Hello All,
A while back I acquired a Märklin HO scale Class G 2000 BB diesel locomotive in a limited run paint scheme.
I fell in love with this class of locomotives while visiting a hobby shop in Aachen, Germany, in 2019.
The unit I purchased was a three (3) rail European AC version with DCC. Trix makes a two (2) rail version with DCC, but not in the limited edition livery.
Later, I bought a pair of Trix two (2) rail trucks for this unit.
A few days ago I finally got around to swapping out the trucks.
Having no experience with three (3) rail AC locomotives, I had no idea how complicated this would be or if it would even work.
After reading the instructions- -yes, this helped- -I removed the shell.
The solder pads on the OEM decoder were straightforward: “A”- -Red; center pickup shoe, “B”- -Brown; wheel wipers (rail pickup).
Both brown wires from the wheel wipers on each truck were soldered together and then soldered to the B pad on each end of the decoder.
There was only a single red wire on one (1) set of trucks from the center pickup shoe. This was soldered to the A pad on one end of the decoder. The A pad on the other end was not used.
Replacement trucks were labeled Front & Rear and pre-wired.
The wires on the trucks had two (2) colors- -Red and Brown.
Simple enough!
After removing the three (3) rail trucks and installing the two (2) rail trucks, I soldered each wire to the corresponding pad on each end of the decoder.
Before programming any CVs, I put it on the pike, called up address 3, and fired it up.
All functions worked!!!
I replaced the shell, assigned the 4-digit address, turned the sound down, and off she ran in all her glory!
What I had anticipated as a possibly problematic upgrade turned out to take less time than it took to write this.
Thanks for