Does anyone know if when you change CV 03 and 04 (acceleration/deceleration) in the top loco of a MU consist will the consisted loco’s respond as well or do you need to program each of the MU’s loco’s with the new value as well. I have been trying to get this to work on my Zephyr system and it does not seem to work. the top loco seems to get the correct effect, but the MU’d loco’s do not. I am sure I am not doing it right. I can’t believe they (Digitrax) would not have thought of this when designing the system.
I think if the other locos took on all the CV settings of the lead loco, then individual speed tables would be changed, too (among other things). THAT would NOT be helpfull!
Better to just do 'em individually for better control.
I don’t think the MU’ed locos are affected, unless you put them all on the programming track together or did ops mode with the address set to 0.
I’ve found that CV 3 and 4 need to be tweaked for different loco and decoder combinations. The same values don’t always produce the same results from one loco to the next.
Once I get the speed adjusted, I consist the new loco with the one I’ve designated as the “standard” and then MU them together, but do not couple them. I try speeding up and slowing down and adjust the momentum settings using ops mode in the new loco until it’s the same or very close to the standard one.
You generally have to adjust them all, except possible the slowest loco - you can slow down the fast ones, but you can’t speed up the slow ones. Adjusting 3 and 4 in just the TOP loco won’t do anything with the others in the consist.
As usual you guys have provided great feedback. I am suprised Digitrax didn’t think of this. I guess I can just manually control it thru the throttle. Would have been nice if it worked on all of the consisted units.
All DCC systems are like that. The control is in the loco’s decoder, NOT the throttle. You can’t adjust an entire consist’s performance as a unit. I’m sure this could be done with a computer program that could issue individual Ops Mode programming instructions to every loco in the consist, but I still don’t know how useful this would be, as every loco is different.
Perhaps in the future there will be ‘consist accel’ and ‘consist decel’ CV’s that could be addressable by the advanced consisting (CV19) address instead of the decoder’s short or long address.
That’s great if you want to only run them head to tail (elephant style) and/or they don’t run at the same speeds. Not a problem with DCC.
Or double heading steam - real steam locomotives don’t have MU controls, there’s a seperate engineer running each one. Try THAT with DC. Or pushers on the rear - with DC someone better be REAL quick with the block toggles!
Cave man may be apt - I was sold on the concept of command control reading information about GE’s ASTRAC system from the early 60’s (alas by the time I saw it, it had already disappeared from the marketplace). Had the DCC standard not been developed, I’d probably be running a CTC-16 type system, probably RailCommand.