how often does stuff malfunction on your layout?

I'm sure I'll pay for this next time I turn the layout on but.....

 

I've found every 7-10 years, I have a "bad year". Constant breakdowns, majority of locos out for repair at the same time, constant issues. 

 

I tore my old layout down in September 2013 and have had issues ever since. I really miss that old layout and regret chopping it up often. Thankfully, I've been having a better 2015 so far. Not perfect but not as bad as late 2013/2014. Went through multiple versions of the layout. Constant issues, tear downs, start over, etc. Also there was one point were I had 6 locos out for repair at the same time. 

 

Things have been going reasonably well for most of the year. Biggest issue has been trains crawling through curves on the left side of the layout and normal speed on the right curves. My basement floor is not level but I've rebuilt my table and it is perfectly level and things still are funky but not as bad. Still, an improvement but not something I like and I guess I wouldn't call it a "malfunction". Of course, that is only with conventional locos. 

 

I plan to really run trains this weekend to test things out and yes there are minor little quirks with things I just haven't had time to straighten out. I'm a 100% perfect kind of person but I think that was making it worse over the past year and I think it also made me a bit more "paranoid" for issues and I'm getting over it! Hope things continue to improve and I don't have anymore "bad years"....!

All the time every time. Why am I in this hobby?!?

Always but usually a very small percentage and usually minor.
But as I expand and aquire more, the actual amount can tend to be a lot.
I am learning to accept less than perfect.

In my understanding, a lot of prototypical railroads were constantly dealing with issues and continuously maintained and upgraded.
But schedule was most important and sometimes that meant hastily jury rigging to maintain that schedule.

Never was a perfect railroad IMHO.

don't want to talk about it for fear of awakening the gremlins!

I subscribe to Jerry's Corollary #6 to Murphy's Law which states:" THE LIKELIHOOD THAT THINGS WILL GO WRONG ON A LAYOUT IS DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL TO THE NUMBER OF GUESTS WHO ARE INVITED TO VIEW THE LAYOUT".

 

But hey, normally things usually work well.  Working out the little bugs is one of the things that go along with this hobby.  It just takes time to find them all and eliminate them.  After some time, it should all work out.  Keep on trying!

Only when company is over.... but seriously I am not really not that superstitious, but usually things happen in 3's. When the 2nd major catastrophe happens I turn out the lights and go upstairs ... 

Not too often... and when I do, its usually my fault anyway.

I really am serious......my trains seem to run flawlessly except when my wife visits me in the basement to check up on me.  Seems as soon as she enters the perimeter of the train room, I have a derailment or a malfunctioning switch or a short.  Its uncanny. She just laughs and walks back upstairs leaving me with a bewildered look on my face!  

Uncanny!

 

-Pete

Not too often but when it does it usually is a sneaky little gremlin which is difficult to diagnose and even harder to get to.  Got one now which I have located but wouldn't you know it is in the most difficult part of the layout to reach.

hello guys and gals..........

 

Every time I buy a NOS lionel, the minute I take out of the box there is something wrong with it before I even put it on the track as I go through it each time then the problems show up!!!!!!!!!!!! It is big problems such as I bought NOS new in the box

#18117 Santa Fe F-3's and both armatures are bend, plastic gears bad(one of the pinion gear tooth is chewed up). This engine has never been run. Then the lionel Amtrak GG1 set, bad wheel sets, warped GG1 body. I am really getting tired of pouring money into it to buy parts to fix it. Those trains were

made in the LTI era and they are JUNK because the people who worked on the assembly lines don't care thus quality go down fast.  It really is too bad as those junk trains were made in USA !!!! Last month,I bought a NOS older Williams F-3's and they just need oil and grease then off they go trouble free. It is now my favorite Williams locomotive and this F-3's is made in china. Sometimes you win some, lose some BUT

I am losing interests in dealing with older lionel but gaining interests in older Williams

(pre-Bachmann days)

 

 

Tiffany

 

I have been really having a bad time lately.

One night I noticed that my caboose was flashing. Dam Kline roller pick ups failed

Next day decided to utilize my MTH car wash that was new in the box, only to operate it to find that it was a new POS in the box.

