Sunday, August 14, 2016

Traffic Jam

Traffic Jam on the main line and the culprit
During the last solo ops session, one of my Tam Valley Depot QuadP servo decoders decided to forget its programming. While that's annoying, it also put a rather harsh end to the session, since two key turnouts on the layout are controlled by this board.

With Pascal's help, this afternoon I reprogrammed the decoder, ... at least I tried to, but one of the servos was obviously very unhappy and started to make grinding noises. I cut the layout power and decided to unscrew the servo horn, since the settings clearly had gone bad and the servo was in danger of stripping its gears. To reach the servo, I had to clear out tracks in underground staging, and parked a bunch of trains on the main line. Unfortunately, this servo was installed facing the back of the layout to avoid underground obstacles, so I couldn't reach it to take off the servo horn, and ended up completely removing the assembly. Once off the layout, reprogramming and reinstallation was easy.

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