New Railway Modellers Forums

It used to be easier when we could just pop in to Maplin and buy a suitable socket off the shelf. You might be just as cutting the connector off the end and fitting something more suitable for model railway use like an XLR.

...The CDU states 16v AC or 12v DC so definitely not 24v... They mean 12VDC unsmoothed and derived from a model railway controller transformer. This will provide around 24V peak which is what the CDU uses to charge up its capacitors. The '12V' is a very nominal value in model railway terms and migh...

How fat is your wire? it may be that you are not getting enough voltage at the GM500 to switch the relay. The PL10 motor is four Ohms, so you only need to have another four Ohms in your wiring to be seeing only 6V at the GM500, and that will not be enough. The PL10 motor will take 3A if your wire is...

A CDU you will only improve things if fed with a suitable power supply which needs to be 16V AC or better still 24V regulated DC. You are lucky that the motors work at all from 12V regulated DC, you must have set them up well. It is no big surprise that adding a switch will be the hair that breaks t...

12V is not really enough to fire a PL10 at full power. You really need 24VDC from a regulated supply or CDU to move a PL10 reliably. At 24V you will get four times as much power as at 12V. Using a switchmode power supply is ideal. Get a 24V/2A one instead of the 12V one, and feed it through a CDU an...

The Bachmann E-Z Command is a product for a very specific market, and that it is still in production shows that it does meet a very specific need, that of the ultra-simple train set controller. If all you have is nine trains, and you want just simple speed and direction control of those trains (and ...

You have not said what colour the LEDs are and how they are wired, but if they are white then assuming 3.5V per LED and they are wired in series you will need a resistor in series with each streetlight with a value of 82 Ohms. If they are white and wired in parallel then you could put all three stre...

You can buy a Jubilee with sound, or it will take a 21-pin decoder so you could fit a Zimo MX644D sound decoder with Youchoos 'Jubilee' sound.

https://youchoos.co.uk/Index-Shop.php?L1=Sounds

Roelander In the case of PluX and Next-18 decoders there is a defined space in the loco to fit a decoder and the decoders are made to a specific size to fit in that space. The only thing to watch out for is that locos not intended to have sound will have a smaller space that will need a special smal...

Buy default a DCC fitted loco should be configured to run on DC. I would not recommend taking it apart to remove the decoder unless there are problems. The decoder fitted loco might well behave better on DC than without the decoder, there are often advantages with the way that lighting works for exa...

Cost of going DCC is £20 per loco for a Zimo decoder, and then a command station. There is no need to look beyond Zimo for decoders - the competition is either inferior, or more expensive, and for the most part both. Since your requirement for control is simple, something like a Roco Multimaus will ...

It sounds like there is still a direct connection somewhere between the motor and the wheels. You need to sort this before you burn out the decoder.

Thee is probably extra pickups on the power bogie somewhere.

To be on the safe side buy a decoder with at least the number of functions that the socket in your loco supports:- 6-pin NEM651: 2-functions 8-pin NEM652: 3-functions 9-pin jst-9: 4-functions 21-pin: 6-functions PluX-22: 10-functions PluX-16: 6-functions PluX-8: 2-functions Next-18: 8-functions (non...

Another option for DC is to use high frequency lighting units on each controller. These will put high frequency AC on to the track and you can use indicators that light when this supply is present. They will also light when DCC is present and possibly when the live steam supply is present too. High ...

You might find that a 5-pin XLR will be a bit more robust than a DIN.