Banbury_in_00 (Posts about rolling_stock)

Bachman Mk1 Composite Brake

Tim Pearson — Sun, 16 Feb 2014 12:00:00 GMT

As a break from layout building I decided to have another go at putting lighting in a coach.

Doing a composite brake coach (half passenger seating half guards area) is the obvious stock to do - its easy to hide the electronics (in the guards compartment) - you can take oppotunity to put a red light on the back of the carriage and being typically the last coach in a set it is the one you most need to have live for occupancy detection.

I need various pieces of rolling stock to put a resistance across the rails to allow the detection software to see the full length of a train from the track occupancy detectors; putting lighting in has the side benefit of being "seen" electrically by the occupancy detectors. The other method is a simple resistor across - a wheelset.

When fitting lighting - getting the power from the rails into the body of the coach is, at least for me, still not a well solved problem. I use DCC concepts axle pickups (actually i use the replacement wheelsets that have the pickups already installed) and they do half the job ok. What that doesn't solve is getting the power from the bogies up into the body of the coach. At the moment I use very fine wire - but as an engineering solution I don;t like the method - it is often difficult to make the wires travel close to the rotation axis of the bogie - potentially causing resistance to their movement and it makes assembly and dissasembly hard.

I have decorated the internals of the carriage by painting the seats and by putting in ersatz mirrors (fine strips of sticky mirror like material) on the partition walls and adding some passengers.

The whole thing works ok, but personally i find the DCC concepts Flicker Free2 units don't completely eliminate the flickering - I think it might be more accurate to call them Flicker A-Bit-Less!

Class 128

Tim Pearson — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 12:00:00 GMT

Despite frequent resolutions to not buy any more stock - I am sucker for some things. I loved the new Heljan 128 Diesel Parcels Unit in green with speed whiskers.

It is a lovely heavy model, unfortunately Heljan have cost reduced their packaging from their lovely strong boxes to the same sort of system used by Bachmann and Hornby - you can see the result here -

I could have sent it back back; but it appears that I was far from alone in having this problem and would probably have just received a replacement with similar problems. Therefore out with the glue and some careful gluing got most of the pieces back on.

Taking it apart meant removing four small bolts and prising the body off - it would be easy to damage the fittings in the cab ends getting the body on and off.

I used a TCSEU621 decoder which seemed to fit in easily into the 21 pin socket.

A diversion into Railbus DCC fitting

Tim Pearson — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 12:00:00 GMT

As proof that I don't learn from my mistakes - I am an absolute sucker for new models. The rational part of my brain tells me it will mean frustration and expense but that never seems to get control when something nice appears on the website of my favourite Internet retailer.

The latest example of this is the lovely looking Heljan railbus in dark green with speed whiskers. Ordered it on a whim earlier this week and as soon as it arrived I attempted to convert it to DCC.

It is nicely packed in the standard Heljan box, it is also a wonderfully heavy model - there is a real heft to it.

To fit the DCC decoder, the first job is to prise off the two airhorns - to reveal two fixing screws - it is quite hard to do this without damage - I found a scriber was the best tool.

The hardest job then is to remove the top half of the body - note the instructions in the box do not mention that you MUST carefully remove one end of the two metal hand rails or when you split the body they will fly across the room.

You have to prise the bottom of the doors away from their seating and slightly outwards to allow the top to come off - this is really hard to do without damaging the bottom of the door (which you can see from the phot I did despite using the recommended tool of a scalpel).

Then undo the little plastic keeper plate that runs the length of the body by undoing two crossheads that hold it down.

Now you can gently lift up the centre circuit board which holds the DCC decoder and remove the dummy board. BE VERY careful - the wiring to this board is incredibly delicate and if you pull one off the metal roof that many disappear into it is impossible to repair them (I speak from experience).

Now you can fit a decoder - here is a TCS621 which seems to work ok. Note that (at least in theis case) the decoder needed to be inverted compared to the dummy board.

Here is my disaster a broken red wire that I was unable to repair - argh!!! return to sender!

Bachmann suburbans - part 8 Final Assembly

Tim Pearson — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 12:00:00 GMT

OK with all of the testing out of the way, now is the time for final assembly. Starting with securing the lamp strip PCB in the brake coach. As before I used the sticky pads supplied with the FF2 kit, and then cut a bit off the tops of the compartment partitions to allow it to fit. Careful positioning was necessary to allow the leds to fit 1 per compartment...

Then to provide a place to interconnect the pickup wires I superglued a small piece of tag strip on the floor of the interior moulding - immediately between the two access holes for the pickup wires.

