Apparently NCE has a replacement board designed for this locomotive. The Bach DSL decoder will fit in place of the old decoder and apprently includes LED’s.

Bach DSL Decoder from NCE

And they are quite affordable too. A quick search indicated prices ranged from $15 to $20 US. I wish I had thought to look for these a few weeks ago. Oh well, the D13SR’s work fine.

Scott

I bought a couple of these locomotives about a year ago from our local model railroad supplier. I needed some extra power on the BS&T and because they were real cheap (<$40). I figured I couldn’t go wrong at that price!

Well, they ran “ok”, but had poor slow speed performance and hummed very loudly. You know the decoder hum you get from some cheap decoders? What did I expect for $40?

A couple months ago I bought a few NCE D13SR decoders for various locos I had without decoders. I planned to try them in these locos to see if it would make much difference. Well, I finally got around to that last week – while Kim was off to the states taking advantage of the high Canadian Dollar.

When I removed the fuel tank covering the body mount screws I was surprised to see a mess of capacitors and resistors attached to the motor contacts. A capacitor was attached to each motor contact and then back to the metal casing around the motor. Another capacitor was attached across the motor contacts. The resistors were attached between the power wire and the motor contact. The picture shows the underside after cutting off the capacitors.

I wondered if these might be causing the noise and performance problem. I figured the resistors were okay, just holding back some power to the motor, but I cut off all the capacitors, being careful not to cut the power lead. There was no difference when I ran the loco. So I went on to decoder installation.

After removing the body I saw that the decoder was a long one and that the LED’s were soldered directly to the board. I would have to figure out some way to mount the LED’s after I installed the D13SR decoder. As I was pondering that I noticed the decoder was screwed to the frame at each end just behind the LED’s. Then I thought that since this decoder was crap anyway why bother trying to save it? So, I used my razor saw to cut the decoder just behind each LED and screw. The old circuit board became the LED mount.

Next I unsoldered the wires from the now dead decoder. Double sided tape held the new decoder securely on the frame. I positioned it so that the wired end was roughly centered in the loco. I figured I could use the existing wires to do the whole install, including wiring the LED’s.

Bachmann used orange and purple wires to the motor (the standard is orange and grey). I figured I’d use the purple wire for grey and see how it worked out. I unsoldered the orange and grey wires from the decoder and soldered the motor leads in their place.

I trimmed the red and black wires to reach the nearest pickup leads and used the bit I trimmed off to run back to the other pickup leads. I made sure I put the shrink tubing on before I soldered everything together.

I trimmed the blue wire so that the 1000 Ohm resistor (as per the decoder’s instructions for use with LED’s) would reach to the nearest LED. The length of blue wire I trimmed off almost reached the other LED so I had to scrounge for another wire to run from one LED to the other.

I wasn’t sure which lead of the LED was the anode or cathode side so I had to wing it. I soldered the resistor to one side of the nearest LED and joined this to the same side of the other LED. Then I soldered the yellow wire to the other lead of the rear LED and the white wire to the other lead of the front LED.

This is the loco with the D13SR installed.

Then came the moment of truth. You should always test a new install by putting the loco on the programming track and attempt to read a CV. If that works without an error then you have no shorts. Once I knew the decoder was installed properly I put the loco on the main line and checked operation.

Wow! There wasn’t a sound as the loco moved down the track! But I had the leads on the LED’s reversed so the lights didn’t work. Back to the bench to switch the leads and back to the main line. The lights worked and the engine ran like a top.

The second loco took half the time and I didn’t mess up the LED’s. It also had a bit of a motor growl, but neither had the same power hum that they had before.

Brian called then with a computer problem that I was going over to help him with. I mentioned the locos and he asked me to bring one over so he could see it run. He was totally amazed at the difference. He had an Athearn CN GP35 shell that we determined would fit on the Bachmann frame with a little modification. So, off to Menzells’ to pick up another of the CP units he had so Brian could install a D13SR into and fit his CN shell on. I’ll get pictures of his unit when we operate there in a couple weeks.

