Hi, I've got many passenger cars with 3 wheel sets that drove me nuts till i came up with a way to set the width and align them all in one shot. Inspecting all my Bachmann engines i measured the width inside the flanges .562 seems to be the number which coincidentally equal 9/16's of an inch.
You can find 9/16 Th's square stock or even a drill rod for the job. I made mine about 2 inches long out of square stock, seems to do the job well. Just remember most wheel sets have one fixed wheel and one pressed on wheel or plastic bushed for electrical isolation. Put the wheel sets into the truck keeping the fixed wheels to one side and place the tool between the flanges if you get a slight drag pushing it though between the flanges it's perfect and no more derailments.

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Hey Boomertom, Is it the EZ Command Control Center your tryin to have repaired if so I have 2 extras. E-mail me and I'll send one up to ya your not too far from me I'm in Florida. I'm an old guy too with limited patience and from what I've read here Bachmann needs to clean house and hire some people that know the definition of Customer Service.


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Hi There's one on Ebay right now auction ends in 2 hours.

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Hi, Does any one know the lengths and divergence angles of the Bachmann ez track #4 and #5 turnouts?

TIA,

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Hi, Just to throw some factual numbers around. The numbers are for a 22" radius.

A Bachmann heavy weight PRR
car length 10 3/4" wheel base 7 3/8" center to center hangs out even to the ez track roadbed
A IHC heavy weight C&O
car length 11 1/8" wheel base 8" center to center hangs out 1/16" over the ez track roadbed
An Acela Amfleet
car length 11 1/2" wheel base 8 3/16" center to center hangs out 1/8" over the ez track roadbed

Hope this was helpful.

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Hi, The Kadee #148 or #153 works well as a direct replacement for the F7 if you don't want to go thru the hassle of replacing the coupler pocket.

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Hi, I just added leds to all of my turn outs I was tired of guessing what position the switch was in. The way I did it was, I used the frog wire and went inside the switch mechanism. This will only work with turnouts that have a frog wire by the way #4 #6 ect. I soldered a 680 ohm resister to the frog wire and used that for the common for the 2.6 volt red and green leds. Then inside the switch mechanism I tagged off the frog switch with a red and green wire and soldered them to the appropriate red and green leds. You only need to use like a #28 or #30 wire gauge for this. No more guess work here. Hoped this helped.

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Hi, The first decoder I used was a Bachmann 4 function the performance was less then acceptable. I then used a Lenz LE1025-JST Back EMF decoder and I'm very pleased with it. I would highly recommend any decoder with back emf  I think you'll be happier with the results over one that doesn't.

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About the only thing I can think of is maybe the handset is on the wrong address. Go into the the menu in the handset and find "reset to factory defaults" and see if that fixes things. The base address should be set to 0. I've had absolutely no problems with mine since day one. You could just be one of those fortunate people and got a DOA and I'm sure your dealer will replace it without any quarrels.

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Jim, Here's another thought on that. When i first got back into model trains about a year ago, I bought 2 Santa Fe DCC train sets which came with 2 engines and the Alaska train set. Now i had a total of 4 DCC engines, one DC engine, 2 10 address controllers, one DC controller and 3 one amp wall warts.
The first wiring setup was wall wart to the DC controller to the DCC controller to the track. That gave me the use of all ten addresses using both controllers.
Somewhere along the line I needed more power due to the usual add on for lights, turnouts, ect. that I was bleeding off the accessory tap on the DC controller. So I wired the 3 wall warts in parallel keeping the white traced wires together giving me a total of 3 amps. Worked just fine.
I've graduated to a Dynamis and a 5 amp power booster and many more engines but I still use those 3 wall warts and the DC controller for all the accessories.

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Old Jedi, I agree with you 100% a #6 double crossover would simplify so many setups especially in rail yards.

Are you listening Mr. Bachmann?

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MRC makes a pcb for sound with DC systems. Right now it's on sale for $29 so it's worth it just to try it out.

http://www.modelrec.com/search/product-view.asp?ID=7639

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Hey Frank, Here's an update for you. I purchased the Lenz LE1025-MP BACK EMF decoders for my Acela HP and Streamliner. I'm very impressed with the performance both low and high speed. They run extremely smooth and quiet at all speed settings vs the poor performance using the Bachmann 4 fucntion decoder. So i guess the bottom line is you get what you pay for even though the Lenz weren't very much more than the Bachmann in price $23 vs $21 the performance difference is huge.

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Are the other engines also on that track when you try to reprogram the new addresses? Try putting just one engine on the track and program them one at a time.

Sounds like they got confused when you tried to program the second engine to a used address.

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Bus would be a terminal block connection. One large pair of wire in and many smaller pairs of wires out.

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