Can I learn how to diagnose and replace a board?

How much do you know about electronics?  How to use a meter?  Ohm's law?  Can you read a schematic?  Can you follow the wiring in a loco and make a schematic?  Your nose may be a good tool to use initially to see if you can tell what is bad by smell.  Also, your eyes may be able to see what overheated.  Do you know how to solder?  Do you know how to take components off of a board without ruining the board?  

The tricky part is when one board is bad and it burned but the board that caused the problem did not overheat and so finding which boards to replace can be a challenge.  

Remember this:  all of had to learn and started with essentially no knowledge at all.  I think you can find instructional courses on YouTube.  

Check with Marty Fitzhenry he can test your boards or get you new ones if needed Alan

he is on this forum and is a great help to anyone

Alan

The answer to most of those questions is no.  I can solder pretty good and can test the track voltage though!

To be brutally honest, I seriously doubt you'll have success in the venture if you jump in right now.  There's an old saying that certainly applies here.  You have to crawl before you can walk.  If you really want to start repairing these, I'd start with simpler projects and work up to this kind of project.  The real kicker is parts, one mistake and you cook an expensive board.

John is right. This is not a simple fix. The hardest thing is tracking down the problem, that's 90%. The other 10% is replacing the parts. If you don't know how to use the tools to do that, then you need to send to someone who can. You can let it sit and go to Devry and study basic electronics then maybe you'll be able to fix it in a year

To calibrate this problem, John has 40+ years of experience with electronics.  I have 50 years of experience with electronics and a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering.  I would have to do some serious homework to repair a board from a locomotive.  The most difficult question to answer is, "why did the board fail?"

I tend to agree that jumping in with both feet on diagnosing Legacy boards may not be the way to go to start learning.  You can probably get in touch with one of the forums repair gurus here and work something out for an affordable repair, if the boards require some diagnosis.  

On the other hand, it won't hurt to open up the shell and have a look around... could be something obvious and simple.   I'm unsure how much physical damage you could have done, but have to assume the locomotive would be fairly well destroyed if you managed to actually break something on the boards from a collision.  Instead I expect something was shorted.  It just depends what shorted to figure out what was damaged.  Assuming a derailment, my first thought is you just melted the wires from the pickups and the engine electronics is no longer getting any power. 

Some of the other folks may know if the trainmaster is somehow one of the 'hard to work on' models, but I expect a couple screws will be all that you need to remove to remove the shell and have a look around.  See if anything is obviously melted or broken, and go from there.  

We all started somewhere.  

JGL

DennyM posted:

You can let it sit and go to Devry and study basic electronics then maybe you'll be able to fix it in a year

I paid about $1350.00 a semester (5 semesters) back in the early 90's for my ET degree from the DeVry Institute of Electronics, long before it morphed into "DeVry University." 

I'm sure it costs a fair piece more nowadays.  About 1/3 of the class would wash out each semester.  We started with 3 daytime classes, ended up with 1.

Unless one intends on going into electronics for a living, it'll be cheaper to replace the board.

Rusty

It doesn't sound to me like the OP wants to actually repair any boards, only determine which board(s) might be bad, and then "self-help" himself by replacing them. I have read here many times the tricks of the trade (didn't memorize 'em!) like check running in conventional, will it do a reset, etc. Perhaps that would help him to get his fix on

Geo

This is a two year old thread, I hope he got his board repaired by now.

Two year old thread or not there should be a way to to plug a USB into an engine and diagnose whats wrong. Like a car.

gunrunnerjohn posted:

This is a two year old thread, I hope he got his board repaired by now.

Ha! That's what I get for reading "Searches" instead of current posts!!! (and not paying attention to dates!)