Odd Occurrence With Digitrax


D&J RailRoad

Professor of HO
I hosted an op session on the D&J Railroad today. Things ran great for the 8 hours of ops but then something happened. All but one of the operators had left when I was getting a short somewhere on the layout. The circuit breakers were hammering away trying to bring power back on but shutting down again. I thought it might have been something with a California Zepher that the one remaining operator had just brought out of the main yard with a few Amtrac commuter cars mixed in, but after removing all the cars from the track, the short was still in there somehow. I started checking the rest of the track and found several trains all jammed together at the throat of the division yard. That was the source of the short as some of the locos were derailed and shorting the tracks. The real concern though was; why did all these locos suddenly start moving in the yard? I'm talking about 10 locos, they where MUed together in teams of two and three. Some had pushed their trains into the bottle neck and other locos were on the lead end of the pile up. All of them had been cleared from the throttles when they were parked in the yard. After I cleared the mess, the short was gone and things were back to normal.
Really strange.
 
I get that sometimes too, have to shut down and restart.
I also get loco's loosing functions when it happens.
Sorry I can't help but at least I can sympathize with you!
 
Without going deeper into details I will say that this hasn't happened to me since I turned off the DC option in all of my decoders. Try that if you haven't done it already.
 
I have the analog function turned off on the command station. I didn't think the decoder would have to be changed too. I will have to set CV29 to 34 then to disable it.
 
Are some of the decoders Digitrax? I set up a couple of consists with Digitrax decoders mixed in with NCE and got crazy results with the Digitrax locos running opposite the directions set in the consist. I contacted Digitrax support, and they said to set CV 57=102. This has something to do with back EMF, but if you don't set it, you will have problems with Digitrax decoders in advanced consisting. Since then, CV57=102 has been part of my Digitrax install procedure, and I haven't had problems.

Not saying if this is the problem, but it would be a wise thing to set anyhow.
 
There are a mix of decoders in that pile up, Paragon (BLI) Loksound, Digitrax and Soundtrax. The odd thing is that all the locos in the yard moved in the same direction regardless of which direction the loco was facing.
 



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