I have 4 CW-80s. One of them has been serving me faithfully for 5+ years. But I have one that I use on my carpet layout, and the last couple of days it has been doing some weird things. It's got the normal loud fan (one of these days I'll open them and oil those fans) so that's not what's bugging me. I noticed that the light on my locomotives and cars are pulsating at lower voltages. And it's not steady either. At first I thought maybe some filtering was going and that I was seeing the AC cycling, like you do on florescent light. But then when time while running the trains I saw the pulsing slow down, and then speed up. The locomotive motors don't see affected by it at all as they still go steady, as does the sound systems. It's only the lights that are affected. Sometimes it's not there, other times it's fast and other times it's slow. Most times it changes, and throttle position doesn't change the rate of the pulse but sometimes the horn and bell button do. I guess tonight I should pull out one of my other CW-80s to make sure it's not the power going to the transformer, but if it was you'd think the house lights and wall mounted AC meter would show it too. I did use my multimeter and check voltage and amperage, both are steady while the locomotive is and isn't on the track.
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there are numerous threads on this forum about
this very subject.
you may want to do a search within the forum.
also Lionel had much trouble with these transformers
and have replaced many.
I replaced 2 and a friend replaced 4.
email Lionel directly, they usually have you cut
off the cord and pull off the orange handle, send
them the parts and they send you a new transformer.
Mine was replaced for free from lionel. Same thing, cut the cord and pull the handle off
Is the train new?
Do any of your other trains do this?
Your multimeter should pickup changes in voltage/amperage that affect lighting.
Unless maybe the the fluctuations are happening faster than the multimeter can respond.
Maybe you have some dirty pickup rollers?
It does it with all my lighted passenger cars and all locomotives that I have had on the track since I noticed it. It does it when the train is still and moving, so not rollers. The transformer is probably about 3 years old and the rolling stock I've had on the track older. The MM is a Harbor Freight special, so I'm sure it's not very fast. It still runs all the trains fine, it's just the lights pulse. If I ran stuff that didn't have lights, I'd never know that this was going on otherwise.