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Proto 1 troubles

S SPManOGR Forum Member

A friend of mine has an MTH Proto 1 Hiawatha Hudson Railking which will not run.  When powered up it dings twice indicating it has entered reset I think but will not move when powered off and back on.  We put in a fully charged battery and tired a computer chip reset with the MTH kit for same.  We used my Z4000 to program feature 18 to reset the engine to factory settings but engine will still not move.  When throttle is advanced you can hear the chug sounds of a steam engine and the whistle and bell work but that's all.  What else can we do short of getting a new board or something.  I don't know if MTH or their service stations even fix these anymore.  My friend says the engine ran fine last time he ran it about a year ago.  He stored it with a BCR in the tender and made sure it powered up before restarting recently.  We called MTH and tried to talk to a tech.  We were on hold for one half hour and no one ever picked up the call.  They closed while we were on hold.

 

Ray

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B bluecometkOGR Forum Member

I had a PS-1 standard gauge engine do the same thing. I did the same procedures as you have done with no luck until I realized that when I put the new battery in I had some how pulled one of the Can motor connectors off. I didn’t notice and put it all back together.

Take a look around inside. I took the thing apart 4 or 5 times before I found what I had done.

Man did I feel stupid. I was cursing MTH up and down for hours only to find out I was the problem.

Maybe something like that has happened to your engine.

 

Just my two cents

S SPManOGR Forum Member
Originally Posted by SPMan:
Originally Posted by Ace:

I had a PS1 problem, thought I had fully charged the battery but the battery didn't maintain voltage under load. Be sure you have a known good battery tested with a load, not just a "fully charged" battery.

 Battery is not an issue.  It was tested with meter and under load.

 

Thanks, Ray

 

S SPManOGR Forum Member

Good news, my friend followed the advice from forum members and found the problem.  It is either in the teather or the 4 pin connector on the engine.  He ran the engine with a different proto 1 tender and it worked fine.  He also tried the Hiawatha tender with another proto 1 engine and that worked too.  Is going to try to get some new parts from MTH next week.

 

Thanks for the help.

 

Ray

AceAceOGR Forum Member
Originally Posted by SPMan:

Good news, my friend followed the advice from forum members and found the problem.  It is either in the teather or the 4 pin connector on the engine.  He ran the engine with a different proto 1 tender and it worked fine.  He also tried the Hiawatha tender with another proto 1 engine and that worked too.  Is going to try to get some new parts from MTH next week.

 

Thanks for the help.

 

Ray

My other secondhand MTH PS1 loco had that problem. It had bad continuity in the 4-pin plug that connects to the back of the engine, perhaps because it got yanked inadvertantly by a previous owner. The 4-pin socket at the back of the engine has two leads picking up AC from the track and two leads with DC (rectified from the electronics in the tender) going back to the motors. It's easy to rig up a bridge rectifier to test-run your engine without the tender to make sure the motors are OK, if you don't have a spare PS1 tender to try out. You can also test for continuity from the plug to the connections on the board in the tender. Easy to do with only 4 wires in the tether for PS1. My problem was intermittent but it showed up if I flexed the wires at the plug.

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