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So I got a bargain where the ad listed a MTH Railking Turbine Loco with PS2 that "doesn't run". 

Having purchased lots of PS1 stuff that "doesn't run" for a bargain, and subsequently making it run with very inexpensive fixes or changes, I thought I'd take another stab at 2.0.  The worst case was if I couldn't get it to work, I would just pull the guts and turn it into another PS1.0 since I have afew more spare bards. (and I only do conventional).

So here's the interesting part...Pretty sure I have 30-4060-0 tender with LocoSound from the Bantam line (says LocoSound on the sticker on the bottom and tender indeed looks to be LocoSound from the internals, just a speaker and a volume pot and a lump of metal.) But I have confirmed the loco is indeed a PS2.0 turbine (I'm thinking 30-1395-1).  The tether is the same and the tenders look virtually identical, so I'm guessing whoever owned it plugged the wrong tender into the loco and couldn't get anything to happen so they called it broken and moved on.

The board looks to be in pretty good shape, the offending capacitor from my previous experiments does not look bulged or blown out in any way, and when I applied track power briefly the smoke unit made noise, so I know I'm at least getting electricity to that point of the board.  So my question is...if I buy a battery / BCR cell (this is a 5V board) and mount it in the loco, can I still use the LocoSounds tender?  I can probably trace the tether to the conenctions at the speakers and the volume pot and swap the leads at the loco board if I have to (although maybe MTH actually made the speaker / pot leads on the same pins as the 2.0?  A guy can hope, it's the same tether plug after all...).

Is there anything that would prevent this?  Was there anything else in the PS2 tender that the LocoSounds tender didn't have?  Best I cna tell, it's only the battery.

J

 

 

Last edited by Jeff_the_Coaster_Guy
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Thanks a bunch John!  So it looks like:

Pins 1 through 4 are good to go

I 've got to add the battery to pin 6 and tie ground to pin 3,

Leave pin 7 blank (since I won't be using marker lights, which is odd because there are definitely no markers on this tender anyway)

Pin 8 is good

Pull the speaker lead off the existing loco sound ground and connect to pin 9 (does the speaker polarity matter on this?  If it does I need to swap 9 & 10 right?)

Pin 10 is good.

Seems like the toughest part will be re-routing the speaker off the PCB ground to its own negative in the tether somehow.  I don't have the insert tools to crimp a new pin.  I might just run it separately into the loco then.

This is super helpful, and it seems that the basic answer to my question is YES, with a little re-routing, this tender should be OK to use.  Speakers are both 16 ohm, and the "linear taper" potentiometer I assume is the same as the "audio taper" in the locosound.

I'll let y'all know how it goes!

I'll look into it, John.  If I remember correctly from a previous project, I had a hard time opening the tether connector to get access to the pins.  I was planning on just swapping out and re-locating the appropriate wires at the soldered board on the loco, but the speaker wire will be the one I have to figure out getting a pinout on the tether.

The diagram above shows 16 ohm on the LocoSound speaker.  Is that a typo?  I'll open my tender later today and see what's actually in there.

Thanks John! Love it when a plan comes together!

Little bit of messing with wires, hooked up a homemade BCR, and strung together 3 speakers ( ! ). Needed to get 16 ohms, the loco-sound was only 8 (I guess the schematic is a misprint). So I had two more 4 ohm speakers in hand, just put all 3 in series. And they all fit!

I do have a new 16 ohm on order from parts express... It was 88 cents! I'll put that in as soon as it comes.

But in the meantime, I have a working PS2 turbine! Let's see how long this 5 volt board holds out...

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Lol, don't really care. But that's the sound file that was in the board, and the chuff sound matches the smoke fan, so no biggie. Are you suggesting that someone at some point put a different PS2 board in? I'd be surprised, because it all looked tied up nice and beat like the factory does it. Didn't look like a replacement.

In any case, whoever did it did a decent job. And I'm not complaining. I don't want to make anyone jealous, but I got this engine for less than I would spend at Skyline Chili on a 3 way and a couple of Coneys for lunch (not exaggerating). So it can chuff all it cares to chuff as far as I'm concerned! 

@351_DD-1: yes, I have PS2 tach system and PS2 smoke, which are both original with the Bantam engine. The tender is the only thing that was loco-sound, and it was just a speaker and a pot.

John, would changing the sound file risk the 5V board in any way? I'd rather do as little handling of the board as possible, some they're liable to blow up at the slightest provocation as far as I can tell from these boards. 

John, would changing the sound file risk the 5V board in any way? I'd rather do as little handling of the board as possible, some they're liable to blow up at the slightest provocation as far as I can tell from these boards. 

Not any more than running it.  OTOH, I didn't see the file in 5V form when I looked on MTH, so maybe that's not an option.

@351_DD-1 posted:

I have a 5 volt board that has smoked twice already and is still useable.  (Front and rear lighting circuits blew).  Maybe this one has nine lives?  Now using the interior light circuit for headlight and tapped off the motor for reverse light.  Always fun to tinker.

The lighting FET's are not that hard to replace, even on the 5V boards.

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