Digitrax questions about engines that do weird things.

Model Railroader General Discussion (Model Railroader)
1

I am learning to love my Digitrax, but I have two things that are not in the book. Does anyone have ideas or experience.

  1. My BLI heavy Mike will automatically reduce speed to zero all by itself. Why?

  2. My Spectrum Mountain with lose its address every so often. I reprogram it and it is fine for a while and then it loses its address. Why?

Any ideas??

2

I’mafraid I’m not going to be of much help, but I can share in your misery. You didn’t mention if you were using digitrax decoders. I had the problem of an absent minded engine with a train controls decoder. It also stopped dead 2 times. I finally read the instructions & it had a certain CV # that you could use to “lock in” the settings. I did that & haven’t had the problem since. It’s also a good idea disable DC operation (that seems to allow all sorts of wierd actions. Jerry

3

As a 10 year Digitrax veteran I can say that “yes, these things happen”. Usually this is the result of dirty track, dirty wheels or dirty pickups. It seems that dirt can interupt the signal packets to the decoder and in doing so misprogram the decoder to do unexpected things. If cleaning track, wheels and pickups does not resolve the problem, reset your BLI to the default CV values. Make sure you have adequate power drops to your power buss as well, since the signal packets can degrade over distance.

4

I have yet to experience this, although I can’t claim to have hundreds of hours on any of my BLI locos. It could certainly be connectivity or contaminants. It must be very unnerving to have it happen.

A quick test, and the quickest solution, as stated above, is to a hard reset, reconfigure the most important CV’s, and let it run for a while. If it does the same thing, you probably have the dirty contacts or rail problem. If not, that opens the possibility that it is either the decoder or your programming, intended or not.

5

Never fear, strange things are bound to happen sooner or later. Because the DCC signal is very complex, often simple and somewhat unrelated things seem to play a part in weird things happening. My advice would be to pay attention to when things happen and then try to isolate the problem when it does.

Jeff

6

Art;

A some questions, that hopefully may lead to answers.

  • have you removed the capacitors from the Spectrum model? - if not do so.
  • do you have 12 guage buss with 20 guage feeders no longer than 15", spaced every 3 to 6 feet?
  • when was the last time you cleaned the wheels with 70% isopropyl alcohol on a paper towel?
  • is your dcc system protected with a surge protector?
  • is the DC mode on your DCC system de-activated - recommended.
7

Art

With the engine that keeps slowing down to Zero, usually that indicates that another throttle (keypad) has that address also. Both of them are trying to control the engine. If you had to steal the address at anytime this is what is happening.

Usually Dispatching the engine from the throttle and reacquiring it will stop this. If it does not then doing a Command Station Reset (OP sw 39) will clear out everything and reset the command station back to factory settings. Then reacquire the engine.

As for the other engine that keeps losing its address do you have a lot of shorts on the layout. This will sometimes send signals down the track making the engine think that it is a new programming command and the decoder will reset. The only thing on this problem is to try and keep the shorts to a minimum!

Dirty track and wheels will also do the same thing. If the engine stalls or runs jerky then it is constantly restarting the decoder and this is almost the same as the track shorts!

BOB H – Clarion, PA

8

There’s another reason why the loco may decide to stop. Digitrax has a OPSW in the brain that will stop an engine if you don’t make any control adjustments to that address for 300 seconds or so. You can turn this feature off, or live with it my making semi-constant adjustments in speed or by blowing the whistle or whatever.

BTW, which Digtrax system do you have?

Paul A. Cutler III

Weather Or No Go New Haven

9

I think cmrproducts hit the nail on the head with the loco slowing down and stopping. I’ve experienced the same thing and it only will happen if somebody “STEALS” your loco, even after you “STEAL” it back. At train shows a lot of times our club does this when somebody wants to walk around for awhile. The only way to stop it is to “Dispatch” the loco from all the throttles that had control of it. We have since stopped “stealing” loco’s and we haven’t had it happen again.