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.
2024-02-09 - Walthers’ UP 8312 Back in Automation
Category RandallThe little saga with the new Walthers Mainline SD70ACe continues for UP 8312.
Back in January, I got the replacement motors sent by the Walthers’ customer support representative. I finally got around to replacing the motor in 8312. The design of the Walthers engine is not too bad in that regard except that I noticed a few of the wires easily get stuck between the circuit board and the plastic shell, which tends to break their insulation. Thus one would have to be very careful when opening/closing that engine repeatedly.
The new motor fixed the issue I noticed and discussed with the support representative, namely the old motor was always stopping on the same rotational spot, and when that happened most of the time the engine would not start till the flywheel was manually moved a bit. We concluded that there’s probably a bad winding in the motor, thus it warranted to be replaced. And indeed, after replacing the motor, that issue instantly vanished and the motor rotated smoothly at its minimum speed.
The engine after motor swap. I applied polyimide tape to ensure wires would not get pinched by the shell.
The other issue I was having with these engines is that the ESU Essential decoders stopped responding after a day or two of usage. And that issue quickly demonstrated itself again with the new motor -- I tried running it around the Randall mainline, and it didn’t even complete a full loop before stopping responding :-(
In between, I bought a couple ESU LokSound 5 DCC decoders. I tried to ask the Walthers’ support representative but they didn’t want to cover that. Anyhow, swapping the ESU Essential for a new LokSound 5 immediately fixed the issue. I used the LokProgrammer to upload a sound file, and the engine has now been running for over a week in automation with no issue whatsoever.
Next, I’m going to apply the same treatment to the sister engine 8330. The original motor also has clear signs of some bad winding -- it really doesn’t run smooth at minimum speed. I’ll change it with the new motor sent to me by Walthers.
I know the ESU Essential decoder is also a problem, but unfortunately the second LokSound 5 decoder I got from Yankee Dabbler has proven to be dead-on-arrival -- I can’t upload a sound file to it using the LokProgrammer -- and the Yankee Dabbler Customer Support seems to be some kind of inexistant void.