About 2 years ago I purchased a pair of Trix PA sets from my local hobby shop. One of the sets had been used on their demo layout, and the other was new. I ran them yesterday for the first time on my own layout, since I finally have some track to run them on. Anyway, they’re both very noisy. There’s a loud growl from the gear train, and a whine from the motors. Does anyone have any experience with making these units quieter? I’ve thought of filling some of the empty space within the body with styrofoam, and of using a thick grease for lubrication. Any other ideas?
Don’t use a thick grease for lubrication. Use something like automatic transmission fluid or one of the LaBelle oils that is plastic compatible.
Are you sure the noise is not because of your layout construction method? Particularly if you used styrofoam sheets. Do you have other brands of locomotives you can run to see if the problem is your trackwork or is really the locomotives in question ?
cacole, Thanks for the quick response. I normally use ATF for lube, and my roadbed is Masonite splines with flex track caulked to the roadbed. All my other locos run very quietly on it. As I said, the noise is in the gear train and motor, and I’m guessing the German engineers LIKE the positive feedback of constant meshing the gear growl provides. I don’t like it, though. The metal bodies also add some resonance, although it’s probably less than if the bodies were plastic. I’d really rather eliminate the source of the noise rather than mask it, but I’d like to know if anyone has any experience in particular with Trix/Marklin.
Are you running your PA´s on DC or DCC. On DCC, you could change the frequency a little to avoid that growling noise - please don´t ask me, which CV you have to tweak to achieve this.
I’m running them on DCC. By the way, both sets make the same noise, even though the demo set is well broken-in. I’m not sure what you mean by “change the frequency a little.”
When you operate your layout on DCC, your locos do not run on straight DC, but on a somehow modulated DC. Depending on the pulse-width, the motors start to gnarl and become very noisy. Most decoders allow for changing the frequency a little, thus avoiding the “gnarl”.
I am in now way an expert on this, but there are some in the forum. Go to the “Electronics & DCC” -section of this forum and tell them which decoder you use and describe your problem.
It is not AC, it is full voltage square wave pulse width modulated DC. As to the ablity to ajust the pulse width frequency from the decoder, that I don’t know about, but I suspect that feature would vary from decodeer to decoder.
The locos should have came with instructions that list what CV’s can be ajusted. what brand of DCC system are you using?
Hopefully David B or some of our other DCC experts have some Trix experiance and will offer their thoughts.
my trix PA has the typical Trix/Marklin motor and gear noise. It sounds just like some of my Marklin European locomotives till I put several hours of run time on them to bed in the spur gear drive system. Try lubing them up good and running them with a good load for a few hours. Mike
I just bought a new set of Trix PA and it also has the loud mechanism. It actually sounds like it’s broken, or has split gear. But both units move smoothly in both directions. What’s more, store had a used set for sale, and we had a chance to set it up in comparison as well - and it was just as noisy. So my consensus - it’s the type of mechanism Trix uses in this PA. They also use direct gear drive, no helical hear here, so it might account for the noise. I was able to justify liking the engine because it’s very high quality model, has Trix manufacturing behind it, and the gear noise will make up the sound effect for this unit since it doesn’t have sound. I’ll report back once I’ll have a chance to run it at home on DCC.
I want to take it apart to align some grab irons, and it looks like the screw on top is all that’s needed to remove the shell. Can it be that easy?!