Fitting Sound to 'Old' Bachmann A1 Tornado

[zr2498]

A long time coming, but I decided to get the 'British Railways' A1 Tornado fitted with DCC / sound.

 

 

A relatively old model with the 8 pin DCC socket in the boiler. This does however, leave a huge space in the tender to fit speakers.

I also fitted a stay alive, especially as there are no tender pick-ups, and firebox flicker.

The ESU V5 decoder needs a 3 wire stay alive. An ESU mini was used.

 

Here is the kit:

 

 

Two 8 ohm speaker connected in parallel (= 4 ohms). After testing via programmer and tester, this speaker combination from Roads and Rails sounded optimal.

 

 

A two wire micro-connector was used for the speaker connection. This will enable the tender to be disconnected from the loco which can be useful, especially when weathering.

 

 

Drilling a 3mm hole in the backhead for the firebox LED was fun, as it is die-cast.

 

 

LED and resistor soldered and heat shrink added.

 

 

Fitted to firebox. This was fixed using black tack.

 

 

The AUX 1 connections were soldered to the base of the 8 pin socket / board.

 

 

 

Stay alive connected to the decoder.

 

 

There was plenty of room to slide the decoder and stay alive into the smoke box. Then, body back to the chassis with the speaker cable routed towards the tender. Attached as below.

 

 

Finally, the stay alive needed to be set up via the CV settings:

 

 

Sound and functions were good, but running needed to improved. The capacitor on the 8 pin board was disconnected (not required for DCC), and the load compensation CV56 was reduced from 255 to 100.