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The Randall Museum in San Francisco hosts a large HO-scale model model railroad. Created by the Golden Gate Model Railroad Club starting in 1961, the layout was donated to the Museum in 2015. Since then I have started automatizing trains running on the layout. I am also the model railroad maintainer. This blog describes various updates on the Randall project and I maintain a separate blog for all my electronics not directly related to Randall.

2023-04-14 - UP 8330 Unstoppable

Category Randall

The little saga with the new Walthers Mainline SD70ACe continues as UP 8330 today totally failed to stop while running under automation and kept circling around the layout, unsupervised.

That was the initial issue with these decoders out of the box and it was supposedly fixed by the first firmware update. Apparently not quite. That’s not promising.

Like ScaleTrains, these Walthers use the new ESU "Essential Sound Unit" decoder and so far I have been less than impressed by this decoder. I don’t care that it has less features -- I don’t need any of the features that are missing. What I care about is solid reliability, and I’m afraid this decoder seems to have skipped the QA line for now.

I shall note that these decoders do not even have a product support page on the ESU website. It feels like a half-baked product. Apparently each OEM has their own unimpressive OEM-specific page to list CVs instead. In the Walthers case, it’s a random footnote in the engine’s listing. That is not a practice I like, and I will make sure to not select any more engines with this type of decoder in the near future (or at least till they iron out all the bugs).


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