Next night I decided to run my UP switcher and calf unit. Only to find that the calf coupler has now decided that after some twelve years to keep opening. Went to replace it only to find that I have to take the entire unit apart and drop the trucks to do so. Well at 2:30am I wasn't in the mood, so after already wasting more time then I even had to run the trains I just wired it closed. This ordeal took away from the time that I had to run the trains, so that was that.

Now yesterday night I decided to run one of my Subways that was running fine the night before. Well this day it was dead. Took it apart to find that the inner lighting shell had a burning bulb socket type issue as well as some sort of short when you squeeze it / screw it together. Replaced it with one from another so I don't blow a board over it. Put it together it worked but had to take it apart again to wipe some blemishes off of the inner windows that bothered me. Put it together and now this time the station announcements are going off on their own. WTF. Now I have another short somewhere. Took it apart and it worked. So I just moved the head light wires around. Put it together and it worked. So there still must be some sort of short somewhere, but it works.

Sooo perhaps I will try again tonight. Hopefully I could just run and not play mechanic.

Sometimes I really wonder why I even bother with this hobby. Or anything else for that matter. Sometimes it just seems that everything is just a hassle.

 

 

I enjoy the tinkering and fixing things that "go South", but as with some of the other posters above, the worst is when things fail when you're trying to show off your work to guests.  I try to move on quickly to something else, but in the back of my mind, I know exactly what I'll be doing when they leave.

 

Roger

Most times everything works fine and I find that over time I tend to forget about that. The few bad days tend to unfortunately remain on my mind a lot longer. Just recently I had a bad day with a MTH 395 light tower. I had repaired it about two weeks ago by replacing a light bracket that broke. A few days ago the light on the portion of the tower I had fixed stopped working. I tried replacing the bulb and still nothing. It turned out after much frustration that the new bulb was bad also! I spent too much time on a stupid minor problem. Usually the problems are minor, but it's the time figuring out what's wrong that can ruin your day and make you think you have too many problem filled times.

Usually when I have some friends over is when I run into problems. Just this past Sunday I had a friend over who has not seen the layout. So I start up the Dash 8s and I had a switch thrown the wrong way,  that causes a derailment. Oh well!

I've had nothin but problems this week

My train is on public display six days a week so I keep it simple, cannot have any breakdowns, especially on the mornings that I have hired help. I was having some continuity issues where the track was flexing on one corner (pressure operated semaphore) but some connecting wires soldered across the joints solved that.

Mine has worked flawlessly since the current version was assembled last Sept. That is until I tried to update my Legacy base a few weeks ago. Remote worked fine, base not so much. It had to go back in for factory repair. Then it came back about a month later. It arrived the same day as a new engine I has pre-ordered about a year ago. The Legacy worked, but it has a couple of vertical lines in the display that appear every so often. The engine had problems upon startup and the layout has been doing strange things since I put it on the track. I think it's name is Christine? Or maybe someone fed it after midnight or got water on it? I am going to remove it tomorrow and see if things improve. Or maybe I was just over due?

When I show it off!!!!
Ralph

Yea verily, that cometh under Murphy's Law #103:

 

Seriousness of the malfunction is directly proportional to the number of people watching.

Alas, the gremlins come out to play with the club layout all too frequently. But you just deal with it.

Not often, but like any mechanical systems things happen. After all we are running a railroad and a lot of the same maintenance items emerge.

hello guys and gals.........

 

Sometimes is much better and peaceful to stay in conventional ( more train running,

less problems= more relaxing fun) and LESS money spent shipping the problems back and forth.

 

Tiffany

>>> like any mechanical systems, things happen. After all we are running a railroad and a lot of the same maintenance items emerge.

 

Ironically I was thinking this same thing on day two of this weeks issues.  But then thought, yeah but I am only one guy. One guy running an entire railroad. LOL

By day 4 of issues, this one guy was then thinking, why, Why, WHY !!! Do I Even Do This. It's not funny, it's not fun... LOL

Last Thanksgiving, with a crowd, everything was working fine like clockwork: until someone wanted to see a different set run, then it got kinda hairy!

Me Too! James

Some no announcement drop by people yesterday had heard of my lay out and couldn't wait to see it. I am all DCS with mostly MU's.All ran flawless.

