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11 Posts
Morning all.
I have been having a set of ongoing issues with my DCC setup.
Here is the backstory, symptoms and equipment:
I have been out of the hobby for a while, however my son who is about to turn 11 has always loved trains. Since he was about 4 his birthdays have involved HO scale train-sets or locomotives. This year at Christmas he wanted a big boy. They were impossible to come by so I settled on a BLI Challenger.
As the train was DCC equipped I also decided we should jump over to DCC and on the advice of the local hobby store got a NCE powercab.
I set up about 20 feet of Bachmann EZ track with a couple of DCC crossovers and wired up the system to Powercab. The train rain fine for about a quarter hour except once in a while the headlight would shut off and the dyno sound would restart. It appeared that there was an intermittent short. I assumed there was a problem with the connections in the track, until the loco quit working.
I contacted the online retailer of the locomotive and they agreed to swap it out. The second locomotive arrived and operated fine for about an hour and then it would not run. When I tried switching back to DC the headlight flashed but nothing else, which on older BLIs was apparently a sign for a bad decoder, though I do not know if that is accurate for current production models.
In the meantime I had purchased several diesel locomotives, some DCC ready, a couple of MTH DCC/DCS/DC dash 9s two BLI Blue Line Locos with decoders installed a Kato DCC dash 9 without sound. With decoders installed, they all operated fine as lon as no more than 2 locos were used at once. If you tried for more than 2 and speed went above about 15/28 they would run slowly or lurch. Power draw in these error cases would be around 1-1.3 amps.
I contacted NCE and had probably the worst customer service experience ever. The associate was very rude and condescending. He tried to spin me with a bunch of technobabble and when I pointed out that he was misquoting telecommunications standards, he said he used to work for AT&T. I used to repair and service telecommunications equipment and had the standards on hand so was not impressed. He then said that the problem was probably either the track (which is probably the most popular consumer track in the world), or the fact that I was using MTH and BLI locomotives or too narrow gauge feeder wires.
I upgraded all the drops to the track and made sure there was no more than 8 feet between drops. I upgraded the wire (12 or 14 gauge IIRC, don't remember off the top of my head, basically the biggest wire that would fit into the NCE connector), to no avail.
I sent back the second challenger and waited for MTH to release the 2020 edition big boy. It came in and I test ran it. It was running 1.3 amps at speedstep 15 with the smoke unit on, which I thought was extremely high. I contacted customer service and they said anything below 2.0 amps was considered high but normal. If you turned on the auxilliary smoke unit amperage jumped to over 1 with the train sitting still. The loco also would not change speeds above about speed step 14.
Then whilst running at around speedstep 5 the locomotive glitched and stopped. Amps were reading 1.3. Sound and steam kept running but the loco would not move. Doing an emergency stop then setting speed to zero had Amps drop to about .3 which is what I would expect for a sound unit and smoke unit. Moving to speed step 1 resulted to amps climbing back to 1.3 and no movement.
I can only conclude that the loco has burnt out its motor.
I have therefore had three locos fail in a couple of hours running. I had assumed that because the diesels worked fine that the problem was perhaps BLI having a bad batch of challengers, but I have found no evidence of that. The fact that another steam loco, with its higher draw, from a different manufacurer has quit makes me think that it is the Powercab.
Is it possible that the cab, under load, is putting out a bad signal that is frying decoders/motors? Has anyone had similar problems? Is this a known issue? Am I missing something obvious?
Assuming the consensus is that it is the cab, would the MRC Prodigy advance 2 wifi be a good step up? I am not buying anything else from NCE based purely on their customer support, however I do like using my phone or my son's iPad as a cab, so the wifi capability is great. How would one connect JMRI to the Prodigy system (I know you don't need it for that functionality but I would like to use it for controlling other systems once I move to a permanent layout).
Thanks. Sorry for the slightly ranty post
I have been having a set of ongoing issues with my DCC setup.
Here is the backstory, symptoms and equipment:
I have been out of the hobby for a while, however my son who is about to turn 11 has always loved trains. Since he was about 4 his birthdays have involved HO scale train-sets or locomotives. This year at Christmas he wanted a big boy. They were impossible to come by so I settled on a BLI Challenger.
As the train was DCC equipped I also decided we should jump over to DCC and on the advice of the local hobby store got a NCE powercab.
I set up about 20 feet of Bachmann EZ track with a couple of DCC crossovers and wired up the system to Powercab. The train rain fine for about a quarter hour except once in a while the headlight would shut off and the dyno sound would restart. It appeared that there was an intermittent short. I assumed there was a problem with the connections in the track, until the loco quit working.
I contacted the online retailer of the locomotive and they agreed to swap it out. The second locomotive arrived and operated fine for about an hour and then it would not run. When I tried switching back to DC the headlight flashed but nothing else, which on older BLIs was apparently a sign for a bad decoder, though I do not know if that is accurate for current production models.
In the meantime I had purchased several diesel locomotives, some DCC ready, a couple of MTH DCC/DCS/DC dash 9s two BLI Blue Line Locos with decoders installed a Kato DCC dash 9 without sound. With decoders installed, they all operated fine as lon as no more than 2 locos were used at once. If you tried for more than 2 and speed went above about 15/28 they would run slowly or lurch. Power draw in these error cases would be around 1-1.3 amps.
I contacted NCE and had probably the worst customer service experience ever. The associate was very rude and condescending. He tried to spin me with a bunch of technobabble and when I pointed out that he was misquoting telecommunications standards, he said he used to work for AT&T. I used to repair and service telecommunications equipment and had the standards on hand so was not impressed. He then said that the problem was probably either the track (which is probably the most popular consumer track in the world), or the fact that I was using MTH and BLI locomotives or too narrow gauge feeder wires.
I upgraded all the drops to the track and made sure there was no more than 8 feet between drops. I upgraded the wire (12 or 14 gauge IIRC, don't remember off the top of my head, basically the biggest wire that would fit into the NCE connector), to no avail.
I sent back the second challenger and waited for MTH to release the 2020 edition big boy. It came in and I test ran it. It was running 1.3 amps at speedstep 15 with the smoke unit on, which I thought was extremely high. I contacted customer service and they said anything below 2.0 amps was considered high but normal. If you turned on the auxilliary smoke unit amperage jumped to over 1 with the train sitting still. The loco also would not change speeds above about speed step 14.
Then whilst running at around speedstep 5 the locomotive glitched and stopped. Amps were reading 1.3. Sound and steam kept running but the loco would not move. Doing an emergency stop then setting speed to zero had Amps drop to about .3 which is what I would expect for a sound unit and smoke unit. Moving to speed step 1 resulted to amps climbing back to 1.3 and no movement.
I can only conclude that the loco has burnt out its motor.
I have therefore had three locos fail in a couple of hours running. I had assumed that because the diesels worked fine that the problem was perhaps BLI having a bad batch of challengers, but I have found no evidence of that. The fact that another steam loco, with its higher draw, from a different manufacurer has quit makes me think that it is the Powercab.
Is it possible that the cab, under load, is putting out a bad signal that is frying decoders/motors? Has anyone had similar problems? Is this a known issue? Am I missing something obvious?
Assuming the consensus is that it is the cab, would the MRC Prodigy advance 2 wifi be a good step up? I am not buying anything else from NCE based purely on their customer support, however I do like using my phone or my son's iPad as a cab, so the wifi capability is great. How would one connect JMRI to the Prodigy system (I know you don't need it for that functionality but I would like to use it for controlling other systems once I move to a permanent layout).
Thanks. Sorry for the slightly ranty post