Stephen, I did not know jibberish was not in the dictionary.  I thought it was an Americanization of the English word gibberish.

Quotegibberish noun 1 speech that is meaning less or difficult to understand. 2 utter nonsense.
ETYMOLOGY: 16c.

The above definition is cut and pasted from Chambers online dictionary.  Note their misuse of the language - "meaning less" where they meant "meaningless."  If even the dictionary has trouble getting it right, what hope does HOplasserem80c have?

QuoteYou make it seem that Atlas appeared sometime in the '60s.  I think it was later.

Actually, I believe it was shortly after WWII that Atlas appeared, certainly before 1950.

And I think Tonycook is right - the Atlas/Kato locomotives were a product of the 80's, not the 70's.  The Atlas/ROCO that preceded them were good, but not quite as good runners as the Atlas/Kato.

IHC was not a big seller in Canada at the time.  Occasionally some Mehano-Teknica products were sold under their own name.  Dealers may have been turned off by the earlier offerings that were under powered and under weight.  So here it was the Bachmann Consolidation that was the big breakthrough.

Note that Mehano's present day offerings, sold through Superstore, are a vastly improved product.

SteamGene, I must be getting old.  I can easily read your AME and understand every word.  But I am still wondering what "can a HO E Z comand dcc without loco run on power lock track?" means.  His words ask if an H0 E-Z Commander can run along a particular brand of rails.  But I suspect that what he really wants to know is something entirely different.

Pulse Width Modulation is pretty standard stuff for dc motor control.  Most if not all DCC decoders use PWM to control motor speed.  PWM improves the low speed performance of most locomotives.  The rest do not need it.  Depending on the repetition rate of the pulses, it may make the motor growl or whine or the rate might be too high to hear.  You might want to ask the seller about this.

If your power source can put out 1.5 amps ac then it will power this throttle up to its maximum.  That would be a power pack rating of about 25 VA (I am not sure what your Spectrum Magnum is rated.)  It will not provide more power to the rails than the power pack can deliver.  What it can do is provide better control of that power.

WOW!!  After seeing your great model, I just had to go and read up on the Dunkirk.  Thank you for posting the photos.

I remember the late 50's - early 60's where a number of companies got into the "I can make it cheaper and almost as good" wars.  The trouble was, after enough steps of "almost as good," they were no good at all, no matter how low the price.

The turning point came when Atlas decided to go the other way.  I think they wanted to see if a better mouse trap really could make people beat a path to their door.  So they brought out a top notch product, made by Kato, marketed by Atlas.  The rest is history.  Atlas/Kato locomotives sold so well that everyone else had to follow suit or disappear.  Bachmann brought out their Spectrum series, Life Like their Proto 2000.  Tyco and others disappeared.

As modellers, we live in a wonderful era.  Bachmann "Standard" diesels are better than just about everything on the market in the bad old days before the Atlas/Kato RS-3.  Steam locomotives also took a giant leap forward when Bachmann brought out their Spectrum 2-8-0.  Wonderful detailing and performance that was rarely seen even in locomotives 10 times the price.  Again, others followed suit.  And steam saw a rebirth that I for one thought would never happen.  A wonderful era indeed.

As it happens, I helped a friend do two of these just a couple of weeks ago.  They were VIA Rail, so did not have the strobe lights.  Without the lighting board, there was lots of room for a Digitrax DH123 decoder with no frame modification. 

If your locomotive has a strobe, the DH123 can handle that.  All you need is an LED for the strobe and a resistor to limit the current to the LED - no extra boards required.  Just use the white and blue leads for the headlight and the yellow and blue leads for the strobe.  If you wish to retain the rear light, you could instead use a DH143 decoder which has 4 outputs.  You could then use the 4th output for a cab light, which is a nice touch when the train is stopped in a station.  You did not mention which DCC system you are using.  Some can program the required CV's, some cannot.  In the latter case, a friend or your local hobby shop may be able to help with the programming.

As far as accessing the motor, the B'mann F40PH is a typical split frame locomotive where each half of the frame is part of the circuit from wheels to motor.  The link below will take you to an article which details a decoder installation in a similar locomotive.

http://members.shaw.ca/sask.rail/dcc/tmaster/tmaster.html

NMRA Recommended Practice 9.1.2 requires that a compatible booster be able to receive DCC information from a command station on a pair of wires.  It also allows for a compatible booster to send information back to the command station on a separate pair of wires.

