Wow, this forum never disappoints. I never thought of the issue but I will have a magnet car by week's end! And, I'll check my ballast before installing. I knew there was a reason for procrastinating.
Paul
Modeling HO with a transition era UP bent
This magnet will pull the Titanic of the bottom of the ocean. It cost $4.00 at the auto parts store. Every once in a while I move it along the track with my fingers between the track and the rail, my fingernails sliding on the rail. I can't believe the crap it picks up and I wonder how a lot of it even gets there.
Brent
"All of the world's problems are the result of the difference between how we think and how the world works."
I just checked my Arizona Ballast GN Basalt, and it's not magnetic. It's still in the bags. I don't see any black specks, either.
Ed
My entire layout may be magnetized. The Vikings won. All is well.
I’m going to build a magnet car this week. Engine terminal is on it’s own power (one leg of a PM42), I’ll try to do some resistance measurements tomorrow night. Meanwhile, that magnetic stuff is spread all over the place around the turntable and ray tracks—- so the entire yard has become a magnet. So I need to scrape it all out of there. Ugh. From now on I will stick a magnet in any scenery material before it goes on the layout. Just to be safe.
You guys have given me a lot of things to investigate and/or fix here, so might be a few days before I post a progress report. Hopefully Mel is right and there’s nothing in the motors. I appreciate all the input!
rrinkerWell that can certainly cause weird things if it's stuck all over the motors. It will also stick to speaker magnets and likely cause distortion on the sound units, as well.
Not to mention increased resistance between the rails!
Can you isolate the engine terminal and check the resistance between rail A and B?
I found out some years ago, much the same way you did, that a bunch of the Highball brand cinders I have had lots of ferrous gunk in it. Fortunately I discovered this before I used any on track. I now have it labeled "Not For Ballast Use!"
I also followed a suggestion by RR Mel and made a magnet pick-up car using a neodymium magnet glued to the underside.
IMG_7270_fix by Edmund, on Flickr
Of course, once glued in place, a magnet won't help in this case.
Good Luck, Ed
Well that can certainly cause weird things if it's stuck all over the motors. It will also stick to speaker magnets and likely cause distortion on the sound units, as well.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
Good tip in the JMRI decoder reset. I was not aware of that.
Meanwhile, I may have found the culprit. And if I'm right, it's probably very, very bad. I asked myself "what changed since I noticed the buzzing?"—I had added a bunch of scenery around my engine terminal. And I used some Arizona Rock and Mineral GN Empire Builder Basalt ballast.
This morning I ran a magnet around my track to see if any gunk might be causing some weird interference, when I got to the terminal, all of a sudden I get these little black specks all over the magnet. So I go back to the scenery shelf, stick the magnet in my tub of GN Empire Builder Basalt ballast, and its instantly covered with the stuff. It's magnetic! Not just a few magnetic particles, ALL of it is magnetic. Whaaaaaat??!! It's labelled as mainline ballast so no idea why it would be magnetic. Very odd as Arizona R&M seems to have a very good reputation. Their website is down right now so I cant check to see if I missed some sort of disclaimer about magnetic particles.
I hope I'm wrong but its possible all my loco's magnetic parts have sucked up bits of that stuff while moving in and out of the terminal, and I'm not hearing a buzz, I'm hearing a grind—from the worst possible places. That would explain why they all started getting noisy at the same time, and why they were noisy with a different booster on a test track in another room.
The locos have been moved and layout is shut down until I figure this out. Does this magnetic particle mayhem sound like a plausible explanation? If anyone could point me to some resources/videos of how to do this type of cleaning, that would be great. I've never done anything more involved than basic lubrication, and I dont even know where to start looking for those particles, other than everywhere. I've got a few F units (my Athearn set is particularly noisy), might be simplest locos to start with.
The correct way to do a reset with JMRI is to open the roster entry and then in the top menu select Reset (it's to the right of 'menu'). That will bring up a dropdown menu, click on Factory Reset and a box will open giving one or more choices depending on the decoder.
Peter
The buzzing sounds like the motor— hard to pinpoint but it just sounds more electrical than mechanical (closest analogy would be an electric razor)—but it gets louder as speed increases so in that respect seems almost gear related. I’ll try the command station reset tomorrow morning. Also will factory reset a few decoders. I will also open up the worst offender—my BLI PAragon 2 NW2 switcher, and grease/lube the gears. It’s an odd egg to crack for sure.
On an aside Randy, you are a JMRI guy, right? I tried to reset CV8 to 8 on that BLI switcher, but Decoder pro wont allow me to change that CV. So I used the single CV thing in the Action menu, that seemed to accept the change, but now that loco is unresponsive to 03 as well as it’s previous 4 digit address. Odd.
Giving it a rest for tonight, and now I‘m just getting more irritated that the Patriots will probably go to the conference playoff (and more) again. All respect to the Patriots, but some variety in the Super Bowl would be nice.
It's not too likely that humidty or lack thereof would cause this. What exactly is buzzing, is it the motors, or the gears? If it's the gears, maybe all the grease did dry up.
That it's all locos, and happens on two different command stations, it's not the signal coming out of either of those.
That leaves the decoders - but something to affect all 15 is about as likely as me winning Powerball. A continuous buzz like a DC loco on DCC would be like there was some connection directly between track and the motor, however this would fry the decoders. And even a mistaken program on the main to address 00 that would do something like disable silent running shouldn;t do this because the CV isn;t the same on all decoders.
Have you tried doing a reset on the system? OpSw 39 (might be OpSw 40 on the DCS240)? It could be that somehow you managed to enable one of the alternate protocols that Digitrax can generate, like Marklin.
Suddenly might be an overstement as I've been in build mode the last few weeks and always have music playing as I work, but I've just noticed all my locos are buzzing quite loudly once they get past about 30 on my Digitrax throttle. I'm using a Digitrax DCS 240 command station/booster. I've got 15 locos, and all of them buzz: my first purchase (MTH Alco PA A-B set), my cheapest purchase (Bachmann sound value RS1), my most recent (BLI Challenger)--and everything in between, they all buzz loud enough to be heard over the speaker sounds (I set all max volumes at about 40%, so they are relatively quiet). Heres some more detail:
I dont know what else to try. My locos sit on powered-down rays around a turntable when not in use, so the chance of an errant programming command getting sent to all of them is almost zero. It almost sounds like they need lubrication (but its more of a buzz than a grind). But 15 locos of varying age/use suddenly needing maintenance all at once is crazy. Which leads me to this thought: can humidity cause this sort of thing? It's been a thousand below zero here (and everywhere) lately. Layout room is always at 72 degrees, but when it's this cold, it's dry as a bone everywhere in the house.
I'm hoping you DCC Jedi Masters have some ideas to try. As always, I appreciate all input and advice.