Scale Trains Helping With Hurricane Helene Relief

Scale Trains has implemented help for Hurricane Helene Relief and is partnering with various organizations for North Eastern Tennessee and other locations help. If you wish to contribute or help, read about it here.

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From Model Train Stuff

We're Still Here For You Continuing to Serve Despite Hurricane Helene

Dear Valued Customers, We hope this message finds you safe and well. As you may know, our physical location in the Asheville, North Carolina area was recently impacted by Hurricane Helene, and the aftermath has created significant challenges for our team. Beyond the operational disruptions of power outages and flooding, many of our employees are facing incredibly difficult personal circumstances—some are without power, cell service, food, clean water, and basic necessities. Despite these overwhelming challenges, our team is doing everything they can to get back to work and continue fulfilling your orders. However, due to these extraordinary conditions, we kindly ask for your patience as shipping times for certain orders may be longer than usual. Rest assured, we are working closely with our partner warehouses outside of North Carolina to ensure that orders are processed and dispatched as quickly as possible. Even through these challenging times, our goal remains to serve your model railroading needs with the dedication and care you’ve come to expect from us. Now more than ever, your continued support is crucial. Every purchase you make helps to provide much-needed resources for our employees and their families during this tough time. Your loyalty makes a real difference, and we are deeply grateful. We are committed to delivering the quality products and service you’ve come to expect, even as we navigate these unprecedented hardships, and we'll have more updates to come in the near future. Thank you for standing by us and supporting our incredible team as they work through this crisis. Please feel free to reach out with any questions or concerns. Our customer service team is available, and they can be reached at 828-341-2295. Stay safe, and thank you for being part of our community. Warm regards, The Model Train Stuff Team

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Digitrax Closed on Thursday 9/26 Due to Hurricane Helene

From Digitrax - Sept. 25, 2024

Digitrax will be closed tomorrow (9/26/2024) as Hurricane Helene heads our way. We're putting our team's safety first with the storm coming in. We aim to reopen on Friday if it's safe. Thanks for your understanding, and we will let you know if anything changes!

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Replacing the Sound Module in a Bachmann Spectrum EM-1 Locomotive.

Need to replace a Bachmann Spectrum EM-1 sound module? Be careful!

Fig 1 Standard 21 Pin Decoders Not Compatible

The key take away here is that standard 21 pin(Soundtraxx Economi, Tsunami2, TCS 21 pin, etc.) are not compatible with the sound module that accompanied the EM-1. One option is to install a Soundtraxx TSU-2200 decoder. How to do this is explained in this video from Soundtraxx.

Another option is to install a DecoderBuddy motherboard by NixTrainz and the 21 pin decoder of your choice.

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LokSound Volume Control Options (There are several)

An excellent discussion of the different ways to control volumes of the various sounds of LokSound decoders took place recently on the groups.io LokSound forum. It started with a user wanting to know the difference between the controls on the Decoder tab and the Sound tab. See figures 1 and 2.

Fig 1 The Decoder tab

Apoorva (better know as the IndianRailModeller) gave a good explanation of the difference and even explained additional ways to control volumes.

The volume setting for a soundslot set from the Decoder tab (figure 1) is like the Master volume control for each soundslot. In the same example, let’s say your Radiator fan soundslot is not very audible. Changing the volume setting from say 60 to 128 under soundslot settings will increase its volume, and the change will be applied equally to all sounds in the soundslot.

Fig. 2 The Sound tab

The volume settings in the window in the bottom right of your second screenshot sets the volume at which each individual sound file plays at when used in any of the sound slots in the sound project. Let’s say you have a Radiator Fan sound slot that uses three sound files, a start sound, a single loop sound and an end sound. The volume of each of the three sound files (typically a 16-bit .wav file) is set in this window. Let’s say you change the volume for the loop sound file from 100 to 150 and leave the volume of the start and end sound files at 100, when you play the radiator fan soundslot, the loop will play louder relative to the start and end sounds. Further, the loop sound will also play at the higher volume setting of 150 if it were used in any other soundslot.

Continuing, Apoorva stated there is in fact a third place where one can change the volume of individual soundstates and sound containers. This is contained within the sound flow of soundstates. Open a soundslot and click on any sound state or container and the menu on the left has a volume setting that one can use to increase or decrease the volume of that particular soundstate or sound container. See figure 3.

Fig 3 Container sound control

He also mentioned that ESU uses this third method of volume control in their prime mover Dynamic Volume Control feature in the most recent versions of their diesel sound projects. They set the volume of the idle sound to a low volume (Volume setting of 50) and each subsequent notch is set to a progressively higher volume, all the way up to 128 for Notch 8. The transition soundstates between notches also step up in volume from the previous notch volume level to the next notch volume level. This gives a more realistic sound transition that many modellers like. Open up the prime mover soundslot and browse around clicking on the various sound containers/soundstates and take a look. 

Apoorva also has a YouTube channel containing videos demonstrating his custom prime mover sounds along with other topics.

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