The Bachmann E-Z Command booster meets the requirements in that it can receive DCC information.  As far as I know, it cannot send information back to the command station.  This is of no importance if you are using the E-Z Command command station which, as far as I know, cannot receive information from a booster.  A second pair of wires is not shown between the E-Z C command station and the booster in the DCC FAQ section, nor could I find any mention of them.



Lenz boosters have the ability to send information back to the command station.  As Pospete already has a Lenz command station which is equipped to receive that information, I believe it would be to his advantage to stick with Lenz boosters.  This will be particularly true if Pospete decides some time in the future to add a second booster, which is a good possibility in large scale.

This is in no way intended to disparage the E-Z Command booster.  Tests by Stan Ames and others have shown this to be a good, robust booster more than capable of doing its job and in most cases, I would have no reservations in recommending it.  Just not in this specific case.

Thanks, Brad, Woody and others.  I guess I will have to change that from "very rare" to just "rare."  I did not realize there were many of them.  I did this one because it was the only GP-20 I could find at the time.  I believe Life Like now has a GP-20 with sound.  Maybe there were GP-20's by others.  Anyone remember?

Bob, you are exactly correct.  If you use that circuit, you cannot start on taped track.  You have to start off with electrical contact with the rails in order to charge up the capacitor on the decoder board enough that it can operate the relay to turn on the battery circuit.  This was an early attempt at a circuit that would automatically prevent the battery from discharging through the decoder when the locomotive was taken off the rails and put away.  Lenz is working on a more sophisticated version that does away with the relay completely. 

In my initial testing, I used a slide switch which was already installed in my test locomotive to turn the battery on and off.  The down side of this method is that there is no fail safe for bad memory.  Everyone who runs battery powered locomotives, including me, learns sooner or later that such a switch is easy to leave on and if left on long enough, destroys the batteries.  But this switch allowed me to power up the decoder and allowed the decoder to do its magic on or off the tape, because my "S1" was manual, not part of a relay.

I am presently working on the design of a third method of turning the battery on and off, one that requires pushing a button to turn on the battery circuit and requires detection of a signal to keep it on.  If no signal is dectected within a presetable time-out period, the circuit will turn off the backup battery and then turn itself off.  I would like to make this circuit flexible enough that it can be used in any battery powered locomotive, whether DCC or radio control.

Pospete, I am afraid that Bachmann has not been very forthcoming with information on how their E-Z Commander communicates with their booster.  Without that information, it is impossible for me to say whether a Lenz command station can communicate with a Bachmann booster.  Your best bet is to assume they cannot communicate and stick with the Lenz products. 

I regularly run a very rare Tyco GP20 and it runs just fine.  I would even say it is one of the best runners I own, right up there with Spectrum and Proto 2000.  It has great low speed performance, runs very quiet, never stalls on turnout frogs or anywhere else for that matter, and it can pull a good string of cars, even up my winding 3.5% grades.  Maybe it's that Atlas chassis under hidden under the hood.

Paul, I have hesitated to reply because I am not absolutely sure that the H0 trolley that our group has was made by Bachmann.  With it, you gently pry one side of the body away from the frame, both near the front and near the back, then pull the frame down a bit.  Then you do the same with the other side.  The frame has four small tabs (2 on each side) that fit into slots in the body.

I hope this helps.

Quote from: Joe Satnik on March 09, 2007, 05:28:27 PM
Can anyone talk about rock slide safety issues?  For instance, do railroads detect slides in a slide prone areas, signaling trains to stop?  Could the rumbling of an engine/train trigger a slide (on top of itself)?
Joe Satnik 

I had some involvement in avalanche/rock slide detection several decades ago.  The wires Lanny saw beside the tracks were indeed for slide detection.  If one or more wires are broken, the lights at both ends of the section turn red.  Apparently this did not happen at the CN accident in the photo.  There was a chain link fence just before the slide area.  I understand that these fences are threaded with detection wires, and the chain link keeps wildlife from breaking the wire and tripping the signals.  Other photos of the slide show that the fence ended about 50 or 100 feet short of the slide.  I cannot help but wonder if it was a case of saving $1000 on fencing but spending a couple of million to fix the damage. 

You may be able to reattach it to the shaft with crazy glue.  Try to fill all of the space between metal piece and shaft, then let it set 24 hours or so before trying it out.