loco, but the reversing rod fell off while it was being packed. I can see why they fall off, there is meant to be locating slots in loco base plate but on the ones I have had to replace I can never find them. In the end I just use superglue to attempt to glue them. Somewhere in this universe is a pile of Royal Scot/Patriot reversing rods.

Well atom3624, its called money. Whether or not they made a big profit remains to be seen but to paint an existing design that must be several years old and then charge a premium has got to make money.

A standard Hornby decoder will work, they are only Leds so it will source enough, there is a guy on EBay (bwtechnical) that does a small PCB with surface mount resistors so it makes it neater or alternatively you can use a "commoned" resistor pack which I have also used. The 8 pin decoder comes with a flying lead for the extra function so you could use that for cab lights. As I said before electrical is no issue, but mechanical is a bit more of an issue. I have some of the old Lima ones that I converted to the latest Hornby specification by buying all the bits, but I also have a couple of Dapol ones that do have lights. The Dapol ones for me aren't that bad, it all depends on which one you get. I wouldn't recommend buying one second hand though as they have pickups that sit inside the gear housing which is not a good combination. Model railway designers fascinate me with their lack of electrical contact knowledge like putting pickups in a place where they can get covered in oil.

When I was fitting lighting to my old Hornby diesel locos I remember this one I avoided. No issue with driving the lights via DCC the big issue was fitting them. The chassis base comes up quite high. The only bit I figured would be easy to light would be the destination board number, then I was worried about "light bleed", so in the end I didn't bother. You could look to see what kits are available and if they have pictures then you could see if you can replicate it.

I am sure christopher it will be in the 2023 catalogue, they have done all the rest so that is probably the next. Of course when you actually get it, is another question. The HD range is a big money spinner and probably something that people haven't already got.

I am not so sure atom3624, too many sold. Possibly for the first 6 months of sale but afterwards who knows. There are many limited edition locos out there that don't sell for much.

I did wonder as I had not seen any posts from the UK. The interesting point is though Hornby can pull all the stops out when they have to. So why is the 9F, P2 and a host of other locos not given the same treatment. I suppose there is the point that many of those will be on "pre order" price from Hornby over 2 years ago, so they won't be making that much profit on those.

I must admit I bought my Duke of Gloucester with sound fitted for a very reasonable price, so I have never taken the tender apart. I changed the motor to a 5 pole but never touched the tender. That tender looks awfully like a Britannia one. Anyway the 21 pin solution is much better solution. Yesterday I spent ages trying to fit Zimo sound in a Royal Scot tender with an 8 pin socket, same issue as before, just too much wire.

Nothing wrong with the loco other than the price, I quite like the colour. I didn't even realise that they had started "shipping them".

Thanks 96RAF, I programmed it with an address so that is all I needed to do. The only thing I might need to do is reverse the direction, but rather than setting the CV, I will just turn the wires round. I am only using it as it was free with the broken loco. Anyway thank you for the help.

Well 96RAF it has one single white dot in the corner.

You are all dead right it has just programmed with an id of 16. Thank you all for the information. It is not that great as a decoder but at least I know I am not going mad.

That would explain a lot, I will try putting a 2 digit code into it. I was going to keep it for testing locos anyway but I was just surprised it didn't read back any values. The loco it came with was an early DCC version so that may explain it. Thank you for the information.

I recently bought a badly damaged loco that came with a Hornby DCC decoder. I managed to rebuild the loco and surprisingly it ran with the supplied Hornby decoder (they are normally broken). I have come to the point now where I want to put a proper address in it. Sadly the the reprogramming never works and I cannot read out anything from the decoder, address, manufacturer id. I have done the reset of the decoder but still it does not reprogram or read anything from the device. It will happily work with its default id of 3. I am using an Elite to do the programming and I know that it works as I have just done a program on a Zimo decoder. I have tried it in the loco and my DCC tester, it doesn't program in either. Did I read on this site that some early versions of the Hornby decoder suffered from this issue?

A thing that surprised me yesterday was valve gear screws. I was fixing a Royal Scot that has lots of issues, seems to be a thing with this model. Anyway the previous owner said that it had bent the valve gear but he straightened it out. When I started running it I noticed every so often the valve gear would jam. Eventually I found the front con rod screw head was hitting the valve gear piston rod occasionally. When I further investigated I found the offending screw had a rather large head (lengthwise) so I searched through my old left over ones and found that their heads differed in length by a lot. The ones I eventually fitted heads were half the length of the original ones. Now seeing as the real prototypes don't have large screws to hold the con rods and valve gear on, you would have though Hornby would go with one sort. Anyway if your valve gear has the same issues examine you con rod screws.

It depends do you want originality or do you want it to work. If you want it to work, then work out which current Hornby model it is close to, then buy a complete front bogie and strip the wheels to put in your old loco. I did this with a lot of my Hornby locos to make the front bogies negotiate my points. Surprisingly on new Hornbys, although some people on this site advocate getting the exact right part, in many cases wheels are shared between models. I have been repairing a Royal Scot and found the wheels were exactly the same as a Duchess. It is not surprising really in the real world several locos would have shared parts to make maintenance better, so similarly the models will in certain cases do the same. Another useful fact is it quite often cheaper to buy the new part off Lendons in Cardiff (if they have it) than a secondhand one off EBay.

I suppose what you really need to do is buy one of those USB analysers (on a different laptop) put it on the USB link between Railmaster and the Elite or ELink and then you would know what the command structure is.

I imagine the limitations of the Select are more to do with the display and the switches available. An external link to a PC would have removed that. It is all in hindsight, but perhaps they would have been better putting the functionality of the elink into the Select and ditching the e link. Less products, more time to develop existing ones. Sadly after watching the Hornby program, I get the opinion is it a case of "just jobs" decided by you know who.