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The Randall Museum in San Francisco hosts a large HO-scale model model railroad. Created by the Golden Gate Model Railroad Club starting in 1961, the layout was donated to the Museum in 2015. Since then I have started automatizing trains running on the layout. I am also the model railroad maintainer. This blog describes various updates on the Randall project and I maintain a separate blog for all my electronics not directly related to Randall.

2023-01-18 - An Update on the Rapido RDC SP 10…

Category Randall

After running for a couple days, the RDC SP 10 is already out of commission: the speaker swap fixed the sound issue just fine, and the engine ran fine for a few days, then it stopped moving. Decoder is still working as I get sound and light, yet no movement.

After taking the engine apart, I first saw all this brown dust around the motor:

Yet interestingly enough the motor does work, so I solder it back, check that the truck wheels are driven properly, start reassembling the engine, and half an hour later of dealing with the finicky reassembly process, once I’m done and the engine is fully reassembled I realize… it’s not moving. Oh, come on! OK, that’s nasty. That means something in the shell assembly process jams the motor so now I have to take it apart again.


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