Rayray

Originally these were just made for our fleet, not to the general public and in a very small quantity. But if you are interested, please message me and I will ask if they have any spare sets left.

This may not be a totally new topic. Several years ago, I ordered a pre-owned Class 170 from Hattons with decoder fitted by them. It was working, but not as a perfect job as I originally expected... Soldering decoders on these DMUs could be painful, as you will have a bunch of wires, big components flying everywhere... Back in the early 2000, these types of DMUs were popularly sold everywhere in the world, by Bachmann local dealers. Among our fan group, we currently have about 19 in our fleet, and almost nobody was bothered to do the DCC process on these antiques... End of last year while I was travelling, I happened to meet an electrical engineer (fan) who used to do design works in a model railroad company. We talked about this issue, and that conversation turned into something we longed for years. He helped us to develop a functional PCB for our fan group to refurbish these old DMUs to be "almost as the current standard". They support 21MTC decoders, and as little as 4 wires to do the power pickups and headlights the train cars are ready to go. Furthermore, it actually provided amplified AUX3-4 for the day and night headlights, not to mention interior illuminations! After I did a test installation, I was astonished that these DMUs were designed to be upgraded (by Bachmann), but never made to its hay day. Here I would like to share some results: Class 170 on its test run: Class 170 interior (T car) Class 170 (M car) Installation. The motor does not bother too much. The installation of the T car Similar results on other "relatives": Class 158 and 166. (I was going to try to open the front and totally swap the LEDs but it was glued too well) I know Bachmann already released the new 158 and 159, stunning model! But I would like to share the idea----if you do NOT want to trade 3 of your old beloved DMUs for a new one, or wait another 10 years before Bachmann completely renews their product line, there is something you could do! These are better than you expected. Even the real railroad company refurbished their fleet, why not you give a try? I have seen that Hattons and quite a lot of dealers already offer DCC fitting in the traditional way, and a lot of you fans also do the wire-by-wire strategy. We came up to this and wanted to simplify all the process, and if any day we wanna do a sound upgrade, all we need is to swap the decoder! Hope this post provides you more ideas~.

Yeah I still used the metal rod (screw) to hold the PCB.

As you might already find out that the original train car came with 2 coils. Each coil connects one side (rail) in series to the motor on the cargo vehicle. First you would need to chop the coils off and clear the soldering pads (if you have de-soldering braids that will be helpful). So the original connection is track A ~ Coil A ~ motor ~ Coil B ~ Track B. Now for your 4 wires, you would just sold the red and black wire to the track-side coil pads (please double check using a multi-meter) and the orange and grey to the coil motor sides pads. (Basically the left over two pads...) Direction does not matter, if reversed, just adjust CV29(+1).

When I did the change, I am soldering the decoder to the pads of the coils (taken out, no need), so as to avoid doing things directly to the motor wires...

Recently I have refurbished the interior light on my S stock cars. There is one lokpilot V4 decoder for each cab cars, and there is one lokpilot micro FX decoder for each center cars. Now to install interior light for all the cars. While I hate having all wires and giant components flying across the train cars, as a result, several PCBs were made with LEDs and plugs to the bottom mounting at the end of the cars. The light controlled as follows: F2 controls 3 of these (2,5,8), and F1 controls the other 6 LEDs. In this way I can turn on 3, 6, 9 of the LEDs depending on the actual daylight. Here is the train on the test track.

I have had the wickham trolley for a while and was always wondering what could be done to modify into DCC without any "heavy" modifications on the plastic or the metal chassis. I bet some of you guys do not want to cut metal, drill holes or do any "heavy" works on it either, and probably just want to have it run on your DCC layout. *This will not work for any of you who wants to go for DCC-sound* Several month ago the Lokpilot V5 series was released and the lokpilot V5 micro was a perfect fit in size to the space underneath the trolley. The big coils and 2 other capacitors need to be removed, and the capacitor section of the PCB was chopped off using a model cutter. The decoder wires (4 in total, 2 for pickups and 2 for motor) were soldered to the original coil pads and it is ready to go. A picture for reference was attached here. A comparison AA battery was also included in the picture.