Railsounds upgrade on 4-6-4 not chuffing, Need advise.

[steview28]

I recently purchased a lionel 4-6-4 steam loco with signal sounds, I bought the upgrade railsounds kit 6-22963 and followed the directions in the booklet and still I do NOT have the chuffing sound when moving. The whistle and the bell button work fine and I can hear the steam sounds but still no chuffing. I also followed someones advise by plugging in the green wire to the center board. I do not have a 9V battery hooked up. Should that matter? Do I need to upgrade to TMCC also? I'm at wits end and don't want to pay someone to fix a small problem like this. Thanks

[Anonymous]

Steview28,

The upgrade for railsounds seems to be a problem on various board sets. If you convert to command they usually work. If you just want railsounds in conventional you will probably have to change the wiring to make it work.

If it's the board set I think it is you can try this.
1. Locate the chuff switch in the engine. It will be under the boards by the smoke unit. There will be two wires soldered to the switch and they plug into the engine motherboard.
2. Unplug the wires from the motherboard and hot wire them to the tender and chassis ground to see if the problem is fixed. If it works you can hard wire the engine.
3. I suggest that you do this by using jumper wires with alligator clips. Remove the plastic connector from the two chuff wires. Clip one wire to the engine chassis. Clip the second wire to the tender mother board. You need to find where the tether plugs into the motherboard to do this.
4. You will find a 4 pin plug that has red, black and yellow wires. The green wire was probably unplugged and it sounds like you plugged it in. If it is plugged in you then need to pierce it with a needle and clip the other wire from the chuff switch to the needle.
5. Try the engine to see if you have chuff sounds.

If this works you need to connect one chuff wire to the green engine wire that plugs into the engine side mother board and goes to the engine side tether plug.. Remove it from the motherboard, clip both wire ends, solder them together and use shrink tubbing to cover the joint. Clip the other chuff wire end, solder on a connector and place it under a screw that goes into the engine chassis.

I've found that there's never an easy fix for these kinds of things.

In summary the green tender wire needs to be plugged into the tender motherboard and the green engine tether wire needs to be connected to one of the chuff switch wires. The other chuff switch wire needs to go to chassis ground.

Make sure you try it first before you cut any wires just in case it's not the board set I think it is.

*** Teal