Need help

[Mikey79]

I recently bought 5 ready to run train sets with ez track. They are the rail chief, rocket freight, overland limited, strike force and coastliner. All dc and ho scale but I was wondering if the 4 emd gp40 and the 4-8-4 locomotives are dcc ready?

[jward]

Depends. How old are the sets? How good are you with a soldering iron?

The GP40s I have were all produced between 2000 and 2012, and they were DCC ready. All that meant was that the motor leads and power pickups from the rails were seperate inputs to a PC board that also controlled the headlights. On mine, the circuit board had to be removed and a decoder hard wired in its place. They were NOT plug n play installations. Some of the newer Bachmann diesels i have DID have an NMRA 8 pin socket which allowed a decoder to be easily plugged in. Don't know if the newer GP40s have the 8 pin plug, or if they are like mine.

[Mikey79]

Thanks Jeff! But I don't really know how old they are. I bought them all this year from hobby lobby, Menards and off Amazon. All in original packaging. All are opened except for coastliner only because I just got that one two days other than that I don't have the packaging. So how can I find out when they were produced?

[bapguy]

I would say no on the 4-8-4. The GP40's  can be converted to DCC. Are you plan on DCC or DCC Sound? The 4-8-4 would be difficult.   On the GP40, NCE makes a non sound decoder : https://www.ncedcc.com/online-store/Bach-Dsl-replacement-decoder-for-Bachmann-p38322131   This should replace the board on the GP40. Sound decoders can be added as well, but the problem is finding room for the speaker.   Hope this helps.   Joe

[jward]

Off hand i would say anything you bought that was new should be a good candidate for DCC, but you will probably have to hard wire the decoder. If it has knuckle style couplers instead of the older horn hook type you should be fine. The older GP40s with horn hooks usually had a pancake style motor and only one truck powered. Those used a cheap motor that isn't really up to the task, and had rubber traction tires that interfere with good electrical pickup. The pickup issue is critical on DCC, less so in the older analog units.

The ones you want are the ones with a centrally located motor (above the fuel tank) with drive shafts to each truck. The PC board should sit on a metal weight atop the motor. Since i assume yours are newer than mine, you might want to look for an 8 pin socket on the PC board, with a removable dummy plug. If you find this, any decoder with an 8 pin wiring harness will plug into the socket. If you don't find that, you'll have to hardwire and the NCE decoder Joe described is a good choice.

One final thought. Since many of these do not have flywheels, you might want to consider a decoder that has back EMF (which acts like cruise control and smooths the locomotive's operation) as well. They are a couple of bucks more than a regular decoder but i think the improved smoothness of operation is worth the added cost.

[Trainman203]

Calypso, is this a club?  What is your engine roster?  I thought I had a lot of one kind of engine, 11 Bachmann 4-4-0s split between Richmond and modern Baldwin.

[rich1998]

Recently we just upgraded 15 of our Bachmann DC GP40's P/N groups: 63501,63502,63504 and 63537 (mix of old stock and new stock) to the NCE bach-dsl DCC decoder P/N: 05249139, for fleet standardization. The Bachmann GP40's run very well with this DCC decoder, adjusting CV2 you can get these things to crawl at speed step 1.

NOTE: Remove the RF chokes on the motors.

Not sure you realized it but some years ago NCE designed this decoder because of all the complaints about the onboard decoder. I saw this in other forums.
I have used the Digitrax DZ125 non sound in a couple Bachmann steam locos upgraded by the DZ126. DZ126PS for plug in. Good for one amp and quite small.

Rich