Mostly Decoders

I did several decoder installs over the past week. The most straightforwad was a Digitrax DH165A0 in an Atlas Classic Katy RS-3, which is a PC board that matches the various older Atlas light boards and fits in the same mounts above the motor. The process is complicated, first, because Atlas uses the red wire for negative on the motor leads but positive on the LED leads; and second, because the Atlas wire at least on this run is pretty brittle and doesn't seem well suited even to being resoldered on the new Digitrax contacts. But I got it done.

Next was a Bachmann Northern Pacific S-4. This is one of my favorite locos, and I'd installed a Digitrax DH126PS some years ago, but at some point it just stopped running. I took out the decoder and tested it in another loco; the decoder worked fine, so I figured it had to be a problem with the PC board. However, the PC board part on the Bachmann site was about as expensive as a whole new loco, so I dropped the idea for a while. Then I find a board that was much more reasonably priced on eBay and ordered it.

However, I decided that before I went to the trouble of replacing the old board and re-soldering all the leads to the new one, I'd give the new DH126PS a try in the old board, and just like that, the loco ran again. So now I have an extra Bachmann S-4 PC board, which you can see to the right of the loco in the photo.

It occurred to me that I have several old Walthers Train Line locos from the 1990s that I haven't converted to DCC, and they don't have any PC boards or 8-pin sockets, so I'll use this extra board to convert one of those. It has resistors for LEDs as well as an 8-pin socket.

Next is an Atlas Classic Cotton Belt RSD-5 that had zinc pest in its frame. This swelled so badly that it actually broke the running board-steps in several places, so I had to glue this back together when I replaced the frame with a new Atlas part. The photos show the loco on the road to recovery.