Automatic Horn Signals With ESU Decoders

Locomotives have specific horn signals they issue when starting to move in either forward or reverse directions. Two medium blasts indicate starting forward movement and three short blasts indicate starting reverse movement. They also have a stop signal of one short blast to indicate they are done moving in either direction.

It’s not difficult to add these signals to any ESU LokSound sound file if you have minimal experience working with sound slots and sound schedules. I have given several tutorials for working with these objects such as this one. This is a little more complicated task than the previous automatic bell project but again, not too difficult. We’ll use the ESU sound file S0539-LS5H0DCC-Diesel-EMD-12-645E3-T-V4-R4.esux located here one more time.

The Forward and Reverse Signals
Open the sound file in the LokProgrammer and go to the sound pane. Double click on an empty sound slot (we’ll use sound slot 28 this time). Once you have this opened add two containers, one for the forward horn and one for the reverse horn. Name them Forward Signal and Reverse Signal respectively. For the forward container add a group of conditions Function = true, Reverse = false and Requested Speed > 0. For the reverse container add a group of conditions Function = true and Reverse = true. This controls the logic of when horn signals sound. All of this is shown in fig 1.

 Figure 1 the basic containers

Once inside the containers the sound files you use will depend on the horn you want for the particular locomotive you are adding this sound file to. These files are located in the lower right corner of the sound pane. You can use drag-and-drop to put them in the states. Now double click on the Forward Signal container. Here you will add four states in series. First the horn’s init sound followed by the horn’s exit sound then the init sound again and the exit sound again. This is shown in fig 2.

Figure 2 the forward signal

All horns have Init and Exit sound files associated with them. Most also have Fast Exit sounds where you could use the Fast Exit in the first exit state and then the Exit file in the second one. It’s entirely up to you. The simulator will help you decide.

Lastly, click on the Reverse Signal container. Here you will do exactly what you did in the Forward Signal container except add one more Init and Exit cycle to complete the three blasts as in fig 3.

Figure 3 the completed Reverse signal

The Stop Signal
For the Stop signal you will need another sound slot. Use slot 31 for our example. Here we again add a container that will have the sound file states in it but we will add one additional state to the slot and this is the horn delay shown in fig 3. It uses the silence.wav file which is included in all sound projects which gives a short delay from the engine stopping to the horn sounding.

Figure 4 the horn delay

The Stop Signal itself consists of a single init/exit horn sequence as we did in fig 3.

When mapping these to a function put both sound slots on the same function and be sure to add the Drive signal to the function you choose (this is critical). The author usually uses function 3 due to not using the coupler function, again, your choice. See fig 5.

Figure 5 function mapping

Thanks to Ted Wentz on the groups.io ESU Forum for first presenting this sound mapping.

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