Hornby Suspect Wiring

[ColinB]

This is just for information to help others out. I recently purchased a Duchess of Lancaster off EBay. When it arrived it was perfect, obviously never been run. Anyway I put in my old DCC decoder to check it worked and no movement at all. So I then did all the checks that I would do on one I have modified. On this loco there was a huge lump of solder between pins 8 and 7. When I went to the loco it had the little PCB that connects the 4 way lead to the tender with the pickups and motor in the loco. On later locos Hornby dispensed with this and just wired directly. The wiring to the PCB was completely wrong, motor wired to tender pickup. Obviously on DC it worked perfectly but for DCC normally a decoder killer. Surprisingly after I had rewired the loco as per Hornby's latest specification (soldering to the PCB was too fiddly) the decoder still worked which I am amazed at, normally faulty pickup wiring kills the decoder. I remember reading that there was a batch where Hornby got the wiring completely wrong so this must have been one of them.

So don't assume that when the loco is advertised as DCC Ready and is about circa 2014 that it will work with DCC. It was an old loco, old Hornby regime so no reflection on their current range of locos.

[Pendragon Sailing]

A salutary reminder, Colin…many thanks for the heads-up

[JWRStation]

Also the justification of of powering a new unknown machine in 'programming' mode which would then fail to read without burning up a decoder...

[ColinB]

To be honest programming mode is great as a final check but doing a continuity check between pins and track is probably more useful. I normally do a continuity check with all the locos I have done work to, but in this case the loco was in mint condition so I assumed wrongly that the wiring would be correct.