My 50 ton Shay (old #4) has been running on DCC without any issues since I purchased it in 2008. A couple of weeks ago I was ready to run her out of the basement to clean the tracks when I got sound but no movement. I moved her to the RIP track and hostled(?) up the 2 truck Shay to take over the duties. No problem.

So this weekend I took a close look to try and figure out what may have happened. On the plug that goes into the third truck, I noticed that the gray wire (one of eight) was broken off. So I fired up the soldering iron and after some micro surgery (and a good deal of swearing) it was fixed. Put it on the rollers and... still sound (whistle, bell,etc.) but no movement.

So I opened up the coal bunker and started poking around. After much peering and poking, I found that the orange wire connect to the decoder (lower) board was disconnected, and might have been shorting with one of the other contacts on the four screw connector. Fixed that. Still only sound.

So I decided to reset the decoder, which is done by setting CV8 to 8. Keyed in #3 on the MRC Prodigy, sound and movement. Success!

So I program the loco to address #4, sound, but no movement? Back to #3, everything still works fine. Set to #2, everything works fine. Back to #4, no movement, but whistle, bell as before. Set to #24, where I left it, works fine. What's up?

I thought about some weird advanced consist problem, and set CV19 to 0. Made no difference and why would it only be effecting it when the address is #4?

I'm stumped. Any ideas?

Peter.

 

reset again, try programming a different loco to #4 (eliminate operator error and possible problem with dcc system)

if it still does it, then put on programming track and read back the cv's and see if they "take"

could be a bug in the quasinami, but if it worked before...

Greg

OK. Time to confess.

Greg was right on the money and when I cranked up Decoder Pro connected to my SPROG and opened up a throttle. Guess what? #4 was working fine again. So then a little light went off, and I recalled something about Old Type Consists. So, out can the manual for the MRC and I follwed the instruction to clear the consist, and #4 worked fine.

The only time I'd every experimented with consists was with a couple of LGB Moguls with MTS III decoders. They don;t support decoder based consists so I'd set up an Old Style. I guess somewhere in that process I'd added #4 by mistake, and that was the problem.

Lesson learned. Thanks for humoring me.

Peter.

Don't tell Del Tappero!

(inside joke)

Glad it worked out, I have done the same thing! (and much worse!)

Regards, Greg