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.
2023-12-02 - A Quick Update on Projects
Category RandallHere’s a short update on current projects:
- SDB / Trolley Automation:
- I did a LokSound firmware update for the Trolley Bowser 1379. It seemed to behave a lot better after.
- I finally understood why the automation works yet fails every day. SDB is working fine at detecting the car and then updating JMRI. However the problem is the wifi link. I’ve noticed the JSON updates could take up to 1 or 2 minutes to be detected by the JMRI “internal sensors” monitored by the Conductor software. So that’s what I need to understand next.
- The BLI Hudson 4-6-4 #5278 that I’ve recently set up for the Polar Express automation is now non-functional.
- Decoder doesn’t respond anymore, which is a typical problem we have with the BLI Paragon 2 decoders.
- Saturday Operators are running the Polar Express train with another engine, but that’s not the same thing.
- I really miss that automation for this season.
- Walthers UP 8330 and 8312 engines:
- These are still not working. I tried 8330 again -- it worked for 2 days then stopped responding to DCC commands again. I tried to get them reimbursed but both TrainWorld and Walthers just played the finger-pointing game on the other party, and that got nowhere.
- I’ll call it as I see it: the Walthers engines suffered from obvious quality control issues from the start, and the newer LokSound Essential decoders in these engines are a piece of crap that clearly wasn’t finished properly before being sold. The logical next step is to replace them by real LokSound 4 or 5 decoders, or strip them entirely and use something solid like Tsunami decoders.
- WalthersProto UP 722 and 712 were my replacement engines for the mainline automation.
- These are no longer working either. Their Tsunami decoders seem to only reply to DCC commands intermittently.
So plenty of issues to address.
On the plus side, the new screen for the Vision computer is working great, and visitors enjoy the videos. In the back, I’ve reworked the workbench programming track with a selector and that allows me easily switch between DC, NCE, and LokSound programmers. I have a DigiTrax PR3 to also hook up to that. That comes in handy to deal with all these locomotive decoders.