When you fire up your DCC system do the lights on your locomotives turn on if they were set to on when you shut the system down? I.E. does your decoder remember the lights were on when the power has been turned off... I ask this because my Rapido GMD1 and atlas GP9 both seem to remember but my atlas GP38-2 does not... Is this normal? I have an NCE Powercab, The GMD1 is a Digitrax decoder and both atlas locos have TCS...
This is likely a CV config setting but I couldn't spot it with a quick skim of the comprehensive guide. I'd suggest using JMRI to read the decoder config from the GP9 and compare against the GP38-2, specifically on the lighting tabs.
On my layout, the lights come on until you select the DCC address and then they turn off. This tells me the track is live and I can turn on the lights or leave them off if I am consisting them.