Hello all, I have a new in box Atlas N scale Trainmaster 24-66 from 2010-2011. Box said it's NCE decoder but does not say which NCE decoder. I'm trying to find the manual for the decoder because the locomotive is not running properly and need to now which CV's to adjust to get it to run smoother. The CV 2 is the standard starting point which I have adjusted to a number of different settings and some times it will start slow and smoothly then I'll stop the loco and try to start it again and It won't start till it hits number 30 or 40 on the throttle then it will jump forward. Can't seem to figure out what's going on? Could it be something other than the decoder? This thing is brand new never been touch when I bought it a few days ago so it a bit frustrating.
it should be this one: http://download.atlasrr.com/pdf/AN12A0.pdf I’d do a full reset on it first to ensure that everything is set to factory defaults and then try from there. Set CV30 to a value of 2 according to the manual.
From your description, it sounds more like a loco problem than a decoder problem. How much time do you have on the loco? Sometimes it takes a bunch of "break in time" to get new locos to smooth out. I'd put some hours on the loco before getting too carried away searching for a problem. The motor could just still be "tight" and needs to loosen a little, there could be a burr on a gear, there could be excess lube in the trucks resulting in poor contact. I'm not a fan of the NCE decoders Atlas uses....they always seem "buggy" when trying to program them. I have a couple of SD7s that I fought with for months to get them to take the loco addresses.......my H16-44s all died. I've ended up changing out a lot of my Atlas/NCE decoders. The only NCEs I've ever installed are in my 3 Atlas VO1000s......NCE is the only one who makes a drop in decoder for those. They've all been fine, so not trying to bash NCE, but the factory Atlas boards have been a problem for me.
Did a the factory reset. And yes could be that being over 10 years old and had never been run just needs some run time to loosen things up a bit which I have already started doing. Your right about the NCE decoders being buggy as I have this exact same Atlas Trainmaster in a different road number that runs smoother than this new one but I can't get the thing to start moving till I'm about 50 on the throttle and I have tried everything to fine tune it. But like I said it does run way better than this new one.
I have never had an NCE decoder factory installed in an Atlas locomotive work. I bought a bunch of SD60's and none of the 10 worked very well at all. So I stopped buying them and just got the DC versions and used TCS decoders. And they worked fine. Also TCS makes a decoder for the VO-1000's too.
Been running this thing quite a bit over the last few days plus tweaking settings and it hasn't improved anything at all. Still leaning towards a decoder problem but really not sure at this point. Will take it back to the shop where I bought it and see if he can fiqure it out. The owner is a really good guy and knows his stuff.
