Well in working on the programming of my locomotives, I am seeing a bad trend. Almost all of the locomotives I have purchased with Factory NCE installed decoders to not work. It appears that the NCE boards do not have the slots for the motor leads and that seems to be the main issue. I am not sure why NCE does not do what all other board manufacturers do, because the spring contact is so susceptible to problems due to temperature and vibration, as in a car going to a show. In every instance the NCE decoders do not work. When I pull the NCE decoders and replace them with either Digitrax or TCS and solder the motor leads to the decoder, they never fail. Has this been anyone else's experience? I tend to see more problems due to number of locomotives I have, which is now determined to be 10 times more than I need. As I said I do not see this as a problem with the Atlas locomotives, I see it as a bad design from NCE.
I never rely on spring contact with motor leads. I have replaced everything with ESU LokSound or LokPilot wired decoders, and I have zero failures due to electrical contact issues (occasionally, a decoder itself fails - I've had that happen about once a year). I only have twice as many locos as I need, BTW. John C.
Learned long ago not to rely on the spring contact. As an Electrical Engineer I know that that is the most unreliable contact method.
