With Allen, we used the new “voltmeter car” to measure the DCC voltage on the track at different spots. As expected, the voltage varies by booster somewhat, and then I got an interesting surprise.

The trolley automation regularly fails because the trolley gets stuck on the one turnout in that little spur where it is running back and forth:

That looks like one of these old Atlas turnouts where the turnout frog is not powered. We have a few of these around, especially in the yards. This is the assumption. It needs to be verified by checking the power routing on that turnout.

Assuming it’s that case, what are the possible solutions?

I have had reports from Saturday Operators of trains slowing up and down when leaving the yard, not maintaining constant speed. I’ve personally seen that too when trying the newly fixed UP Walthers engine a few days before. Then a few minutes later, everything was acting normally in both cases.

One possibility would be dirty track. The pads of the track cleaning train are filthy and haven’t been changed in a while. However that would not explain why the issue goes away after a short time.

The other possibility is an electrical issue. What we need is a way to measure the track voltage and see if it changes. I don’t have a RRampMeter at hand for the task, yet we can easily replicate that using scrap components I have around already.

Thus, I made a “voltmeter car” to display the track voltage:

What you’re looking at in the picture above is a donor chassis from an old DC engine, and a few components I had at home: a “full” bridge rectifier (I removed the smoothing capacitor) connected to the track power pickups, and on top a basic voltmeter display. The idea is to measure the peak of the DCC signals as if it were a DC one, which should be more accurate than a multimeter in AC mode (we’re not doing AC Vrms here).

The little saga with the new Walthers Mainline SD70ACe continues for UP 8312.

Back in January, I got the replacement motors sent by the Walthers’ customer support representative. I finally got around to replacing the motor in 8312. The design of the Walthers engine is not too bad in that regard except that I noticed a few of the wires easily get stuck between the circuit board and the plastic shell, which tends to break their insulation. Thus one would have to be very careful when opening/closing that engine repeatedly.

It’s time for the regular Freight train to go back to the automation and replace the Polar Express.

The trolley automation is starting to work as promised:

The ESP32 software now communicates with JMRI using MQTT, which gives better response times (down from 1050 ms to 2-6 ms!)

I’ll leave this running as is for a couple more weeks to see if I got all the issues figured out. I may want to slightly adjust the timing of the trolley, for example.

The next step after is to finalize the sensor installation: first I’ll change the ESP32 for one without the OLED display (the display is very useful for debugging, but useless after since nobody will be looking at it), then I need to add a couple LEDs to display an ok/failure status (since there won’t be any screen anymore), and finally the goal is to mount the sensor next to the track, probably hidden by a building, while the ESP32 should be mounted below the layout. See, just a few loose ends to finish… the usual 90/90 rule of software engineering.

Happy New Year 2024 from the Randall Museum Model Railroad team.

Tis’ the season for the Polar Express cars on the automated line:

I reinstalled the Polar Express for the season barely two weeks ago, and almost immediately the BLI Hudson 4-6-4 #5278 lead engine failed while being used by the Saturday Operators. I plan to try to fix the Paragon 2 decoder later, yet that will take some time.

Instead, I got a new engine, a Bachmann Berkshire 2-8-4 to lead the train, but not just any of them -- specifically Pere Marquette #1225, which is allegedly the actual inspiration for the engine in the Polar Express book -- speaking of which, if you have not read the Polar Express book, I encourage you to go find it at your local library -- it’s a fairly short story yet it is very well written and the painted illustrations are simply delightful. The animated movie was interesting, yet the book is in my opinion the best medium for this story that you can read as a kid or an adult. It’s a timeless piece about hope and dreams.

Here’s a short update on current projects:

• SDB / Trolley Automation:
• I did a LokSound firmware update for the Trolley Bowser 1379. It seemed to behave a lot better after.
• I finally understood why the automation works yet fails every day. SDB is working fine at detecting the car and then updating JMRI. However the problem is the wifi link. I’ve noticed the JSON updates could take up to 1 or 2 minutes to be detected by the JMRI “internal sensors” monitored by the Conductor software. So that’s what I need to understand next.
• The BLI Hudson 4-6-4 #5278 that I’ve recently set up for the Polar Express automation is now non-functional.
• Decoder doesn’t respond anymore, which is a typical problem we have with the BLI Paragon 2 decoders.
• Saturday Operators are running the Polar Express train with another engine, but that’s not the same thing.
• I really miss that automation for this season.
• Walthers UP 8330 and 8312 engines:
• These are still not working. I tried 8330 again -- it worked for 2 days then stopped responding to DCC commands again. I tried to get them reimbursed but both TrainWorld and Walthers just played the finger-pointing game on the other party, and that got nowhere.
• I’ll call it as I see it: the Walthers engines suffered from obvious quality control issues from the start, and the newer LokSound Essential decoders in these engines are a piece of crap that clearly wasn’t finished properly before being sold. The logical next step is to replace them by real LokSound 4 or 5 decoders, or strip them entirely and use something solid like Tsunami decoders.
• WalthersProto UP 722 and 712 were my replacement engines for the mainline automation.
• These are no longer working either. Their Tsunami decoders seem to only reply to DCC commands intermittently.

So plenty of issues to address.

On the plus side, the new screen for the Vision computer is working great, and visitors enjoy the videos. In the back, I’ve reworked the workbench programming track with a selector and that allows me easily switch between DC, NCE, and LokSound programmers. I have a DigiTrax PR3 to also hook up to that. That comes in handy to deal with all these locomotive decoders.

I’m currently experimenting with the preliminary design for the Trolley automation:

The main focus here is the Software Defined Blocks project which uses an ESP32 with sensors to emulate block activations for a train model railroad. I’m using this new automation as a test bed to experiment with that and different sensors.

Although the software part is progressing smoothly, the automation part is not, cf. results from the automation first test.

I have reinstalled #5278 and the Polar Express cars on the automated line:

Well, almost. It was pointed out to me later that I forgot the 3rd passenger car with the observation deck. Oops. NYC #5278, an Alco “Hudson” 4-6-4, is our lead engine in this operation. The train from last year also had a nice Hershey freight car before the traditional Lionel HO Polar Express cars. And let’s not dismiss the inkjet-printed labels that makes this a true Polar Express 🤣. We’ll update this one to match.

Since last year, I have entirely changed the automation program so I had to adapt the automation script to work with Conductor 2. The changes to the script were fairly easy to make, and I had to adjust the timing a bit, especially since the new Conductor 2 requires setting min/max “safety” times for each block. In hindsight, the timing changes may be due to the train having a different configuration, as its length influences the timing sequence.

Thanksgiving Update: The Hershey car has been added as well as the last observation car thanks to Jim and Orion, and indeed that was the root cause of the automation timing changes. I had to adjust it back -- Happy Thanksgiving 🦃 !

This train will be running at Randall on the shorter automated line all December, till the new year.

Here’s a run of the train captured back in 2019:

A NYC J-1 Hudson (4-6-4) pulls our Polar Express on the Automated Line on the HO Scale DCC Layout at Randall Museum, San Francisco.