Trip

Yeah, they reliably drive me fkin nuts.

No other forms of torture are still allowed. Has anyone actually checked the Geneva Conventions?

That worked. Thanks very much gents. If anyone knows why a motor must be present to get a response (or even read CVs) I'd be very interested to know.

I've bought a Hornby R3390 from ebay It's had the sound decoder(s) remove and left with an 8-pin socket in both the powered and dummy car. Fitting a decoder to the powered car worked fine. Fitting a decoder to the dummy car (to work the lights) and I can't get a response from the decoder on the programming track. Using a multimeter in beep mode I've established that there is a perfect connection from the rails all the way to pins 8 and 4. (This is measured at the solder contact of the wire that runs to the decoder.) The decoder was pulled from another loco which was working fine. I'm assuming that although the other connections to the decoder are important for working the lights the only connections required to read/write CVs are pins 4 and 8 to the tracks? Any ideas what could be wrong?

That's absolutely fantastic GU, thanks very much.

Well that's all very well for you Russ what are the rest of us going to do for entertainment now?

Well, quite. I bought it from the UK ebay site but from a German vendor. He has agreed to refund me, which he really had no choice about, but I have not been able to persuade him that selling this item in the UK without clearly stating, in English, that it will not work on any track somebody in the UK is likely to have is going to cause him (and his customers) trouble. Never mind.

Thanks all. As many of you worked out this model only runs on Marklin AC track. So the very stupid thing I had suspected I'd done turns out to be buying the wrong fking loco.

It might do but to be honest you're better off using another brand of decoder until they get that issue fixed. If you've got room for a keepalive you got room for several other options.

Thanks. That link says it's got a NEM 652 digital interface which is an 8-pin DCC socket. If that's true, it's exactly what I'm after. I think I'll wait for confirmation on that before buy it though.

JMRI absolutely works on a Mac (and Windows, and Linux).

This is excellent advice John and I wish I'd seen it before I ordered it. It arrived this morning an apparently doesn't work unless you have Marklin AC track (whatever that is). It claims to have an NRMA compliant decoder in it but that doesn't actually seem to be the case. Back to the drawing board. Incidentally I don't want DCC sound. Just DCC capability.

It's actually a Piko 57305, not a 57691 per the title.

Yep, it got removed immediately and hasn't been put back. It doesn't cause a short on the programming track incidentally.

I've just received a Piko 57305 which has a built-in decoder. There is a manual for the decoder in English which says it's NMRA compatible. It also says Decodertype: 76 320. DCC manufacturer id 76 is Auvidel, a German company, which makes sense. On the programming track every CV is set to 255. Writing new values appears to work but reading them back suggests it hasn't taken. I thought I'd try using it with the default address (which the manual says is 3) and putting on the layout causes an instant short. Normally when I'm totally baffled by something on the layout it's because I've done something really stupid. Any ideas?