Technical

Hi everyone, this is my first post here although I’m fairly familiar with the 00 live steam range having had my Hornby Mallard set for quite a while now. That said I really am grateful for all the information on here and it’s certainly helped me learn even more about these wonderful little locos. I’ve mostly been running mine on the rolling road due to the lack of a layout, although with one finally in the works lately I’ve started running round actual circuits of track to get used to running it “properly”. Unfortunately I’ve run into an issue that has me scratching my head a bit.

To start off with running it on the circuit was fine, I could get it going and bring it to a stop without too much fuss and it ran really nicely. Then all of a sudden it started displaying some weird behaviour when I wanted to slow it down and stop. Now when flicking the controller in the opposite direction to reduce speed, the loco won’t respond for a few clicks (not unusual) and then it’ll suddenly shoot off a top speed! If I’m lucky I can do an emergency stop but there have been several occasions where the loco flies off the track as soon as it reaches a corner.

I tried running it on the rolling road again with the body off to see what was going on but I can’t get it to replicate the problem. It only happens when running on actual track. To make matters worse, a few months on and plenty of troubleshooting later, it doesn’t seem to be isolated to when I want to slow down anymore. Now the loco can be happily running round the circuit and then without any warning at all (or input from the controller) the regulator will fully open and it’ll shoot off at top speed again. Sometimes I’ll hear the whistle go off too although the loco continues running in the same direction.

Does anyone have any idea what could be going on? I can’t figure out why it’s only happening on the track and not on the rolling road. At first I thought it might be something to do with a gradient change (the room is slightly wonky in places!) but it doesn’t seem consistent enough for that and it rarely happens in the same place either.

As it stands at the moment though I can’t currently run the loco on track for fear of it suddenly shooting off at top speed. I imagine I’m missing something incredibly obvious but if anyone can shed some light on what’s going on I’d be incredibly grateful. Many thanks.