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.
2025-07-24 - Santa Fe RDC Issues, UP Passenger Issues
Category RandallThe Santa Fe RDC 191+192 that I put back in automation is giving me some issues. It just keeps stopping from time to time in the tunnel before YouBet or the tunnel to the branchline canyon. Then, much later, it seems to respond to DCC commands again yet at the point the automation’s recovery mechanism has already given up.
Today I went to see where it got stuck and I noticed that one of the two cars seems to have no power, and the other car is not powerful enough to drag both units -- that’s to be expected since I “downgraded” these engines from two to one motor per car, so they don’t have a lot of pulling power. Thus right now I’m just going to run this as a single car train and monitor how that works. I may want to upgrade both engines with a LokSound “Capacitor / KeepAlive” to see if that helps.
The UP Passenger has this nice UP Observation/dome car provided by Jim, which has recently started to derail:
It consistently derails when going in reverse on the same spot over the T311 turnout. That area is very hard to reach -- farther than arms’ length -- so I can’t just get close and look carefully at the wheels on the turnout. It does also derail when I run just that one car with the same engine:
One suggestion from Orion was to turn the truck around, so I’ll try that another time.
The older and more “primitive” dome car works well, so the UP passenger train is back to having a single car:
