When the Bachmann Collectors Club offered the class 150/1, 150 123, in Silverlink livery, my wife offered to buy one for me for my birthday. Naturally, I accepted this offer! Around the same time, I had bought a Regional Railways Provincial liveried version, 150 148, pre-fitted with Howes sound, at a very reasonable price. I swapped the chassis on the motor coaches so that the prized Silverlink set had the sound.

However, there has been an ongoing intermittent problem with minor power interruptions on both units. Initially this caused the (non-sound) Bachmann decoder I fitted to keep resetting itself back to address 3. After fitting sound, it was more noticeable because the unit would stop, then restart the engines, then accelerate again.

I have investigated the units several times but could not see any reason for the interruptions. Then, the more recently released Bachmann class 40 with sound alerted me to what might be the problem. As I have documented in an earlier entry, I found the class 40 pickup arrangement was causing intermittent breaks in power collection (as reported by several other modellers in the forums as well). The solution with the 40 was to add soldered wire pickups bearing onto the wheel backs. I decided to do the same with the 150 123 (and may well follow up later with 150 148).

As some people had also reported problems with some of Bachmann's DMUs not transmitting power reliably through the rubbing contacts between the bogies and the main PCB, I decided to use a few decoder wire off-cuts to solder connections between the vertical contacts on the bogies, and the tops of the contacts on the PCB.

While all this was a little fiddly, it wasn't all that difficult either. The bogie side frames simply clip off the bogie chassis and the tops are released by undoing the screws through the main chassis block, so access is not hard. I checked that the cardan shafts were engaged before reassembling (they never came out of their sockets) and test ran the chassis before replacing the body.

Running of 150 123 is now faultless. When I tackle 150 148, I'll take a couple of photos to show the work done.

This is quite an old picture of the unit, running on my old layout.