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.
2024-06-05 - UP 8330 on the Mainline Automation
Category RandallUP 8330 is now the pulling mainline passenger train, replacing Walthers UP 8312:
You might recall UP 8330 has been its own little saga, and is now working fine after a motor swap (under Walthers’ warranty) and a brand new LokSound 5 decoder (out of pocket expense).
UP 8312 has been running nicely since February, yet I recently had issues where it would not stop when coming back to the station at the end of its run. The first time I found it on this stopped here on this dirty track spot:
I naively cleaned the dirty track (what was I thinking!), which means the second time it failed to stop it continued back into the Stockton Yard. I was, of course, unable to replicate the problem when I wanted to diagnose it, so I don’t know if it’s an issue with the automation script or with the engine itself. But then I have not changed that part of the automation scripting logic in months, and the issue did not appear with UP 8330 so…
Updates: A few months later, I got the same behavior with UP 8330 -- engine starting with automation yet totally ignoring stop commands and keeping going around the layout. I’ve also had the issue of the engine not stopping at the station in reverse and ending up on the “dirty” track as seen above (except that time I had turned it off). Overall, the LokSound 5 decoders don’t seem extremely stable in automation.