Lionel - 6-25505 SANTA FE HEAVYWEIGHT STATIONSOUNDS DINER - announcement route

I have one of these here. To the OP,  it's "California Limited."  I was searching the forum for posts about it.  Ours, it seems to run in conventional mode, but it never responds to any TMCC commands.  When I press Horn/Whistle, it runs through all the sounds, so it's not a total loss. It is quirky with the lights, sometimes they're on or off, and sometimes it's blinking.  When I push the switch to PGM, it never programs or responds to the remote at all.  It's acting like it's not receiving any TMCC signal. Curious if this is either repairable or possible operator confusion. I do know how to set PGM for Lionel stuff..

"Please watch your step, the California Limited is arriving"

"Attention passengers, the California Limited will depart momentarily"

Cathryn,

You'll have to open it up and do a little troubleshooting.

1.) It may just be an antenna problem.   The antenna is this small plate labeled "2" in the exploded parts diagram below (which is accessible through lionelsupport.com if you need to see the whole thing).  The plate should be glued to the roof of the car, or one of its side walls, and should have a wire connecting from it to the motherboard, which is part "16" on the diagram.  This wire is not shown here.  So you'll have to find it and check to see if the wire is connected between the plate and the motherboard.

2.) On the other hand it could be a radio problem.  This board is the radio board (R2LC), #22 on the diagram above:

You may need to replace it.  Unfortunately, its' no longer available from Lionel parts, but there are many, many of them out there because they have been the most common board across all of Lionel's production in the past.

You should be able to find one, new or used, and its descendent, the R4LC, should also work and is available brand new from Electric Railroad (ERR).

If you do the replacement be careful; the new one must plug in precisely in the same way the old comes out.  Do not accidentally shift the connectors, for instance by being off by one row of pins (which is easy to do), because that will kill the new one.   

Mike

Cathryn, for your SS Diner, try reprogramming it's TMCC ID.

Thanks guys.  I'll try that programming it with that extra step 5 there first and go from there. This isn't so precious that I'm not afraid to unscrew it and peek what's inside.

This is a necrobump, but posting here because I finally figured this out.   It wasn't the diner, it was my TMCC wiring that made it work properly.  Why did some locomotives run fine with TMCC, but not the Diner, I have no idea.

What happened was I also had a old Lionel Diesel Locomotive that didn't run TMCC, just like the diner.  I took it into the Train Shack, but what do you know, it runs for them fine.  I had some other repairs done on this and just got it back.  My father had oddly purchased two Base-1s, and I did a test of Base-1  and a separate set of track, it's own transformer, I was able to get this Locomotive going.   After much fiddling I moved the new Base-1 closer to the track, and use that one instead, and now both my Locomotive and the diner are fine. The other Base-1 works, like almost was well as the one that does work?  I'm honest not sure what happened, but it's all good now and I'm tired with fussing with it. I don't want to touch it.

Controls all work, and I now get the sounds, just like in the manual.

@Mellow Hudson Mike posted:

Cathryn,

You'll have to open it up and do a little troubleshooting.

1.) It may just be an antenna problem.   The antenna is this small plate labeled "2" in the exploded parts diagram below (which is accessible through lionelsupport.com if you need to see the whole thing).  The plate should be glued to the roof of the car, or one of its side walls, and should have a wire connecting from it to the motherboard, which is part "16" on the diagram.  This wire is not shown here.  So you'll have to find it and check to see if the wire is connected between the plate and the motherboard.

2.) On the other hand it could be a radio problem.  This board is the radio board (R2LC), #22 on the diagram above:

You may need to replace it.  Unfortunately, its' no longer available from Lionel parts, but there are many, many of them out there because they have been the most common board across all of Lionel's production in the past.

You should be able to find one, new or used, and its descendent, the R4LC, should also work and is available brand new from Electric Railroad (ERR).

If you do the replacement be careful; the new one must plug in precisely in the same way the old comes out.  Do not accidentally shift the connectors, for instance by being off by one row of pins (which is easy to do), because that will kill the new one.   

Mike

The newer version of the radio from ERR does work fine, I have used it in place of the R2LC board with no issues