Here is a tip for anyone with an original Hornby class 50, which I understand were the first Hornby locos to have an 8 pin socket on the circuit board. Hornby made a mistake with the wiring in that they chose the wrong common return, making it negative instead of positive (or the other way round). This meant tha decoders would not work on DCC, causing a dead short, and in some cases even blew the decoder. I found out this week, having just brought my class 50 over to Greece, when the whole system shorted out by showing ‘error’ on my Elite controller every time I put the 50 on the track. So I searched the internet, as you do in these cases and found a simple solution! Some people were able to get replacement circuit boards free from Hornby and when they ran out people were able to use the class 56 circuit board until they ran out. Some people rewired their circuit boards, but one person came up with a very simple solution, which has worked fine for me. On the decoder harness, just cut off the blue and green wires! Simple. I was sceptical at first, so tried it out on a cheap Lais decoder. I was so pleased to see that all the lights worked and the loco runs correctly! Job done. No additional expense or work to do.

Posted by Wagons Mike at 2024-06-19 11:09:35 UTC