 

@   beginning  east bound CSX BNSF 4 engine multi unit
    @  .55  west bound Guilford Pan Am  5 engine multi unit
    @ 1.54  east bound Guilford 2 unit switching track

 

Thanks for all the hilarious responses good to know i am not alone

 

It is her good looks that distract you...and any time we think these things will run by themselves we find out differently.

 

The cattle car, horse corral, and milk car all work on the principal of "is anyone other than you watching?"  When you're alone they all work, someone else enters the room and the cow and horse seem to have become instantly intoxicated and the milk man has become the world strongest man.

Just crack a beer, All good!

I run postwar lionel and other conventional, so my trains run well, but the accessories are a whole other story.  The accessories are one of my favorite parts, so I've built my collection over the years.  Getting the vibrating motors, track pressure activation, and loads to operate could be frustrating, especially when someone wanted to see them.  But in the 7 years I've been without a layout, I've improved my tinkering skills and have done a lot of reading.  So when that day comes that I do get to build another layout, all activation accessories will be hooked to insulated rail sections, once I get an accessory operating correctly it'll be screwed down, and my 397 coal loader will stay on the display shelf

 

Overall as has already been said, when it's conventional, it's usually a pretty straight forward fix

A corollary to Murphy's Law, at least in my basement, is that things malfunction in direct proportion to the amount of time I have spent on the layout. Everything needs adjustment if I haven't run trains in a while. Something particular - an accessory, particular engine or even siding - goes wrong if I haven't used it recently... 

I think that's the old Christmas Lights Corollary at work. Something that operates perfectly when put away won't operate at all when taken out again.  

MartyE,

   Man do I agree with you, a lot of problems can be caused when a layout is not really

engineered and built correctly.  Seldom if ever do I have a wiring problem, now if a switch fails or something wears out, like traction tires, that is just normal layout operation maintenance, setting a Legacy or DCS up incorrectly, now that is just plain operator error.  Maybe because my layouts are mostly Tin Plate I have very few problems, however I have to admit some of the new modern rolling stock has it's own individual share of problems.

PCRR/Dave

 

It happens all the time -- and my layout isn't really very big or elaborate.  Just the other day, one of my Atlas Trainman 60' cars started to flicker.  The other Trainman cars are all just fine, but no matter how thoroughly I cleaned rollers and wheels, it still flickered while running.

 

So I set about taking it apart to investigate.  I found that the roller seemed a bit crooked on one of the 6-wheel trucks, so I tried to straighten it out with a pair of needle-nose pliers. 

 

Well, I discovered that the rollers on these trucks are held in place by a fairly fragile metal fork that's part of the main casting.  And of course, I snapped one of the fingers of it right off, necessitating a call to Atlas to order a new one.  I don't even know if the car will still be flickering when the truck arrives, so that issue remains undecided.

 

Meanwhile, my Lionel 494 beacon has stopped rotating, which means I have to put a new drive washer in it.  And last week, the external bell controller button attached to my KW failed, reason unknown, requiring a replacement.  Little, annoying things like that are some of the surprises layouts always have in reserve.

 

Worst of all was my Lionel 783 Hudson.  Ran like an arthritic slug when I bought it, and the RailSounds never did work properly.  It took me months (along with full 700E valve gear, loads of molybdenum grease in the gearbox, a Williams TruBlast II bell/whistle unit, an LED headlight, hours hours of break-in time and a vast stream of incandescent swearing) before I finally made a good runner out of it.  In fact, it's among the best runners I have at the moment, but it was a task worthy of Hercules to make it that way.

 

Things like these are part and parcel of the hobby.

 

As with most people, my layout breaks when visitors are present.  

 

Joe

All the time also but mot of the time its the OPERSTUPIDRATOR (ME) LOL!  AL

Yep, Nothing like impressing the wife and her friends!!

 

Out for a train trip. Day prior everything ran flawless on their two loops.

 

Went to run a brand new GP38-2, time to let everyone see it run. Ran flawless on inner loop, wouldn't respond on outer loop. Checked track signal. 10's on inner loop, 0's and 2's on outer loop. 2 large ovals, star wired had 10's all over Saturday. Gonna swap outputs over there tonight but believe it is some mystical issue with another dimension.