Adding Rail Sounds to ESU Sound Decoders

Tsunami2 sound decoder owners, hopefully, are aware that they can enable the rail clickity-clack sound for added realism on their locomotives. You can do this by controlling the number of axles per truck and trucks per cars settings along with the related sound scaler (volume).

Tsunami2 Settings

If you are using JMRI’s Decoder Pro these settings are located on the ‘Sound’ sheet. If you do not use Decoder Pro the CV settings are as follows:

CV 3.257: Clickety-Clack Configuration

Description
CV 3.257 is used to set the number of axles per truck and number of trucks per car for the clickety-clack sound effect. CV 3.257 determines the frequency of the clickety-clack sound effect and allows you to simulate various locomotives and rolling stock.

Note: To access Indexed CV Page 3 with CVs 257-512, CV 31 (CV Index 1) must be set to a value of 16 (default) and CV 32 (CV Index 2) must be set to a value of 3.

Figure 1 CV 3.257

AX0-AX1: Axles per Truck 

01 = 2 axles per truck
10 = 3 axles per truck

TR0-TR1: Trucks per Car
00 = 1 truck per car
01 = 2 trucks per car
0: Reserved

Default Value: 5

CV 3.258: Clickety-Clack Sound Scalar

Description
CV 3.258 is used to set the frequency of the clickety-clack sound effect. The value of CV 3.258 determines the proportion between the speedstep and the scale speed (feet per second) used to configure the frequency of the clickety-clack sound effect.

Note: To access Indexed CV Page 3 with CVs 257-512, CV 31 (CV Index 1) must be set to a value of 16 (default) and CV 32 (CV Index 2) must be set to a value of 3.

Figure 2 SS0-SS7: Clickety-Clack Sound Scalar

Additional Information
Higher values indicate higher scale speeds and increase the frequency of the clickety-clack sound effect. Entering a value from 1 to 255 into CV 3.258 will adjust the clickety-clack frequency from 0.01ft/s to 2ft/s. Scale speed (ft/s) is calculated as:

Scale Speed (ft/s) = (Speed Step × CV 3.258) ÷ 100

Entering a value of 0 into CV 3.258 will disable the clickety-clack effect.

Default Value: 180

ESU Settings

There are two things you will need to add the rail sound to an ESU decoder, the first is an empty sound slot and the second is to have the template files loaded on your computer. These are available for download on the ESU website here . The ESU rail sound is located in the template files in the miscellaneous folder as ‘rail clank intelligent’. Open your Lok programmer, load your project and go the sound pane. Highlight the empty sound slot on the left and then highlight the rail sound file on the right. Finally, click the blue arrow pointing to the left to move the sound file into the selected sound slot. See Figure 3.

Figure 3 Moving the sound file to the empty sound slot

Now go to the decoder pane and function mapping sheet. Locate your project’s traction motor sound in the Sounds column. Now select the drop down and, leaving the traction motor selected, select and check the sound slot where you added the rail sound. So now there are two sounds selected for that function, the traction motor and the rail sound. See figure 4.

  

Figure 4 Two sounds on the same function

This completes the basic configuration so you can reload the sound file to the locomotive. You can adjust the volume in the sound slot settings as usual. To adjust the speed of the clanks you will have to adjust the constant values in the sound slot flow diagram. You can use the sound simulator to test your changes then reload the sound file when you’re satisfied. This will take some time until you get exactly what you want. Also, as is, the sound file is for two axle trucks. Again, you’ll have to play with the sound flow diagram to get more than that.

Have fun!

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