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…