Is it time to upgrade your older TMCC engines?

J Daddy, I had GunrunnerJohn upgrade a 5.0 ATSF 3751 Northern with the new Chuffer Board, but I am not sure If anything else changed. I expect it to come in any day now and I will let you know. I think his Chuffer Board should be Cool. It is probably less expensive to up grade some of these nice older engines than buying new ones.

Good Luck and hopefully the other guys will chime in...Happy Railroading

Hmm, well, yes, I have had several done.  Here's the results.

1. K-Line TMCC TCa daylight. Had oldest board, 1 chuff/revolution, puffer smoke unit, no cruise. Now has new boards, super chuffer, cruise control, fan smoke unit, 4 chuffs/revolution..

2. Lionel C&O Hudson #305. Had one chuff/revolution, no cruise, puffer smoke. Now has cruise, fan smoke unit, 4 chuffs/revoltion.

3. PRR "Baby Mikado" 9631. Had no cruise, puffer unit, seems to be 2 chuffs per revolution. Upgraded with ERR cruise, still with puffer smoke.

Not a TMCC upgrade, but TMCC, improved sound added to conventional 8801 Blue Comet. AC motor, so no cruise control.

Do I like them better than before? Yes, absolutely. Costs were higher on TCA Daylight since it had oldest electronics, but still way below what I would pay for a comparable Legacy Locomotive.

I guess it depends on what you want.

Hi John,

I do them on a regular basis, meaning the full works. ERR,4 chuffs, upgrade the smoke unit, and

John's super chuffer. It's so worth it. You can run your engines in R100 mode and they will crawl like a legacy engine.

Alex

No.Sell the engine and buy a Legacy or Vision line.Nick

Only if your paying not in my budget the higher price items. there nice I'm sure but I can't afford them. I have upgrade a lot of engines from conventional to ERR tmcc with there sound boards. 

Taking the double hit from selling my TMCC and buying replacements in Legacy seems frivolous.  I might as well upgrade and save the difference for that future engine I can't live without.

Bruce

I disagree with selling the TMCC and buying Legacy. I understand the cost might be cheaper but some of the older TMCC stuff ha held up really well versus some of the newer Legacy simply has not. I did an ERR Cruise upgrade to an older TMCC diesel and I really like it. If you like what you own then upgrade it.

My feeling is this. When TMCC first came out, I could buy LCRU's for $50 per. So I spent 1k upgrading a lot of PW, MPC and LTI engines to TMCC. So I have 20 engines command for the price of ONE Challenger when it came out. Without RailSounds of course, (some have horns and some have air whistle drivers) but they run great on my layout. Now, My OEM TMCC, Odyssey and Legacy stuff also still runs great, and with the exception of a non-chuff smoke unit (that is annoying to me) in my first issue Lionel M1aMountain, and a hit or miss smoke unit in my Conrail U36C why bother spending the bucks? The stuff still runs and its a neat showing of the progress technology is making in the hobby. 

I will upgrade the older TMCC stuff when/if it breaks.   Otherwise you can just spend money endlessly chasing the latest and greatest.  I have learned to appreciate and enjoy what I have. 

Larry-

Post some pics or video!

B&O Bill-

What a huge difference in the PRR Baby Mikado Jr..

Thanks for posting.

I have an Atlas"O" Alco C-630 I'm right in the middle of upgrading. The original TAS EOB system somehow died while in extended storage-it would only sit and blow the horn when the throttle was turned.

I have the ERR Cruise Commander installed along with the new ERR Railsounds Alco C420 board. I know, not correct, but closest to Alco sound they have.

I also bought a new smoke unit PC board to mount on the existing TAS smoke unit as the electronics weren't compatible. 

The biggest effort may be getting all the leds hooked up and working as Atlas used a lot of small PC boards in the cab and back of the shell.

I'll post photos once complete.

I ran it back and forth last night and it runs well.

Most of my engines are either Atlas with EOB or K Line with Cruise. I do have some Lionel with TMCC and Odyssey, I am very happy with all of them so why spend money upgrading them? The Atlas with EOB I think run the best!

Related question:  Lionel used to sell engines that were conventional but "Command Upgradeable" or something like that.  I had a GP-20 that fell into that category.  All you had to do if you wanted TMCC was to buy the board from Lionel and plug it in.

Is it still possible to get those boards?

