New Legacy Steam Locomotive Sound Issue and Fix

John, My Legacy H10s will sporadically drop the volume of the sound until I push another button on the Cab2 and then push the engine button again and the volume comes back to normal. I have your YLBs in both and they still do it. Do you think your cap would solve that issue too?

Not sure what the H10 issue is, did you get the boards reprogrammed for the lower drive sounds?  The initial issue with the H10 was the sound file they cooked into the board was overdriving it, and after a time, the overload protection would drop the sounds.  I have two H10's, and neither of them do that, both got my YLB.

John, I guess I missed the overdriving issue that may be the problem since none of my other Legacy engines do this. I guess a call to Lionel is in order. Thanks.

It was a common issue if you ran full volume.

Some times you got to wonder what Lionel is thinking in their designs.  Not to have a place for a battery for this issue is just crazy.  But good solve John.  A cap is better than battery.

Without spending a lot more time tinkering and tracing, I couldn't figure out if I could find a place to use a supercap.  However, the large conventional cap on the raw rectified power gives me a bit more than two seconds of sound.  This seems sufficient for most brief power interruptions running over switches.  I prefer this to the solution I was considering, adding a tether between the locomotive and tender to bring track power over and share the rollers.  This keeps the simple drawbar connection intact and solves the sound drop-out issue.

That's pretty awesome! Definitely a handy little solution.

John,

Nice work as always

Alex

Your electronics wizardry never ceases to amaze John!

Well done and simple solution.

Even simpler than I imagined when I opened it up to see what could be done!

I passed the Bar Exam the 1st time I took it 45 years ago, but I don't understand a word of this. LOL.

Sure sounds impressive though, and it's good to know that you folks understand it in case I need to get anything fixed.

John, That certainly was a quick and easy fix once you saw there was no place for your YLB.  For sure everyone is dealing with component shortages.

Arnold, My guess is if you put a legal document in front of us, I wouldn't understand any of it!    Come to think of it, I passed my FCC Radiotelephone License exam 45 years and a couple month ago.  We were still dealing with vacuum tubes then.

@Mark Boyce posted:

John, That certainly was a quick and easy fix once you saw there was no place for your YLB.  For sure everyone is dealing with component shortages.

Arnold, My guess is if you put a legal document in front of us, I wouldn't understand any of it!    Come to think of it, I passed my FCC Radiotelephone License exam 45 years and a couple month ago.  We were still dealing with vacuum tubes then.

Mark: About the same time you were getting your license, I was learning the hard way NOT to ever tell anyone that you knew how to repair (tube) TVs cuz EVERYBODY had a broken one somewhere!

John: I assume you tied your big cap to the 2nd cap on the board? I wonder why the diode wasn't added before the 1st cap?

George

Just throwing it out here, for some guys who don’t want to open up their engine, ERR makes a relay that give track power to the middle rail depending on direction and it works really well to not lose power to the engine when crossing a Ross switch.

@GeoPeg posted:

John: I assume you tied your big cap to the 2nd cap on the board? I wonder why the diode wasn't added before the 1st cap?

There's a bridge rectifier at the input of the power to the board.  That's normally all you see for a power supply, that produces DC of the proper polarity no matter what comes in, AC or DC.  The exact purpose of the diode between the two caps is a bit of a mystery to me, I can only imagine it was to prevent the cap from discharging back through the input circuitry, not sure exactly why.  I'd love to see a schematic of all the power input circuitry.

@William 1 posted:

Just throwing it out here, for some guys who don’t want to open up their engine, ERR makes a relay that give track power to the middle rail depending on direction and it works really well to not lose power to the engine when crossing a Ross switch.

All my longer curved switches, and the double-slip switches, have the DZ-1008 relay to energize the dead rails.  That's obviously not enough for close coupled rollers on many tenders.  The only cure I know of is opening them up and applying a fix similar to this one.

Ten four.  That’s nice work as always.  Way over my head, attaching a few skinny wires worked in my case.

@GeoPeg posted:

Mark: About the same time you were getting your license, I was learning the hard way NOT to ever tell anyone that you knew how to repair (tube) TVs cuz EVERYBODY had a broken one somewhere!

John: I assume you tied your big cap to the 2nd cap on the board? I wonder why the diode wasn't added before the 1st cap?

George

George, I know what you mean!  I wanted to tell everyone I was a janitor 😆

This one was actually one of the simpler fixes, I was somewhat surprised that was all I needed to cure the issue.  Even a caveman could do it.

@gunrunnerjohn posted:

It was a common issue if you ran full volume.

John You were right as usual. I tested both of them today and with the volume down 1 step no issues. Thanks for the help I'll call Lionel about it after the holiday to see if they will still do the mod.

I think this is one of the few issues that I actually chased down first.

This is great.  I printed this post out for future reference if I ever have this issue.  Crazy that battery connections are gone.

Your posts always give me so much technical info!

Thanks.

@gunrunnerjohn, you neverr cease to amaze us with your electronics knowledge. You are amazing! On behalf of everyone, thank you for your willingness to help everyone. You are a true master of your craft! God Bless You!

@Gary P posted:

@gunrunnerjohn, you neverr cease to amaze us with your electronics knowledge. You are amazing! On behalf of everyone, thank you for your willingness to help everyone. You are a true master of your craft! God Bless You!

Gary, thank you for commenting on this 3-year old thread!  I am also appreciative of all the help John freely shares!!

Stop, you're embarrassing me!

Thanks guys, I like to help when I can, and accept help when I can't.

@gunrunnerjohn posted:

Stop, you're embarrassing me!

Thanks guys, I like to help when I can, and accept help when I can't.

John, both comments are exactly how I feel when someone compliments me.  There are so many good folks here who feel and do the same!  Thank you OGR Forum!!

John, does this fix require soldering to the main board as shown in the photo? If so, I wouldn't be able to perform this it...my hand tremor makes fine soldering work next to impossible. My Legacy bipolars have the sound dropout over crossovers...and I've been pushing buttons and adjusting throttle on the CabII to bring the sounds back.

It does indeed require soldering to the bottom of the sound board as indicated.

This problem was discovered 3 years ago at this point. Just wondering if current Legacy engines have the same problem, or if Lionel has since designed something to overcome the problem.

(Also curious if modifications like this cause warranties to be invalidated, but that's another issue)

@breezinup posted:

This problem was discovered 3 years ago at this point. Just wondering if current Legacy engines have the same problem, or if Lionel has since designed something to overcome the problem.

(Also curious if modifications like this cause warranties to be invalidated, but that's another issue)

AFAIK, the design of the RSL4 board hasn't changed in the three years.  The only two engines I have to test that are later that the ones I applied the fix to are the PRR 0-6-0 and the 2023 VL-BB.

The 0-6-0 has a tether, so it has rollers all around and doesn't have the issue.

Interestingly, the VL-BB does not have it either, it has a several second hold-up after losing track power to the tender.  I don't know if this was a special accommodation for the Vision Line or they actually added a cap to fix the problem in general for all the RSL4 boards.  I haven't had the tender open, so I have no idea what it looks like in there.

Pennsylvania LEGACY 0-6-0 #7007 SKU: 2231560

Union Pacific VISION Big Boy #4014 SKU: 2331264