No, this is in no way meant to be a facetious title. It is about the LED wiring method MTH employed which the author just discovered. He is not upset about it just disappointed.
At the most recent estate sale that our club held there was an MTH Erie Lackawanna GP35 available for sale. The author has a soft spot for GP35s from his long ago home in West Virginia. The B&O main line went through the middle of town and he vividly remembers the thundering 5 engine GP35 105 car coal trains gunning for the "17 mile grade" up and over the Allegheny Front as they screamed through town gaining speed.
The MTH engine did not run or do anything for that matter but the price was only $10.00 so he said "I can fix that". Yeah, sure!
He stripped down the engine to bare bones, tossed the burned out decoder (it was definitely burnt) and used a CR2032 3v battery to test the LEDs and determine which wires were what. After some time with the wiring he determined that all of them had a common negative voltage with the different colored wires as the positive for each LED. THIS IS EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE OF THE OTHER DECODERS THE AUTHOR HAS DEALT WITH mainly Soundtraxx and LokSound which have a positive common!!
What does this mean? It would be necessary to unsolder the LEDs, flip them 180 degrees and re-solder them.
Let's see...$10.00...wait!! he will have to buy a $100.00 decoder to get it to run at all (sound, etc...) OR he can throw it through the window.
Hmmmm...window...decoder...
So remember this the next time you're tempted to buy and fix an MTH engine. They are going to be more work involved than you bargained for.
If you have an idea for a blog post here, let me know. If I can comment on it, I will or I'll see if someone else can and post it
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