The Centreville Railroad is a DCC layout controlled by a Digitrax Zephyr DCS-52 base station that I’ve had for about two and half years.
I’ve had an intermittent issue almost from the beginning where a locomotive on the layout – that wasn’t the one I selected and wasn’t part of a consist was responding to throttle controls. The issue would occur with decoders and engines from different manufacturers – the only constant was the DCS-52.
Over the last few months the problem has started getting worse – it’s been happening more frequently and I’ve had a few times where an engine would sprint away as soon as it was placed on the track and then not respond to any commands.
I searched for months for a cause, and solution to the issue and found nothing. No idea why it’s happening, and nobody with a suggestion to stop it.
So finally I reached out to Digitrax, and their recommendation was to reset the DCS-52 with the following steps:
- Press the Menu/Enter Key.
- Select options 3- Option Switch Setup by pressing the 3 key.
- Use the keypad to enter the number 40.
- Press the B Soft Key “Closed”. The changes will take immediate effect.
- Press the C Soft Key “SAVE” to save the Option Switch settings. If you do not save the settings the OpSw changes will not be saved when the unit is powered off.
This seems to have resolved the issue, I had three engines on the layout one of which was a frequent offender when it came to responding to throttle commands that weren’t addressed to it and things seem to be working normally. Hopefully this sticks…