Not that I am aware of.  This was too cost effective of an approach for the consumer.  Now they want you to buy a new locomotive.

You can still get the "kit" but you are better off using ERR or other aftermarket parts. Upgradable engines have a TMCC compatible motor driver (DCDR) but you have to buy a R2LC and a new Railsounds board. The "Railsounds" board the engine came with will not accept serial data so has to be replaced. 

As for the original question, I have upgraded most all of my engines to cruise either ERR or EOB and replaced the puffer units with fan smoke and 4 chuffs. I must be one of the few that is OK with RS4. All I care about is decent deep chuff and whistle. If there is room I replace the speaker. I also add engine aprons and replace the tether on MTH engines with straight tethers plus other details.

Pete

The symptom suggests the PGM/RUN switch was in PGM mode.

You can still get the boards for the truly command upgradable stuff.  The board you need is the R2LC-C08 for most of those upgrades.  For sound, Lionel still has many of the RS4 sound boards listed for sale, and the RS power supply is a generic unit that was used in early Legacy stuff as well.

For less that $100 you should be able to grab all those boards for the upgrade, if you can't, check with me.

I bought a PRR consolidation over 5 years ago used.  I like the loco so much that I modified it by adding a different front coupler.  Still it was annoying listening to the one chuff every 5 inches but it was worse watching the lurch and other quirky operation.  So, not being too technically adept, I had someone update with ERR to get rid of the lurch and other quirks.  The person was not willing to do the chuff modification so recently after a couple more years of one chuff per 5 inches, I jumped in the deep end of the pool and did the 4 chuff conversion my self. 

I also had an MTH  scale decapod upgraded with ERR and they did the 4 chuff conversion for me.  I might update the K-Line B6s switcher with ERR if I ever get to running trains again as I am in a renovation phase now.  How difficult is it for a novice to do ERR conversion?  Soldering? Hmmmmm.

Installing an ERR Cruise M usually only requires one solder connection. Installing it in a K-Line B-6 however requires modification of the heat sink mount. The original board sits vertically in the engine. The Cruise M will fit only if placed at an angle and then only barely. You have to oval out the holes in the heat sink to fit the board at the required angle.

Pete

I have a number of older 3rd Rail QSI-equipped engines I'd like to upgrade; how would this new system work on those?

Once installed the engines will run fine but upgrading a brass engine that doesn't have TMCC already is more involved. You will have install a new tether and engine connector. You also have isolate the tender shell for the antenna. Depending on how large the tender is you may or may not have to install some of the electronics in the engine. You may have replace the smoke unit too depending whats in there. Any more I upgrade brass engines to DCS. No antenna hassles and you get more in the kit including couplers.

Pete 

It works great, I've upgraded a number of 3rd Rail locomotives, and I have more to do.

Insulating the tender shell isn't that big a deal, and the lack of a flywheel in some brass engines certainly complicates PS/2 installations.  The smoke unit has to be replaced if you're a smoke guy anyway, and I use LED lighting for all my upgrades.

Gunrunnerjohn: Just an update on my C630 EOB issue; I contacted Bill Serratelli at Atlas"O" about my issue-he confirmed this was a failure mode he'd seen before (the PGM/RUN switch was in "RUN"). He was actually gracious enough to email me a work-around that involved adding two jumpers to the TMCC motherboard. After looking at where they were (underside of the MB which would entail de-soldering many heat sinked leads from MOSFETs(?) ) + having to come up with some real small gauge wire and a smaller soldering tip than I have, I decided the upgrade was the way for me to go + it gets rid of the annoying high hertz "whistle' EOB can sometimes make.

I'm sure that particular issue could have been resolved, but since you're already on the way to the ERR upgrade, that ship has sailed.

FWIW, I like the performance of the ERR cruise over EOB anyway.

I had the same thing happen just not Atlas turned out my handheld cab1 battery was way low. Put new batteries and all was fine it had enough power to plow horn/ring bells and operate direction and the coil coulplers it also I would move with pushing the boost would move it but that was it 

Maybe a smoke upgrade on those early TMCC puffers and only then if you're happy with all else about the engine. Simply not cost effective, and worse, if you're looking to match with aftertmarket upgrades what is available today new ... forget it, you'll never be happy.

Unless its something unique, IMO, cut your losses, unload it and start over.

Joe