Graham Radish

Thats ideal thank you so much I think after ive redone them im going to give the shell a dusting with satin varnish with my airbrush, the factory ones have no protection as theyre put on the shell last

Its weird, the loco is brand new, ive literally touched the shell twice and the transfers loose, they are not stuck down very well at all, suppose i could get some black lines waterslide transfers and replaced the damaged area, but quality is slipping with these models

Contacted them, because i changed the speaker the warranty is now void so now im stuck, great.

Got it from rails of sheffield m8 ok ill give them a ring

Ive owned my colas rail 37 for a week and already the 'L' on the colas raiL logo has fell off! Bachmann need to sort this issue out theyre extremely fragile all ive done to it is wiring the shell has been handled twice and the transfrers are loose? this isn't good enough i dont really want to buy a new bodyshell, is there anything i can do about this?

Ok thanks.

I will try and word this best i can lol, Concerning the Lok programmer from ESU, now when you buy a factory preinstalled v5 decoder setting Cv8 to 8 resets it to default settings, the question is - can you make you own default settings with the programmer ie: CV8=8 loads your personal settings and override the factory one? Cheers folks.

It will run windows7 nigel, i could always replace xp with 7 and leave 98 in tact, 98 to me is where the fun is, although im no programmer ive mastered the art of making custom boot floppies. But at the mo, im just using xp to backup jmri stuff to and from floppies, i was quite surprised to see the dr5000 software works in xp absolutely perfect, but yea in win98 dos mode ive done a boot floppy that lists all my trains settings etc. In any case even if you did play a small part in jmri, without people like you people like me would be completely stuck,. yup these decoders are immense ive never seen so many settings damn.

@Nigelcliffe I read on a post on here that you played a big part in the construction of JMRI, i tell you what once you know how decoder pro works this program is bloody brilliant, you are one hell of a talented man sir, without decoder pro i wouldn't have a clue how to program these decoders properly, the ESU manual for the loksound5 is very user unfriendly, and there are loads of errors in it, they need to revise it all because these mistakes could destroy decoders, JMRI is so so good, im an electrical engineer not a programmer i found the manual confusing to say the least. last year i built myself a retro PC with a pair of SSDS so i can run XP on one and Win98 on the other, its a socket 939 machine (opteron 180 on a MSI neo2 platinum motherboard with an AGP 7800GS gpu) i fitted a floppy drive so i can use it to backup the locos settings, i think its always a good idea to have a second backup on physical media, and floppies are perfect for this, ive got some disks that are 30 years old and they are still perfect. as you know the ESU chips have a massive amount of settings and they take an hour and 30mins to fully read so doing this cuts that hour and a half down to 10 seconds. Anyway JMRI decoder pro is just brilliant! this is my backup machine now for everything model railway related.

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Nigel its the cv settings that get me everytime, this is where i get confused lol.

Thing is modern dcc chips have all this stuff onboard, getting as much crap out of the decoders signal path is probably the best thing you can do, i mean now most good decoders have a ton of settings for basic DC running even the sound/lighting works, adding extra components to the pcb adds impedance and wastes valuable space. btw, i love your profile pic lol

Just an update: As richard says leaving the front lights as they are and just changing the rear lights to work independently on functions 3 and 4 is the best option, doing this means on my dr5000 control panel fo0 (the headlight button) will switch on only the front white lights and not any of the tails. So at the moment ive corrected all the wiring colour codes: F0 = Directional Front Lights F1 = Front Cab Light (Where The Driver Is) F2 = Rear Cab Light F3 = Tail Light 1 (Drivers Side) F4 = Tail Light 2 Cab Light Resistors = 3KOhm, replaced the 1.5K resistors that were factory fitted at points, R11 & R12 on the pcb, now cab lighting brightness is accurate Replaced the Yellow cab light led's with warm white. The loksound nearly caught me out, the violet wire is different than that on a zimo decoder, On esu its used for Function2 on zimo its for the speaker, mixing those two up would have certainly blown the decoder up and there would have been some magic smoke. All i had to do to wire the rear cab light on the pcb is cut one trace that goes from the negative pad down to a SMD capacitor, this isolates it from the pcb and the cab light dimming problem goes away. the negative pad has a tiny hole to solder a wire directly to it then to the decoders Function2 pad. Im archiving this so i can do exactly the same upgrades to future class 37's I have wired the bottom switches to switch off the rear cab/tail and headlights at one end only, Bachmann wired them so they completely switched off all the lighting (bad idea) Another option is to re-purpose the CAB light switch to CAP, to enable or disable the stayalive for programming, all you would have to do is scrape off part of the print from CAB to CAP The soldering on the pcb in places was questionable, i found in a few places the wires were ready to fall off, and if this happens and the wires hit the chassis you can say goodbye to your decoder, they also used a cheap circuit glue which in time will turn conductive, i removed all this and fitted a plasticard sheet under the pcb held down with double sided sticky tape, basically there was no short protection anywhere. A mate of mine has mirrored everything that i have done to his load haul class 37, but he made one critical mistake, he put heatshrink tubing around the decoder, you should only do this for low powered hard wired zimo/lais etc decoders, doing it to a 21pin esu5 chip could cause it to overheat and fail, these get hot, in fact if anything fitting a small heatsink and attaching it with 2 part thermal glue would be even better, its preventative maintenance like one of these: Also as with every other Bachmann loco ive worked on ive added a cm square piece of thermal pad material that goes in between the motor and the metal chassis, the chassis then acts as a giant heatsink - in most cases doing this will almost certainly double the motors lifespan, my motor was hitting 65celcius without the thermal pad, once its fitted this goes down to 2 degrees above room temperature, in my case at the time was about 24 oC, farish n gauge locos motors get red hot and doing this imo is critcal. Anyway ive done all this so ive got some common ground when working on future locos, i hope others find this helpful.

