My grandson received a lionel legacy control system (990) and a legacy capable Gen Set Switcher for Christmas.The legacy was advertised as a one wire plug and play hook up. The instructions provided are not at all clear regarding hook up. There are many seemingly conflicting instructions in the manual causing many page flips back and forth.. My grandson is using fasttrack with an inside loop and his power is a ZW equivalent transformer. If you use the black wire from the power track on the binding post on the legacy base, should anything be done with the red? We cannot get the cab 2 controller signal to the engine, but can get railsounds when using the ZW. If someone has a simple method for start up of the legacy system with a new loco, we would appreciate hearing from them. If someone knows any source for clearer instructions, please let us know.
Nothing should be done with red. Only hook a ground wire to legacy base. With the gen set is a orange module. Turn on legacy base and track power. turn on contoller by pressing CTC and insert orange module with engine on track. The engine will be given ID. You. May need to press engine key (eng) and enter ID. Then turn orange dial and it should start up.
link
Google "Lionel legacy utube video". Lionel has posted videos of how do's.
model in O. the Western NY and Ontario Railroad
I have to agree with you pretty tough to get going with this system. You need to study the book a while.
As mentioned all that needs to be hooked up is the ground or neutral terminal.
You have to program the train to receive instructions from the legacy system. The engine should have come with a module to program it with. If not the generic steam or diesel module should operate most features.
It takes a bit of reading to figure this all out and by no means is it easy until you have done it a bit.
Thank you very much for your reply. We will try this today and will let you know. Is it necessary to plug the engine module into the handset and the base? Can the system be reset to the original setting it had out of the box? Steve and grandson Kyle
Dave, Thanks for your reply. Does the engine module have to be inserted in the base and the handheld? Can the system be reset to the as delivered settings in case we have entered the wrong data? Steve and Grandson
The module needs to be put into the hand held unit only. The generic steam and diesel modules should restore you back to basic settings.
There are also blue modules for both the remote and base to go completely back to original factory settings.
Check page 74 in your operating manual for module instructions and page 54 for engine programing instructions.
Before you put the module in the cab-2,press eng,then enter id number, i use the last 2 numbers of the engine number, the engines come with 1 as the id number ,i allways changed the id number to the last 2 numbers,you could use the first 2 if you want.
1st thing is to confirm the black terminal of the transformer goes to the outside rail. I know everyone knows this, but didn't see it explicitly stated in any of the above replies.
As Jerry alluded to, the important first step is to make sure the engine ID number is set to a number that you know what it is. (while factory default is 1, it cant' hurt to reset it to something you like up front).
Locate the "Program/Run" switch on the engine (I think on Gensets it's under the roof, but check your manual).
Apply power to the track, put the switch to "Program". On the remote, hit "Engine" (softkey on the right under the large LCD display), a number (pick one not used by another engine if you have more than one Legacy/TMCC engine), then hit the "Set" button (lowest left button, below the big red knob). Horn wil blow and headlight should flash. Put the switch back to "Run".
Address the engine by hitting "Engine", the number you selected, then blow the horn with the slider control.
At this point you should have control of the engine with the system. You can now use the orange module to program all the other info (engine name, Legacy engine type info, etc) into the system.
Hit "Engine", then the number you chose. Hit the "Info" button to the right of the large LCD display. One of the soft keys will change to "Load Module". Select this, it will tell you to insert the module (in the remote only). All info should load, and you are now ready to go. If you change the actual engine ID originally selected at some point in the future, you would have to re-load the module after changing the ID.
Good Luck. Hopefully this step by step is clear enough to get you going.
-Dave
I'll add that the genset is a great start to your fleet! I recently got the NS genset, and it's beyond cool!
Dave, Thank you very much for the step by step instructions you provided. We were successful with setup yesterrday afternoon, and our grandson is thrilled. Thanks for taking your time. Steve and Kyle
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