Recently I have had some success. I had commented on the Forum that I had a runaway problem with one locomotive which the recommended solutions did not solve. I had also had a problem with the lights of another locomotive, i.e., the front headlight came on at power-up and did not go out irrespective of the direction in which the locomotive was running. Both had Zimo MX632 chips which I had bought on-line from the U.K. I took the matter up directly with Zimo and, after an exchange of e-mail correspondence suggesting the known solutions and possible causes, they said that to be sure that the chips were at fault, the faults had to appear on a decoder tester. So I bought a tester and, to be sure, the faults appeared and then Zimo admitted that the chips might be at fault. I sent them to Vienna and in a fortnight I had them back reset and with updated software. The cost was about 20GBP. I reinstalled them in the locomotives and so far everything seems to be O.K. I must say that the correspondence with Zimo was very fluid, with immediate responses to my messages.

One of these locomotives was given to me about two years ago, but the other was purchased about 40 years ago and I intended to have it running chipped whatever the effort. To-day I had it running with a rake of four coaches. When running in one direction, there was no problem. I kept the speed down because of the tight curves on the lay out. However, I decided to try it the other way round, so I unhooked the locomotive, ran it on the runabout loop and hooked it on to the other end of the rake. Then I had problems. At one particular place where there is the end of a downward ramp and a 1st radius curve is followed by a reverse curve I found that the last coach was pulling the one immediately in front off the track. Since this was the very first test with this locomotive and the rolling stock, it is too early to draw conclusions, but since all the rolling stock is old with the coupler sticking out rigid from the bogie, the problem may lay here on this particular coach at least. This coach, when hooked on directly behind the locomotive and running in the first direction mentioned, did not cause any problem.

I shall just have to try out all the stock to see what happens and if this same problem occurs with other coaches and then take remedial action.