Steamplug

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Don't know if this is a new thing but has anyone experienced brittle points before? had the point in question is a Hornby made in China right hand point which I had pinned down with track pins and I was about to replace with an electrofrog point. When I went to carefully lift it I found the sleepers and in particular the track ties to be very brittle and the point pretty much fell apart in my hand. I will post a pic as it's a mess

Echo what's been said, iPhone speakers are great. Roadsandrails have a good selection and some good YouTube content covering most locos.

So just wanted to provide an update on this old thread, post lockdown and once the Hornby repair team got back to the office they took a look at mŷ unit and confirmed it was a power switching issue. Thankfully they replaced the unit with a new one so all back up and running. Thanks for all your support and advice. John

I'm sure this has probably been answered before but I've searched the forums and could not find anything relevant. I have decided to set up a small rolling road so I can have a play around with new locos etc away from the railway room. My setup is simple, 1 Hornby select feeding a 30cm piece of track. Everything works fine in DCC however I decided to use the 0 address to test a non chipped loco before I added the dcc chip and I get a buzzing noise when no power is applied which reduces as more power is applied so much so I cant hear it anywhere over quarter power. I decided to test a few locos and get the same on all non DC locos, is this normal and will it damage my locos as I was thinking of using the rolling road to run new locos in on DC before chipping them? Cheers John

Thanks for all the greats advice, Brian it is indeed a DCC layout so I like the idea of taking a feed direct from the rails to feedback has it mechanically switched.

Slight edit they are PM1 motors working the points not PM2's

Hi all, I have a few Hornby points on hidden sidings powered by pm2 point motors. Are there any simple led type indicators out there or better still DIY electrical diagrams to build something which will show me if the point has physically thrown as occasionally the motors do not fire correctly?

Morning all, I'm looking to add some length to my LNER Teak train, currently its made up of Gresley teaks however I was wondering is it prototypical to run Thompson's alongside gresleys in the same train as this would give me loads of options to increase the length?

Update, did the test recommended by RAF96 the power does dip on the boost channel when the elite attempts to read the prog track however I tested the prog outputs at the same time and there was no corresponding signal/power on the prog outputs so sounds like a power switching issue. Good news is Hornby are being supportive and have issued me with an RMA so their repairs team can take a look at it when they are back in the office. All the best and thanks for the support, I will update In a month or so when Hornby have had a look and fed back. John

Hi all thanks for all the great advice, had to wait before i could respond as im currently limited to 2 posts per day. Bit of an update spoke to HCC via email today and they asked me to test the AC output from the Boost ports which by the look of it they are looking to rule in/out the fault in the post by RAF96. I tested and it returned 1.5V AC out of the boost port (dont know if this is good or bad). @RAF96 had a look at the teardown and it looks beyond my soldering skills so got me thinking of other options if it is beyond repair. As i mentoned earlier i do have an elink lying around which got me thinking, is it possible to connect the elink to railmaster as a second controller and use it to do any programming work? This would give me the elite running trains via railmaster or manually and also the ability to programme/read via railmaster. Then as my grey matter started to awake it got me thinking about the general set up anyway, assuming i can run both the elite and elink, if i were to run Prog and points from the elink (points via DCC concepts ADS and also DCC omegas) would this protect against any shorts as the frog polarity would then be fed from my elink bus whilst the main track would be fed via the elite bus? Hope that makes sense. Cheers John

Thanks Chris, I had a feeling it was all pointing to the controller. I will certainly give the cleaning of the contacts a go though. Am i safe in assuming that a Hornby repair is beyond economical sense? Im sure i have also seen a teardown on these forums somewhere so i may attempt to have a look at it myself. Will let you know how i get on. Cheers John

Hi all, im looking for help with my Elite, its recently started returning "XXX" when i read CV's using my programming track. Ive uploaded a video to Youtube showing the exact issue: Bit of background it has been updated to v1.44 and had been working fine for both control and reading/writing. I generally use it connected to my PC running railmaster. I have restarted it in diagnostic mode and get an EE good message so looks to be not issues internally and i have also reset and reinstalled the bios but the issue is still present. When i try to read CV's in railmaster through the elite i get 255 as a value against all the CV's and generally a message saying there was an error reading CV's, and like i said above when reading via the unit i get "XXX" when i try to read the address. My first thoughts were a duff decoder so i tried another loco but have the same issue. Second thought was the Prog track so i cleaned it thoroughly and tested the connectivity using my multimeter between the wires that go into the unit and the rails and no issues there. Thirdly i thought maybe a unit issue so i dug out my eLink unit and connected to railmaster, run a CV read using the 2 locos previously mentioned and both read just fine using the same programming track. Lastly just to make sure i swaped back to the elite to see what would happen and the issue was still there. One last twist is the elite works just fine as a controller both stand alone and through railmaster and happily controls the 2 previously mentioned test diesels. Last note its stamped a 2017 unit and i bought it in December 2018 new from Amazon so likely out of any warranty. Help as im out of ideas. Steamplug

Hi, i have an A4 TTS Gadwell which when i set it up in railmaster (using my elite) all works fine but the speed controller in the software only gives a range of 0-1 (see pic). When on track though the loco works fine if controlled via my elite untit but when controlled by the software on my laptop its either stopped or full speed with nothing in between. /media/tinymce_upload/c596622590caf8c91c6b26f39a54a01d.jpg/media/tinymce_upload/a64da0cad77135a71e203da668442d61.JPG