jpendle

Railcom is optional in the NMRA standard and many US designed decoders do not support it. I use NCE Switch 8's for point motor control, and I have to disable Railcom on my Z21 for them to work. Regards, John P

Railway Herald reports this week that ROG are about to order 10 CL93's with an option for a further 20. Regards, John P

I forgot to say, I have a Z21 and it is a great piece of kit. Regards, John P

FYI, you don't need to swap from Prog to Main for a simple test track, the Prog output acts like the main output as long as you aren't programming anything. It does sound like the Z21 may be faulty. What colour is the light on the Z21? It should be blue for normal operation, green for programming, and flashing red for a short OR for a power overload (where you have so many locos and accessories that you have exceeded the current capacity of the unit, not likely in your scenario). Regards, John P

Do you mean that pressing F0 didn't turn on the lights at front and rear? I believe that the CL26 uses a Next18 decoder and as with all Dapol models with Next18 decoders you have the ability to control the lights at each end of the loco independently. F0 isn't meant to control all the lights. This allows you to follow prototype practice and leave the taillights off when hauling a train, or the headlights off when propelling a train. Generally with a Next18 decoder in a Dapol diesel or electric, F0 controls the directional front lights, F1 the rear tail lights, and F2 the rear headlights. I usually remap the functions so that F0 controls the directional front lights and F1 controls the directional tail lights. Regards, John P

There's definitely something wrong there. When you swap the multimeter probes you should see +25V one way and -25V the other way, (or +10.5V & -10,5V). BTW are you using the Main Track output on the Z21 or the Prog Track output? Regards, John P

What do you mean by switching the rails? Also you can't measure a DCC voltage with a standard multimeter because of the way the DCC signal is transmitted. BUT the voltage you measure should be consistent. Regards, John P

Any idea what the 66's were doing there? Other than heading towards Wigan Thanks, John P

Hi, It works very well. I model in N Gauge but I have 2 Dapol CL86's double heading a long intermodal rake with loaded and unloaded wagons and it copes well with the gradients on my layout. You must make sure that both locos are thoroughly run in before timing them and entering the traction settings though. Regards, John P

But the other approach would be to say, do all 10 CL88's, and then people could buy the whole fleet! John P

WOW!! I'd succumb to one of those John P

The decoder address is set dependent upon the addresses set for the points. Each group of 4 points will have its own "decoder address" Look at the examples on pages 33& 34. 1) You press the programming button on the unit to put it into the correct programming mode. 2) On the Z21 app, assuming you have a Z21 command station, you add a point and give it an address, e.g address 1. 3) with the point decoder in programming mode you activate the point in the app, this causes the outputs on the point decoder to be set to addresses 1 to 8, and for the decoder address to be set to 1 for outputs 1 - 4 and to 2 for outputs 5 - 8. In step 3 above, if you were to activate a point with an address of 9 then the outputs would be programmed from 9 to 16 and the decoder addresses would be set to 3 & 4. Regards, John P

OR out of stock. They'll sell what they have and then that's it. John P

Mea culpa, my knowledge of DCC systems is not encyclopedic But yes, I was referring to the two above, but wasn't sure if any others fell into that category. Regards, John P

Hmmm? A typical sound decoder with a project loaded (unless you are talking Hornby TTS) is around 100 pounds, so quite a lot of money. For the DCC system then you'll need one which allows you to control up to 28 DCC functions as a lot of sound projects use all this stuff. For example, horns, flange squeal, brake dumps, sanders, coupling sounds, etc, etc. A budget system won't allow this. Regards, John P

Yes

Looks like you have 2 threads open for the same question. Regards, John P

I use 1" inch thick XPS and do this for my Tortoise motors, Cobalts should be similar. Align the point actuating wire with the hole in the point tiebar and then draw a rectangle around the motor laid over the foam. Make sure you mark where the tiebar hole is. Cut out the complete rectangle.. Cut the chunk of foam down so that it is approx 0.5" thick. Make a hole for the actuating wire. Glue the assembled motor to the bottom of the foam and then glue the foam back in place on the layout. Regards, John P

I believe Iain was being a little 'tongue in cheek' there. A lot of people use the terms chip and decoder interchangeably. Strictly speaking, the thing you put in the loco is a decoder, it is a small PCB with a number of components on it, the main component, and some others, being 'silicon' chips. Regards, John P

I agree with JST. Unless I am buying a sound fitted loco, I always buy DCC ready and fit my own Zimo decoders. They have none sound decoders at just 20 quid, and they give superb running and have more CV's than you can shake a stick at. They are sometimes in short supply, but that's because they are in demand Regards, John P

Hi, I'm in the process of re-vinyling a couple of Farish CL150's into the newish 'white' Northern Rail livery. One of them will need the base livery repainted because it will show through the white vinyl. So some questions. Is Maskol a good product to mask the windows and roof? Can a can of 'Halfords' white car paint be used on the body shell without issues? (It won't be Halfords but a US equivalent) I also have a bottle of Vallejo White acrylic, but that will have to be brushed on, as I don't have an airbrush. Would that be better than the rattle can? I wanted to get hold of a spray can of Vallejo White primer but these are out of stock everywhere I've looked. Thanks, John P

Probably because there was a fatal train accident yesterday. John P

I'm glad that we've been able to help. As far as the networking stuff goes, this is the explanation. The z21 has a FIXED IP address of 192.168.0.111 so any device talking to it must be on the same subnet, i.e. it must have an IP address of the form 192.168.0.nnn. Your laptop is almost certainly configured for DHCP and the z21 box is NOT a DHCP server, so when you connected the laptop direct to the z21 it would not have been given an IP address and therefore wouldn't be able to talk to the z21. If you ever need to get your laptop to talk directly to the z21 (router disconnected) then you have to change the properties of your laptop LAN port to a fixed address, such as 192.168.0.112, then you should be able to ping the z21 from the laptop. (you'll then need to change it back to DHCP for normal use). For the same reason, when the router had an address of 192.168.1.1 it was also unable to connect to the z21. IP address 192.168.0.nnn is on a different subnet from IP address 192.168.1.nnn. By resetting the router it now has the correct address, which is on the same subnet, so it can connect to the z21. Also, the router IS a DHCP server, so your laptop can connect to it without any issues. Hope that helps. Sounds like the next task is track and wheel cleaning Regards, John P

Probably because that's when they're expecting 'official word' from the Uni, so they can cancel without any issues (penalties or whatever). John P

I just tried this on my setup, and with nothing connected to the Z21, I plugged in the router supply to the Z21 and got a red flashing light. Regards, John P