I decided that they ran so well they were worthy of being weathered. Here they are waiting to go to the service tracks in Tidewater during a recent operating session on the BS&T. Two very nice running locos with new decoders for about $50 each.

Later!

Scott

The goals of the UMG (Un-Named Modular Group) are to promote the hobby of model railroading and to expose people to the operations side of the hobby. Some would argue the primary goal is to have a good time with a bunch of great guys, but that’s actually just a bonus.

One of the things that we encourage our “members” to do at public shows is to talk to visitors and explain what we do, why we do it, and how we do it, even at the expense of blocking the main line. During shows we have to have a “sweeper operator” go around the layout and move trains abandoned by operators engaged in deep conversation with a visitor.

One of the most common topics we get asked about is DCC. The amount of misinformation that is available on the web, and supposed “common knowledge” of non-DCC modelers, is astounding.

I’ve discovered a few sites lately with a lot of great information about DCC that I’d like to share. They shed some light on the myths and misinformation.

Joe Daddy has a lot of great information about Model Railroading Urban Legends which covers more than just DCC. His Legend #5 is one that always gets me – “Use the biggest wire for your DCC bus that you can, preferably 12 gauge twisted.”

First, have you ever tried to twist 12Ga. wire? Second, why would you need heavier wire for your layout than what’s used to carry power throughout your house? Most home wiring uses 14Ga. wire to carry 110 volts at 15amps! Most DCC layout wiring carries 15 – 20 volts at 5amps.

The pundits of heavy wire state that there is less resistance in the larger wire resulting in less power loss. Some hunting on the web shows that 16Ga. copper wire will lose about 6.5v over 100m (328ft.), while 14Ga will lose about 4v in the same distance (at 5 amps). This would be a problem on some very large layouts but not so much for the average home layout. If voltage loss is a concern you should place the command station/booster in the middle of the section it is powering to reduce the wire run as much as possible. If your runs are really long, adding boosters to the middle of power blocks will help.

I used 16Ga stranded wire. Apparently, stranded wire should have less power loss because electricity runs on the surface of the wire. So, more wires equals more surface area equals less power loss.

Steve Jones has several pages dedicated to DCC Myths on his blog – Electric Nose. The one that irks me the most is the issue of DCC Friendly Turnouts (being in the UK Steve calls them “points”). Some websites scare modelers away from DCC by telling them they need to make a tons of modifications to their turnouts before they can run DCC. Steve points out that it is not a problem of DCC, it is more often a problem of wheels, or the turnout, being out of gauge.

I’ve built two DCC layouts of my own, and helped friends with several more. We have never had to do anything more than insulating the frog rails on power routing turnouts to avoid shorts. Well, there were a few used turnouts that we had to set the gauge of the point rails and some that we had to shim the guardrail, but those were more of a derailment issue than a shorting issue.

DCC command stations are much more efficient at detecting shorts than DC systems are. When trains are run on a DC layout there may be shorts happening all over the layout, but neither you nor the DC controller notice them so the trains keep rolling along. DCC systems are very sensitive to shorts since the power output (5 to 10 amps) is generally much higher than DC systems. They shut down at the first sign of a short to protect the layout. So a layout that seemingly runs fine on DC may not run quite so fine on DCC. But that not a problem of DCC, it’s a layout problem and is rarely very difficult to fix.

You’ll see a lot of layouts on the web that have what looks like very complicated wiring. Some people will think that’s because they use DCC. On those layouts DCC is only a small part of all the wiring. Items like electric turnout controls, signal systems, occupancy detection, and scenic lighting all add to the wires running under a layout. You shouldn’t just look at a picture of complex wiring and think “DCC”. Read the text and see what else they’ve got going on their layout. Remember, DC layouts can have much more complex wiring than DCC layouts due to multiple throttles and power blocks.

Railroadman, Daryl Dankwardt, has a great post about complex wiring - Don’t be Intimidated by all the Wiring – that shows photos of his wiring. It looks complex, but he uses DC and is doing a lot with all those wires. He has electric switch machines and has a control/dispatcher’s panel with LED indicators, turnout controls, and throttle selection switches. His wiring is very neat, especially when compared to some other layouts I’ve seen.

Scott