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.
2023-07-14 - UP 8312
Category RandallThe little saga with the new Walthers Mainline SD70ACe continues as UP 8330 stopped working yesterday. It doesn’t respond to any DCC command and is not even detected by the NCE on the programming track. The engine has only been running since February, merely 5 or 6 months. That’s not exactly stellar.
In any case, I swapped it and placed its twin engine, UP 8312, in automation.
We’ll see if UP 8312 fares a bit better while I try to get UP 8330 running again.
For comparison, the last batch we used was UP 8749 from Athearn, and along with its twin engine UP 8736, we ran them almost 4 years in a row.
The Walthers units were plagued with some mechanical problems out-of-the-box, as well as software issues with their ESU not-quite-LokSound “Essential Sound Unit” decoder. From my software engineering perspective, the whole thing stinks like a serious lack of QA both on ESU side and on Walthers’ side.
It’s too bad because the engines are beautiful. Their shells have a very good amount of detail, and the inside chassis is well organized, with a good weight giving them good traction.
A couple months ago, we had one case where the UP 8330 engine 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.
I shall note that these new ESU "Essential Sound Unit" 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).
The next task is to open the engine and check the motor on the defunct UP 8330. Since we now have a LokSound programmer, I’ll try to reset the decoder to see what happens. If the decoder is dead, it’s back to Walthers’ warranty again. Another option is to remove the ESU Essentials decoder and install my own LokSound 5 in there.
Update: Thanks to Walther’s support, the engine is now repaired and functional. Details available here.