I have one of the LRRC 2000 “Celebration” baby Hudson locos. (#6-18680)Since I just converted my layout to TMCC I decided to put in the 3 available upgrades for that engine – coil coupler, Railsounds, and Command.
I’m having trouble with the coupler upgrade. The instructions that come with the engine say: “Inside the tender locate the wire nut that has just one black and brown wire together. Unscrew the nut and attach those two wires, one each, to the black wires from the electrocoupler. The order does not matter.”
Problem: I only have one wire-nut, and it contains two black wires and a red wire. (The black wires go to the trucks.) I can’t find even one brown wire anywhere.
Can anyone give me a clue where to attach those two coupler wires?
I called Lionel Tech Support. Long story short, I got the wrong information. The lady on the phone told me to connect the two wires from the coupler, one each to the two black wires in the wire nut, and to connect the red wire to either of the two black wires. I pointed out that that would just connect all the wires to the trucks…she said, “It’ll work.”
Of course, it did not work.
Next I read the directions that came with the coupler, which basically said to “find a bundle of mostly black wires, add one of the coupler wires to that bundle and connect the other wire to the left side of a two-pin connector on the motherboard.” That did not work either. Tried connecting the wire the other side of the connector and it still didn’t work.
Finally I found an unused connector on the motherboard that wasn’t mentioned in the engine directions OR the coupler directions, and just on a whim hooked both wires to that connector, and…it worked. So no thanks to anyone, I figured it out myself. But it works, and the best news is all the “incorrect” hookups didn’t damage anything. Miracles do happen.
