As a prewar guy I know nothing about DCS. A friend of mine has a DCS layout and is having trouble. At one spot on his layout his engine stops. It has power. Smoke and sound works but it does not respond to controls. He must push it a few feet before it responds. On another section he has a similar problem although the engine will go through the section in reverse without problem.
ANY IDEAS?
Thanks
Al
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This could be a track or engine power pick up problem . If a dcs engine looses the dcs signal the engine carries on with the last command given. So if the engine was going 15 smph it carries on at 15 even with no dcs signal. It doesn't stop unless there is no power ..
If the battery is low and the power is slightly interrupted the engine might drop into neutral and you have to re start it.
Battery test.... turn track power off. sounds should carry on for at least 6 or 7 seconds.
That's track power off, not shut down with remote. I'd probably start with the battery test.
I have a couple spots on my layout where this happens occaisionally over switches where only one roller is powered. Could be the track needs to be cleaned or rollers and wheels. Best to do all three first. Then add wire drops around the trouble spots.
For a DCS locomotive, that seems odd. Normally, they will keep running if they lose signal.
I have seen this a couple of times, never did figure out what was happening. You could honk the horn, turn smoke on and off, but no movement. A shutdown/startup sometimes clears it, but I had to do a feature reset a couple of times to get it moving again.
Strange beasts. 
For a DCS locomotive, that seems odd. Normally, they will keep running if they lose signal.
I have seen this a couple of times, never did figure out what was happening. You could honk the horn, turn smoke on and off, but no movement. A shutdown/startup sometimes clears it, but I had to do a feature reset a couple of times to get it moving again.
Strange beasts.
John,
On my Atlas track layout it has happened with the 2-roller steam engines over switches where one roller is on the neutral guard rail. With DCS it happens very rarely where it happened frequently in conventional. When it does happen the engine just stops and won't budge or respond to commands.
That the one engine he has will go through in the opposite direction without trouble is not surprising. I've seen that as well and believe it's a characteristic of the roller contact variation. We take it for granted but I'll bet the physics of rolling electrical contact are not all that simple especially when a signal is being sent.
S
It appears that something in the configuration gets scrambled, when I do a feature reset, it seems to come back alive. This was happening a lot on a new PS/3 E-8 set at the club, but once we got it running around, it seemed to settle down.
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