Lionel 6750 M1b 4-8-2 steam engine

If modular reseat sound boards.  G

Tried it...........ran it the other day for three hours with no problems. Ran it today and within 10 mins the horn blew by itself and within 5 mins got announcements.

Horn? ! what kind of PRR engine are you running there?

I have had commands drop out and it was the IR tether not aligning up.

Check to make sure the IR and brackets stay aligned around the layout ... my root issue was a slight rise in the track and the chuff would skip a beat.

I have had similar issues with the same engine. Unfortunately I am not knowledgable

about the electronics to have resolved the problem. At one point I replaced the battery

and this did correct the problem for a while only to have it recur when I began running

the engine after I had it packed away for 3 months. I hope someone here has  insight.

Now I'm motivated to try again. I'll try to reseat the sound boards and see if it helps.

Thanks G.    Mike

Mike,

I think it is the R4LC and I'm going to replace.  

Also if you are going to reprogram back to manufacture specs it is the AUX1 +1.

An actual Lionel product number helps us help you.

Gunner, the number is 6-11147...........thanks.

oops ment gunrunnerjohn...........................

It could be the R4LC, but the last time I had the exact same issue, it was the sound board.  It could get expensive swapping boards around, so I have a suggestion.

If you have another similar vintage Legacy steamer, try swapping the tenders between them.  Run them both until you get a failure, that will tell you which end is failing.  As long as they have the same style IR coupling, they'll run just fine together.

Great suggestion but I don't have another engine that has the same type IR. I do have a spare R4LC that I can swap but don't have a spare sound board.

Open your tender and remove the Railsounds 5.5 audio board.  Pull and reseat both chips.   John, without those sounds being activated by the operator what he is hearing is a product of the tender.   Nothing is being sent through the IR system.  When inside the tender, don't push the boards tight.  Pull the boards off the motherboard and reseat them.  

I would do the tender swap as John stated.  That is a good no danger trouble shooting tool.    Walk slow and try what the guys suggested before throwing parts at it.

Marty, I know that would be my top suspect, I don't believe the R4LC is a likely candidate here.  My identical failure turned out to be the sound board in the tender.

Another possibility, check the mounting screws on the trucks and the sideframes.  I had one that had loose screws for the sideframes, those were causing random audio output like this as well. 

My money would be the board.  

I was wondering about dirty track pickups wheels, but never seen that generate crew sounds and such.  Just random whistle. G

Since I had one with loose screws on the trucks generating both whistles, bells, and random crew talk, I think the dirty wheels or pickups are certainly a possibility.  They'd logically do the same as the loose connection to the power I would suspect.

Hi Guys, some great suggestions and never thought about reseting the chips and will reset the chips and board. Thanks again for the info.

GUNRUNNERJOHN, I would go along with the dirty wheels etc. except the way I understand it the TMCC signal does not care about dirty track or wheels. The rail is the where the signal comes from and it creates a tunnel effect around the rail and the antenna picks up the signal so it is always a clean signal unlike DCC the signal goes through the rail into the wheels for signal pickup to the decoder is this right?

In this case, the TMCC signal has nothing to do with the analysis.  If the RS boards are intermittently losing power and getting noise spikes on the power input, they can cause this effect.  I've seen a bad board do this and also simple poor connections from the wheels from loose screws on the truck side frames. 

I will look at loose screws today when I do the chip reset. Again thanks for the info always a pleasure and some great knowledge on the forum.

Pull the chips.

Any progress?????

I reset both the PIC and ROM chips on the sound board and so far so good. But I have had several hours on it before it screwed up and ran it for about 1/2 without problems and need to put more time on it to prove it out. Thanks for asking.

I hit this often.  You should be OK.