Finally I secured the two FF2 units and the FL2 decoder with some double sided auto foam tape. By this stage things are complicated as you have the pickup wires coming through the bogie through the chassis, through the interior moulding and secured onto the tag strip, and at the same time you have the wiring also connected to the rear lamp and the exterior moulding mounted pcb lamp strip - soo inevitably it ends up a bit of a birds nest.

it is a bit of a fiddle to get all of the wires into the rear brake compartment as you reassmble all of the pieces and you may find the ready and frequent use of expletives helpful.

Once assembled - at least it worked - the lamps are perhaps a little too dim and subtle for my liking (or for good photography) but this is probably realisitic and certainly better than the ridiculously bright output you see on some models. I think if I do it again I will either choose some brighter LEDs or drive less off a single FF2.

Below are some pics of the finished job, the complete absence of flickering is excellent....

Bachmann suburbans - part 7: Programming the TCS FL2

Tim Pearson — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 12:00:00 GMT

This little project keeps throwing up problems that seem to cost a lot of time - firstly the locolamps not working, then the pull up circuitry to get the FL2 to work with the FF2 and now I hope a final problem - programming the FL2.

I don't want to do anything very sophisticated on the FL2 side but I did find that I couldn't use button 2 on the throttle to control the tail light (this is because on the digitrax throttle button 2 is not latching). Now there are various ways of programming DCC decoders - normally I only program on the programming track but on this occasion I used "ops mode programming" - in this the device does not need to be connected directly to the programming track instead the programming instructions are "sent" to its address and it can be on the main track.

Since my circuit was on my desk on the other side of the room from the programming track where i only had a connection to the main DCC rail supply I used ops mode programming. This worked fine to change the button for controlling the purple wire / locolamp - by loading CV 36 with value 16 I was able to change it to use button 3.

I was then stupid and went through the process of changing the FL2 to 4 digit DCC addressing, this is a multistage process and you first have to set CV 29 to 38 then load CVs 17 and 18 with some calculated values. The problem is that once you set CV 29 to 38 the "ops mode programming" ceases to work - as presumably the decoder is now at 4 digit address 0000 - only that isn't really a legal address and not one that you can use the digitrax to send stuff to. The decoder is now lost in (address) space. So now the only way of controlling the decoder until you have sorted this out is to put it on the programming track.

The problem I then found (and reading various internet boards I am not alone) is that I was unable to get the FL2 to respond on the programming track - argh!

I contacted TCS support who suggest a few things - but eventually I found the following - programming on the programming track only works if I disconnect the FL2 from the FF2s - The circuit I used was maybe over the top - but I put a resistor and LED on one funciont wire - the LED will then flash when programming happens giving you some visual feedback - I also connected a 47ohm resistor across one of the function wires and the blue return wire on the FL2. There was conflicting info from TCS if this was necessary or not - the instructions said yes but the support people said no.

Because the FL2 comes with a separate harness at least you can make up a harness for programming on the programming track to set four digit addresses and then do all other programming in "ops mode" on the main.

Circuit I used for programming the FL2 on the programming track using a digitrax DCC system...

Bachmann suburbans - part 6: Circuit Diagram

Tim Pearson — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 12:00:00 GMT

So I have ended up using two FlickerFree units to control the two sets of lights - one FF2 to control the carriage light and one to control the rear light. The rear light you could just control from the FL2 and live with the flickering but I have decided not to.

Here is the circuit that I ended up with after much messing about...note that there are actually twelve tiny leds for the carriage lights - only four are shown..also note that the two resistor values are not to be confused 47Kohm is required for the locolamp -less than 10K would probably damage it- wheras 47ohm is required to get the 12 carriage lights to have the sort of brightness one might want (less than you initially think).

Bachmann suburbans - part 5: Bogie conversion

Tim Pearson — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 12:00:00 GMT

The first job to do on the bogie was to change it to a Kadee coupling

I am using the technique I found by a contributor to Model Rail Forum LINK}:-http://www.modelrailforum.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=11303;here; Which involves unscrewing the coupling bracket and then cut off the vertical section that holds the old tension lock then drill a hole as far forward as you dare in the now forward most horizontal section of what remains. Use that hole to bolt on a Kadee 46 and then remount the whole unit upside down - voila its magically at the correct height.

PIC}:-kadee46suburban.jpg;

After fitting the kadee then on the rearmost bogie of the brake van (i.e. the one underneath the guards/parcel area where we are going to locate the electronics) then I fitted the brelec pickups - these are expensive and fiddly - especially getting the little 'rivet' to go through the hole you have to drill without dropping everything and having to crawl around on the floor to find all the pieces (repeat until you get fed up). I will reserve judgement on whether cost/effort was worth it until i see how they work.

