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DCC CVs for the early Roco kkStB 310


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Hi,

 

I recently acquired an early Roco kkStB 310 (art. no 63310), a product first released almost twenty years ago. They're rather nice models of an absolutely brilliant prototype from pre-first world war Austria, but that's not the subject of my post. Neither are the later versions of the same model which have an entirely different inner life.

 

Roco fitted an integral DCC decoder (developed and supplied by Lenz) onto the circuit board inside the boiler of the early releases of the model, and then confused everyone by also fitting an eight-pin plug and socket under the 'coal' in the tender. This is easy to find and people think it is an eight-pin decoder socket, but in fact it is a jumper which is rotated 180 degrees and plugged back in to switch the model from analogue to DCC operation.

 

I had a few problems with the running of my model, and this seems to be fairly common. The motor would buzz and the loco would start to move and then hesitate and give up. If it was still in contact with the track it would repeat the process, but it never actually accelerated and generally just stopped where it was. Note that at this point I had tried to program the loco with a Lenz LH100 controller, and then tried to do a factory reset (see below) when things did not work out.

 

In my case some of the problem was due to dirty contacts and some to a slightly bent cardan shaft between tender and loco, but the rest was due to the decoder.

 

Looking around the web it is clear that the decoder has caused other people trouble. I used JMRI Decoder Pro and a Sprog DCC interface to see if I could improve things. Attached is a listing of the CV settings which actually worked for me. I have run my model successfully on Lenz and NCE systems with these settings. Roco_63310_CVs.pdf

 

I feel doubtful that all these CVs are actually read by the decoder. The decoder isn't recognised by Decoder Pro, and neither Lenz nor Roco provide any information about it (several people have asked). The bare minimum set of values seem to be the short and long address and the starting voltage. As far as I remember, trying to reset as you would for a modern Lenz decoder (by putting a value of 33 in CV08) has no effect. Nothing in CV 29 seemed to do anything.

 

As far as I can tell, it is essential to send commands to the loco in 28 speed step mode. The Decoder Pro/Sprog DCC combination prefers 128 steps and this compresses all the usable values into a small fraction of the throttle, meaning it's extremely hard to control the loco speed and it looks as if it's malfunctioning. Values over 28 have no effect. You have to tick a box in Decoder Pro's Sprog console window to set the speed steps to 28 and this setting is not stored.

 

I have not yet found a way to turn off the front lights using DCC.

 

A disclaimer: my experience in DCC is very modest. These values were found by trial and error. They might rescue a non-running 310. I recommend you do not try to adjust one that already runs well on DCC!

 

Finally some of the earlier posts on this decoder, in English:

  1. https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/germanrailfr/roco-63310-t712.html

 

And in German:

  1. https://www.h0-modellbahnforum.de/t310899f54863-ROCO-DRG-BR-ex-BB-Rh-oeffnen.html
  2. https://www.h0-modellbahnforum.de/t312280f19606-Welcher-Decoder-in-Roco-Rh-der-BB.html
  3. http://zimoforum.huebsch.at/Lists/STP%20%20PfuSch/Flach.aspx?RootFolder=%2fLists%2fSTP%20%20PfuSch%2fDecodersubtyp%20in%20Roco%2063310%20bzw%2e%2063311&FolderCTID=0x01200200E0CC0759D9D36847A090218DF72CD5B8

 

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