TrainSounds Brake Squeal

[Anonymous]

Hello all

I’m a newbie who, as a pre-retirement gift, rewarded himself with a Lionel NYC Flyer trainset including TrainSounds this Christmas. I recently installed the FasTrack siding add-on track pack with a manual switch to the basic loop of track.

Now the TrainSounds brake squeal is activated almost every time the train goes straight on through the switch. This occurs at a steady speed without operating the train rapidly & then slowing it down as the owner’s manual describes. In fact, I had not heard the brake squeal at all until I installed the add-on pack. I find the regular squealing to be annoying mostly because it occurs so often & I can’t control it. So is this a peculiarity of TrainSounds, is the switch defective, am I doing something wrong, or could it be something else?

I know that turning the TrainSounds off is an obvious work-around, but my grandson thinks the chugging & crew-talk are really neat. I would appreciate hearing any comments or suggestions.

Many thanks,

Bob (Nashville, TN)

[ben10ben]

The only thing that I can think of that might cause it is a voltage drop that the board perceives as slowing down and therefore activates the squealing sound.

That may be a long shot, but it wouldn't be too difficult to add a jumper from your main terminal section to the point where the squealing starts. Just be sure you get the wires connected correctly, and not center rail to outer rail.

[wrmcclellan]

I agree with Ben that when the loco travels over the switch, it is seeing a momentary loss of voltage that the Trainsounds circuit would interpret as slowing down and thus trigger the brake squeal feature.

You might examine the pickup rollers and make sure they are clean and operating properly as one not making contact would cause this problem. As far as I know, the two rollers on the bottom of the loco should properly bridge the gaps in the center rail as the loco travels over the switch.

Regards,
Roy

[pbjwilson]

Clean the switch as well. Right out of the box you never know how clean or dirty the track is. Alot of gunk in manufacturing these days. I ran into the same thing with some new MTH switches. Trains balked everytime I ran my trains over them. Then it occured to me to just clean the track of the switch. No problems since. Good luck.