Roundhouse 4-4-0 hesitation

Model Railroader General Discussion (Model Railroader)
1

Another fellow and I have installed the keep alive capacitor in our Roundhouse 4-4-0 that has a MRC DCC/sound decoder. We both were experiencing hesitation at times with our locomotives. Now they run with no hesitation. The capacitor is a 1000ufd,16volts with a 100 ohm resistor and a rectifier. We used the circuit suggested by Marcus.
http://www.members.optusnet.com.au/mainnorth/alive.htm
We stuffed the capacitor, resistor, rectifier into the smoke box and ran two wires to the 7805 voltage regulator in the tender. There was no room in the tender for the capacitor.

rich

2

I don’t know what is wrong with your Roundhouse 4-4-0’s. Mine have never hesitated. They are two different ones. One a undecorated and one a B&O ordered two months apart from different hobby shops. They are probably from different assembly batches, one has the round headlight and the square.

They run over Code 100 Atlas turnouts that have electrical continuity problems that haven’t been fixed without stalling. They run over a turnout that has transparent tape extending the isolated frog length because of shorting by a On30 BLI C-16. The track has only been cleaned once since it was put down in 2004. That is because it was stored for twenty years.

There should be no problem with the locomotive hesitating. My recently sound equipped MDC oldtime 2-8-0 has only tender pickup and it doesn’t stall.

Harold

3

Hi Harold

I had read that yours ran fine on a Yahoo group and your web pages. I checked all the pickups on mine and they looked fine, plus the engine is new.

I checked with an ohm meter also.

Go figure. All I know is the engine runs fine now. The next project will be to close couple the loco & tender like you did with your 4-4-0.

rich