Digitrax will be closed 12/22/2023@5pm CST
Will re-open 1/2/2024@ 8am CST
For Christmas and News Years Holidays
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Friday, December 22, 2023
Thursday, December 21, 2023
Atlas Acquires Custom Signals
For Immediate Release
December 21, 2023
Hillside, NJ-
Atlas Model Railroad Co Inc, Hillside, NJ announced today the acquisition of Custom Signals of Poughkeepsie, NY. Custom Signals specialized in O scale signal products and building signal systems for layouts.
The asset purchase agreement, finalized on Friday, December 15th, includes in part, the balance of inventory, the Track/Signal Configuration Library, and all Custom Signals tools, comprising molds, dies, designs, plans, and diagrams for all current and proposed products.
Paul Graf, Atlas CEO said, “This purchase will allow the expansion of our signal line from a basic Automatic Block Signaling system (ABS) to a full Absolute Permissive Block Signaling system (APB). It will grow our N and HO signal products, and offer all customers valuable assistance in building track layouts using the Atlas All Scales Signal System.”
Atlas currently offers an extensive line of products in the Atlas All Scales Signal System. The line was first introduced in the early 2000s while working with Terry Christopher from Custom Signals. It was revamped in 2019 with an additional line of products for use in N, HO & O scales. With this purchase we now have a full line of products for use in N, HO and O scales.
These easy-to-install signals and signal system now make it possible to incorporate the reality of the prototype into your scale modeling experience.
To remain updated on all Atlas products and special announcements, sign up for the Atlas Insider Email here.
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Tuesday, December 12, 2023
Random Dropping of Consists With DT602D Throttles Updated - 2023-12-17
The
author belongs to The Hostlers Model Railroad Club of Ogden, Utah whose modular layout
is currently set up at a local mall for the month of December. We have a minimum
of 9 members running trains on it, 3 at a time, for about 8 hours a day 7 days a
week until New Years Eve. Running started the day after Thanksgiving.
Members
have complained that they are randomly losing consists in the middle of running
causing runaway locomotives. The author has also experienced this and it is happening
relatively often.
The
only common factor to the problem is that it only happens to users with DT602D throttles.
The 400 and 500 series throttles work flawlessly.
There
is also a museum layout where this has happened (to the author at least). There's
a lot fewer members running trains there and the author hasn’t had the opportunity
to talk to many of them.
Frank Fezzie of the groups.io Digitrax forum brought up the following point:
One difference between the DT602D and the DT402D/DT500D is that the DT602D goes all the way to Power Off as it goes through the stages of saving battery power. When it has powered off the DT602D can no longer send the "ping" message to the command station every 50 seconds or so which tells the command station that the throttle is still out there controlling its assigned engines. This can result in the command station purging the slots from active status for that throttle. When the DT602D is started back up it will attempt to reacquire the engine that it was running but the consist may be damaged by the purge process. The result is that some of the engines that were in the consist are now not in the consist and are running but not controlled by any throttle. The DT402D and DT500D also can go into power save mode but they do stay powered on and continue to send the "ping" signal so the command station does not purge their slots.
How to prevent this?…disable address purging in the command station.
<Author’s
note>
Disable purging of addresses by setting the Command Station’s OpSw14 to “C”losed.
This change was made to the command station and the author will report back with an update of the results after more run time testing.
<Update 2023-12-17>
After a week of testing by several users running multiple consists it appears that preventing address purging at the command station has corrected the consist dropping problems we were experiencing. The tests included manually dropping and re-consisting the same engines in different orders.
The mention of "stealing" addresses being a possible cause of the problems will be taken care of by holding a mini-clinic on this at our next club meeting.
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Thursday, December 7, 2023
ESU's Statement on Unusual Amounts of Decoder Failures
From ESU
"ESU continues to stand behind its products and our industry leading 2-year ‘no questions’ asked warranty applies of course. Every customer can send decoders to our ESU LLC office for replacement directly. Please note that OEM decoders must be exchanged under the warranty of the OEM manufacturer.
"The chip crisis has been hard on the industry as a whole but is recovering. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by this issue and want to thank you for your strong support."
Mit freundlichen Grüßen
Ihr ESU Support Team
Thanks to Henry Sherwood for pointing this out and as Alan Pearce of the LoksoundUsers groups.io forum said, "That is good to see, and that they have identified a specific failure problem. It would be more concerning if they had a variety of components failing, then one can't be sure if the real problem has been found."
The author completely agrees with Alan.
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