Bachmann suburbans - part 4 Fixing Leds

Tim Pearson — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 12:00:00 GMT

Looking back on some earlier advice from Richard of DCC concepts on use of Flicker Free with FL2 I realised that what was missing (though you won't find instructions to tell you this anywhere).

You need to connect the blue 'return' wire on the FL2 to the green wire of the FF2 via a pull up resistor (10K seems to be fine).

Doing this and voila I now have DCC control over the lights via the TCS FL2 decoder and the FlickerFree unit.

[I will put up a circuit diagram when I have finished tweaking later on].

So I went ahead and fitted the strips of LEDs into the open carriage.

PIC}:-LEDstrips.jpg;

My next job is to fit the DCC concepts LocoLamp onto the back of the brake coach. It is amazingly small - it is marked here with a red arrow.

It isn't brilliantly positioned and I have just used regular plastic kit glue to fix it.

Getting to the point where I was confident enough to fix the locolamp was a long story - I had a whole pack of them (thirty quids worth) that just didn't seem to want to work for me - they are easy to blow up but even so! That pack has been sitting in my cupboard for several years so in frustration I purahcsed a new pack and these seem to work fine.

One trick to learn is how to remove the enamel insulation of the tiny leads that supply the locolamp. There are several techniques - you can burn it off - but this is a bit uncontrolled, or you can gently wipe with an emery cloth being careful to put no strain on the connection - neither are great. and stripping the insulation remains a bit of an art form.

Bachmann suburbans - part 3: Microconnectors

Tim Pearson — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 12:00:00 GMT

I have lashed up a simple set of connections between the FL2 decoder and the DCC concepts FlickerFree2 device and the lighting strip - initially this does not seem to work.

Pressing button 1 on the controller should toggle the lights on and off - but it doesn't.

So while I scratch my head about that I have drilled some holes in the ends of the carriages for the Miniatronics microconnectors.

They are only an interference / friction fit at the moment - and O am hoping they can stay that way.

Upgrading the Bachmann Suburbans - Part 2: Bill of Material

Tim Pearson — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 12:00:00 GMT

By connecting the carriages I can control their lighting as a single unit which is nice and also I lower the cost of the fit out by using only one decoder and one FlickerFree unit.

The Flicker free units were devised by Richard of DCC concepts for DC originally - and they contain a large capacitor to drive the leds even when pickups aren't working - e.g. when train is stationary. Of course on DCC when the train is stationary the rails are still live - but the FF2 still has a purpose - firstly it allows more LEDs to be driven than a typical lighting decoder - and in the packs you also get the really hand lighting strip PCBs and some nice microdot LEDS that are ideal. The FlickerFree2 pack come slike this...

and once opened you can see lighting strips FF2 units leds and a handy pack of 1K resistors.

So now I have my complete bill of material - and it looks something like this -

Seated passengers - From ebay seller everest model on ebay £8.99 for 60pcs Kadee couplings - in stock but probably around £5 for a pack Pickups - Brelec - bought from DCC Supplies - £4.50 FlickerFree2 from DCC concepts bought from Digitrains - £58.32 for pack of 6 Microconnectors - Miniatronics bought from Digitrains - £8.32 for pack of 2 pairs DCC Decoder - TCS FL2 lighting only decoder bought from Digitrains - £14.82

PIC}:-Wholekit.jpg;

I did consider using electrical connector couplings but as their are no NEM coupling sockets this would have been hard. I am also trying the brelec pickups to see if they are easier than just a bit of bent pickup wire. The axles on the suburbans are not conductive at all and so

So overall if you take one sixth of the FF2 pack and passengers set and a half of the connector pack then you get a total cost for the pair of carriages of around ( (8.99 + 58.32) / 6 ) + ( 8.32 / 2) + 14.82 + 5 + 4.50 = £39.70

Which will almost double the cost of the two carriages which are currently retailing for around £19 each online.

Banbury_in_00 (Posts about rolling_stock)

Bachman Mk1 Composite Brake

﻿Class 128

﻿A diversion into Railbus DCC fitting

﻿Bachmann suburbans - part 8 Final Assembly

﻿Bachmann suburbans - part 7: Programming the TCS FL2

﻿Bachmann suburbans - part 6: Circuit Diagram

﻿Bachmann suburbans - part 5: Bogie conversion

﻿Bachmann suburbans - part 4 Fixing Leds

﻿Bachmann suburbans - part 3: Microconnectors

﻿Upgrading the Bachmann Suburbans - Part 2: Bill of Material