I had posted earlier about trying to do a “factory reset” for chuff sounds on this particular locomotive, with each attempt being un-successful on the club layout with Z-4000’s. When my AT&SF Ten Wheeler set arrived it came with a Z-1000. So after setting up the Realtrax and testing my new set I figured what the heck why not try resetting the problem child. It worked. I ran it a bit, shut everything down for an hour worked great, off for a day no problem. Let it set for almost a week and ran great, so I took it to the museum with me today, NO chuff !!! NO reset !!!
Could there be something about the Z-4000 that this particular PS-1 chip doesn’t like ?
As far as I know protosound 1 needs a pure sine wave to function properly. Also a light in parallel to the tracks helps to get it running the way it should.
On my layout I had 2 problems. 1st one was that the train came in programm mode without starting up on the 50Hz märklin transformer I use. 2nd was the continuous horn blowing when powered via an electronic transformer. By accident I discovered that the engine would run properly when there was a caboose on the tracks and that caboose had a light.
Hooking up a small 5 watt bulb in parallel to the tracks somehow made the train behave normally. The second one had to do with a not so proper sine wave coming out of the electronic transformer.
It could be that your home layout has a lighted lockon and the other layout doesn’t have that or that the z4000 is not putting out a nice sinewave… I suppose the obvious thing with the battery is already checked (when it is weak, the engine also acts up weird)