Restoring sound to my old LGB Mogul

[Cliff George]

There has been a few posts on adding sound to Moguls so I thought I would give some details of how I did mine. This is not necessarily the best/cheapest way, but it is my way. My mogul had already been converted to digital a few years ago and at that time the old analogue sound boards were disconnected. I wanted to get sound back into it again.

I decided to use a DIETZ MicroXS unit as I have used these before, they have excellent sound, and I am familiar with them.

First we need to take the loco to bits. Five screens only are needed to sperate the chassis from the boiler/cab.

Remove these screws on both sides.

Once we have eased the cab/boiler off from the chassis we then need to remove two screws from the bottom of the cab to sperate the cab from the boiler (no picture - sorry).

The Mogul was previously converted to digital with a Lenz Gold Maxi decoder. I decided to keep the LGB electronics to control the front light, smoke and firebox flicker. Advantages were that I thought the conversion was easier, disadvantages no independent control of functions (which I don't mind), but secondly that the lights go out when the loco stops (which I don't like, and may change sometime).

The gearbox/chassis had to be converted from a three to a four wire as part of the digital conversion. Sorry no pictures of this either.

By the way I suggest people don't do what I have done here and not be consistent about what colour wire to use, stick with the LGB scheme if possible.

The inputs from the rails from both the chassis and from the power pickup on the tender, via the connecting cable, go to the inputs of the decoder. The output of the decoder goes to the LGB electronics and to the motor.

Looking underneath the cab we see the three wires that used to connect to the chassis back when LGB made it. The black and the white wires are the power from the rails. These are now connected to the motor output of the decoder. The green wire, which used to go to the motor, is not used and as a result the cab switch will not work to control the motor. It may have been better to use this green wire to go to the motor and not send the decoder output directly to the motor in which case the cab switch would have worked. But I didn't think about that at the time - silly me.

The old chuff sensor wires are cut off and connected to the sound module.

I could have gone for the more expensive DIETZ unit, the X-clusive-S, that would have allowed me to connect the chuff sensor to the sound module. However I think the microXS unit is fine because how hard the engine is working, via the back emf feature, get translated into sound via the SUSI interface. With the chuff sensor you just tend to get the speed to the loco, and not how hard the engine is working translated into sound.

Now we attach the sound module to the SUSI interface of the decoder and the old chuff sensor connector. We are going to use the connector wires to the tender that used to be used for the chuff sensor for the speaker.

I also added a power storage unit at the same time. No particular reason I just had one spare.

Ease it all back together being careful not to trap any wires and all is done.

Details of what has to be done in the tender to follow.

I hope this is useful to someone and that I have done all of this post correctly. It's the first time I've tried to combine text with pictures and I've probably got the wrong text with the wrong picture somewhere!

 

[Cliff George]

There are six wires in the connector between loco and tender, one isn't used, two are used to feed track power from the tender to the loco (we should have picked these up in the loco and fed them to the decoder). The other three used to be used for the chuff sensor connected to the old analogue sound boards in the tender. We are going to reuse two of the three chuff sensor wires to carry the output to the speaker.

The chuff sensor itself is no longer used, although if we had chosen to use it it would have connected to the sound module in the loco and so these wires would still be free.

First we have to remove the top of the tender with four screws from underneath (sorry no picture). Then remove the old sound boards.

Despite what I said previously about being consistent with wiring colours, LGB have gone and used the same white/green/brown triple wire for a different purpose in the tender that what it was used for in the loco (I guess it is what they had to hand). Here these wires used to be from the chuff sensor, but we have now converted them to be the speaker output.

I decided to replace the old tender speaker with a new one, but I could probably have got away with reusing the existing one.

All we need to do is to join the speaker cables with the appropriate white/green/brown wires. The order here seems to be the same as it was in the loco.

The last thing to do is to put it all back together again, wack it on the programming track and program up the sound module. I move the functions around on the sound module so that I get a standard function usage throughout all of my locos and because I have to do it anyway since the default configurations have some function clashes between Lenz and Dietz. For example the shunting speed function three on the Lenz decoder is the same as the bell on the Dietz unit. It is easy program the sound module and if anyone wants details let me know.

Finally, since I use computer control, I have to configure the computer program, Traincontroller by RR&Co, to know all about the new sound features of the Mogul and how to use them, but that is not the subject for this post and virtually no one except me is going to have to do that anyway!

As to the sound itself it is excellent, you lot are going to have to wait for my next video, probably in the summer, to hear how good it sounds!

Hope this is useful

 

[electricity_bill]

Hello Gents
I am in the process of converting my Mogul and have read your notes with interest. One small point, how do you get the lead weight out of thr boiler barrel?
Bill