I put an engine on the track (not on the reverse loop section) and heard the PM42 board click which I thought was odd. I believe the decoder went bad in that engine, now it moves very slow. When I tried to run a few different trains through the reverse loop section, the locomotive dies (no power). These engines run fine until they come into the loop. I have 3 reverse loop sections on my layout and now 2 of them are dead. I replaced the PM42 board with a new one and still have the same issues. Is it my command station? I have the DCS 210 command station. The reverse loops have been running fine for over a year until now. There has not been any new or changed wiring to cause the problem. I checked the gaps on my track and they are all good.
Check your wiring.
Check your wiring again.
It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse.
I'd try a decoder reset on the suspect engine.
Other than that, I don't have any ideas except from an odds standpoint, two boards with exactly the same fault seems unlikely.
Are the wires solid or stranded? If stranded, are strands touching other things?
Henry
COB Potomac & Northern
Shenandoah Valley
Can you test those pm42 boards separately on an isolated piece of track?
Chessx1 I put an engine on the track (not on the reverse loop section) and heard the PM42 board click which I thought was odd. I believe the decoder went bad in that engine, now it moves very slow. When I tried to run a few different trains through the reverse loop section, the locomotive dies (no power). These engines run fine until they come into the loop. I have 3 reverse loop sections on my layout and now 2 of them are dead. I replaced the PM42 board with a new one and still have the same issues. Is it my command station? I have the DCS 210 command station. The reverse loops have been running fine for over a year until now. There has not been any new or changed wiring to cause the problem. I checked the gaps on my track and they are all good.
Not sure where to begin in terms of offering suggestions or advice. It does seem as though the locomotive caused the problem. So, let's start there. You think that you fried the decoder, but have you tried to reset the decoder. What type of decoder is it?
If you haven't messed with your wiring and the gaps are open and clean, it is hard to imagine that two reversing sections suddenly went bad. Which leads me to believe that the short caused by the locomotive somehow screwed up the PM42 board. But, if that were the case, then the replacement PM42 board should have solved the problem.
I am not familiar with the DCS210, but that seems to be the only remaining culprit. That said, I don't see where the command station could cause these problems. Something is causing two of the three reversing sections not to respond to a short caused by mismatched polarities.
That brings me back to a wiring or gapping problem.
Tell us more about how you have recently operated the layout. Did everything work fine yesterday? What have you recently done to the layout in terms of wiring or adding track work? Was the problem locomotive recently added to your layout or has it been operating on the layout for some time?
Anxious to hear more from you about these issues.
Rich
Alton Junction
If swapping the PM42 did not resolve the problem, I suspect you have a gap that closed up, or a feeder crossed somewhere - maybe a feeder from the loop bus connected tot he main side, or vice-versa. Or just a bad connection from the PM42 section to the loop tracks.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
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