Youre absolutely right, these components aren't needed any more this isnt the 80s where locos interfere with analog tv signals, Bachmann/Hornby should redesign their pcb's and remove all the unwanted components that cause problems with the decoder

Yea i watched your video about this on your youtube channel, so the em1 speaker will only fit in the tank area then? isn't there a ballast weight in the tank? Going to get cracking in a min and sort this mess out, so to have independent front and rear lights, i just need to wire them up to the aux 3 and 4 then yea? obviously not touching the common positive. its been so long i cant remember how on the decoder the FRONT LIGHT and REAR LIGHT (not aux functions) functions work separately. on mine one side of the lighting is grey red and black, and the other side is brown orange and grey! theyre supposed to be blue white and yellow at both ends lol

I know sounds weird but ive traced the circuit back from the cablights and its going through the diodes hence there being a voltage drop (brightness lowered) once the front lights are enabled, Bachmann have also used all the wrong colour codes for the wiring indicating a sloppy job

Wow thats proper nice, great work

I think getting as many of these components on the pcb out of the signal path of the decoder is best, i know of a lot of people that just snip out/desolder the capacitors, theres something on the pcb thats dimming the cab lights when the headlights are switched on which means theres voltage somewhere that shouldnt be there, looking through the manual on dc operation for the loksound5 dcc chip it states that sound and lights will work directionally even if the decoder is hard wired.

Well whatever problems they had seem to be all sorted out now, but i have never had any issues with mine whatsoever neither has a friend of mine so i cannot understand why they get such hate here, it works perfect in traincontroller too, there are loads of users out there that mirror my experiences with this system.

Iain i bought the Bachmann factory sound fitted version loco

Yup the DR5000 Is a massively underrated interface box, it basically does everything that units three times the price do and then some, mines not been switched off in 19 months and never crashed once, so those claiming unreliability issues are either using cheap cat5 cables or dodgy power supplies, since the dr5000 is basically a digitrax system protocol in traincontroller and jmri its winner winner chicken dinner, ill part with mine when nelson gets his eye back. there is absolutely no need to spend over 350 quid at all. the digikeijs ecosystem is wonderful, they cater for absolutely everything. just because the odd 1 or 2 people have had problems doesnt mean its a bad product lol, im wondering how many on here have had issues with the z21, no electronics are immune no matter the price. my x570 pc motherboard cost £600 and lasted just over 3 hours.

The way the PCB is wired is not the best in this loco, i understand that they used diodes to make the front and rear headlights work on a single function of the decoder, however these are not needed and are also interfering with the cab light operation (on function1) of the loksound5 decoder, what's happening is Bachmann have overly complicated the PCB for the worse, and once the headlights or tail lights are switched on in any direction the cab light dims down, this is because of the voltage drop across the diodes and pcb resistors. Now, i have a few options here to rectify the issue, 1. wire one side of the cab lights to function output 2 2. keep the pcb in place but rewire all the lighting properly and with the correct wiring colour codes (why Bachmann use grey for tail lights and orange for the front is beyond me) these are supposed to be yellow and white 3. remove the pcb completely and hard-wire the decoder itself then i will have independent front/rear/cab lights in both directions. 4. leave the pcb in place but remove all the components from it then i will have independent front/rear/cab lights in both directions. 5. leave the pcb in place but remove all the components from it then i will have independent front/rear/cab lights in both directions, then wire the bottom cab and tail light switches in between the common positive wire to switch off all lighting in DC mode running. Why don't Bachmann take advantage of such an epic decoder that has a whopping 12 outputs in total? it would have been easier for them to do it properly instead of the silly way they've done it, its overly complicated for no good reason, will doing any of the above take value away from the model? whats your opinions on this i'd love to hear them. Cheers.

Oh you do, especially in class66 and class70 locos, the windows are huge, cheap drivers fitted by Bachmann let the models down, especially with the cab lights on, theyre very noticeable.

I bought a so called "decent" quality pin vice last weekend, after not using one for donkeys years i was totally gobsmacked at just how low quality they are now, damn, they used to be really heavy. the old one that i bought from the old model railway shop in hanley, s-o-t was heavy as a house, this one feels about the same weight as an empty matchbox lol, things certainly aren't made like they used to be

Been searching the internet for the past 90 minutes cant find any modern era train drivers (that wear high vis) anywhere, does anyone know of a stockist? Cheers.