Yes Stephen,.


thank you to share with us .

Markus,

My guess would be DCM. These toolings have always been DCM. Locos we see with the "new" three pole motor that were may have been previously five pole (or other) are all those with the newer, smaller motors. I don't think it would be worthwhile for them to try and convert the existing F7 and PA-1 tooling to use anything other than a DCM motor.

-Brandon

I can't believe it... or I was still refusing to believe reality.

But we should've known after the recent Stummi exposure of the new 37455 motor.

Then there is really nothing desirable left in the whole Marklin range....

I've already bought all the DCM models that I need, so have no plans to add more DCM models...
whereas,
every other models that used to be equipped with SDS or bell-shaped motor have been downgraded.

This is quite a concern, because if this is their new policy,
ALL new tooling models from this point onwards will be designed around the new standard 3-pole motor...

DCM fans shouldn't rejoice either....

Moving forward, I think they would still progressively replace DCM with 3-poler can motor,
but they will probably move at a slower pace, because they would need to hedge the popularity of DCM against the new 3-poler.

Do note that except the 2009 Re6/6 (which uses an Re4/4 II treibgestell anyways, so doesn't really count) - there hasn't been any new tooling model with DCM architecture since the mid -90s.....
So undoubtedly Marklin will take DCM out of equation eventually.

Besides, arguably the "standard" 3-pole motor is cheaper to buy or manufacture vs DCM...

Marklin catchphrase written in every loco box I have are:

"Tradition, Quality, Innovation, & Emotion"

How they have betrayed their own philosophy.... it's really sad.

• A 3-pole motor can not be counted a Marklin tradition (or maybe DELTA/Analog tradition??)
  
• It is of questionable quality (longetivity), as it is a cheap motor
  
• It is no way can be considered innovative
  
• And it's really killing all the emotional fun and excitement of expecting a new Marklin model

A very sad day.

Edited by user 07 February 2014 09:00:36(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Hi Miguel,all,
Agreed!As stated before my FL loks(all tender drive) are 3-pole,two old ring motors and a can motor,they work fine.
The problem as I see it,is will these M 3-poles a) pull a train well b) LAST

We shall see,....

Dr D

I'm watching 37924. It fits my era better and it does not come with sound. This will save me some money on a decoder I will never use. It will get a LokSound V4 upgrade which will work fine with the three pole motor. So, the icon with five stars arranged in a circle means pretty much nothing now?

I'm on the understanding most do not have a problem with the motor in and by itself. The problem lies in the situation where Marklin's decoder does not have the motor control circuitry and/or program to adequately control the motor and provide smooth running. Tom posted a quote from someone at Marklin acknowledging this problem. Plus the cheaper motor has not returned a cheaper price. The quality and life expectancy are yet to be determined. It may last forever, it may not.

Hi I speak from my own experience, and comments made by Marklin. And yes now one is perfect and yes they may have made mistakes, but I have found none myself with my models and wish those who have problems with there's a speedy recovery. I do think thoe that all this tech in models is getting to far into our heads and making us all worry far to much about it. To me if it looks right and runs right then it's a good model. My latest Marklin model is 37337 an SNCF BB12000. I don't know what motor it has or decoder, I don't CARE. It runs very well and it looks just perfect. I am happy and it came straight out of the box, and ran and it's not got she'd loads of bits to add and then brake off

Hallo,Obi-wan,all,

If a lok doesn't perform well in conventional operation it will not with better electronics nor digital.Mechanics also plays a part in it's performance.


Dr D

I hope I can buy the old boiler BR41 when I will find it at a good price, I mean close to 275 euros. I expect it to happen in about 1 year.

I am sure I will be very happy with it all: look, detail, running, painting, lights, etc!

I already have a Br41, the 3792, so I am not tempted to buy this model which is quite similar. Yes, I know, it has more bells and whistles! I tend not to repeat examples of the same class unless there's a very good reason.

Hi Obi-wan,all,

>Mechanics & materials used in the gears and such do indeed play a major role in performance & reliability... <

Your kidding!

>I have black Märklin BR 03.10 "3089" streamlined loco with a plastic/nylon cogwheel in the gears (starter set?) where the teeth are worn so the loco does not move... So "quality" has been an issue for many years when some models get unmotivated "cost cuts" ... <

Calling Dr Eisenbahn!!!

>I also have a Roco BR50 üK where they have an excellent 5-pole DC motor with skewed windings in the tender driving the tender wheels, and the main loco wheels are driven via a cardan shaft from the tender, and unfortunately that construction sheared the cardan gears due to too soft metal used... <

Well know issue.Roco does not do that anymore.Wait! You have Roco lok????


>And as a personal side note on tender drive...
You don't put the horse behind the cart, do you? <

You like the cab to have no room? The tender loks are fine pullers.

Egad!

Dr D

Since I got my first Marklin in-house MFX decoder, I never had too much hope in them.
It's Marklin's problem.

Digital world has matured enough in the past 10 years.
If one manufacturer is not competent enough to make them, we can just switch to another brand
...and basic decoders are now cheap enough, so long as we don't worry too much about full operating sounds.

Marklin was being quite clever about it though,
seemingly packaging more and more of their locos with full operating sound.
Why?
Higher RRP, and to make us more reluctant to replace those precious sound decoder.

I think they realize that their decoder's load control is worse compared to the other brands too - so in a way, sound package seems to be their way of protecting their market.

Okay, that's also slightly off-track from the topic.
But my point is decoders are merely the necessary additional tool for digital operation.

The rest of the locomotive is, however, should be considered a package in its own way, or a work of art.
Its tooling, detail, and motor -- this whole package is actually what represent the entire brand.

It's actually harder to switch brand to buy which loco vs decoder selection and/or problem with load regulation.

Juhan briefly mentioned about Marklin BR18.1....
It was introduced in 1988 --- close to the dawn of the real digital MRR age --- so naturally, some issue with electronic packaging...

But can you say that Marklin BR18.1 is not a beautiful model?

I think it's got all its ingredients, and the whole package is perfect -- although it was quite expensive for Marklin to make at a time...
True, it has no smoke generator, but that besides the point.
This is still a very modern design, highly detailed, and with the right decoder, its Faulhaber motor completes the whole package.
It was just so ahead of its time.......

Which bring us back to the point --- this artwork should be the model that every new tooling Marklin model be compared with.

Hence why the new standardized 3-pole motor is an issue for me.

Can Marklin argue that it is far better than the Faulhaber in BR18.1 - and actually makes their new models a better package compared to their 20-year old design?

They used to be able to argue that with BR01, BR05 (non-streamlined), BR18.3, BR64, BR39, BR23, and to some extent their BR50.40 and BR41...
They made huge fuss about it, and they showed that they were proud with those products.

But recently, Marklin had been trying to keep quiet about their "new" 3-poler.....
Luckily, internet forums shared everything, and look! Despite the "hush-hush", we know about this recent development.

I can only conclude that they already know that it is of inferior quality vs their previous motors.
Otherwise, where's the SDS-like campaign on the net.

I'm still trying to keep an open mind here, and see how the 3-polers compared to the previous generation motor.
But given the price, the second hand market is still the better option for Marklin-branded items.

Edited by user 08 February 2014 06:41:43(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

If they use any cheap motor to PA1 locos the locomotives will not run with them even alone,they are very heavy.I believe they will not do sush a terrible move.I do not know bout the F7,we will wait and see.

Admittedly, having most of my locos with very old 3-pole motors, I dont see the big deal. I think so many other aspects comes into play; mechanical construction and electronics.
Surely, the best 3-pole motor is still infinitely much better than the worst 5-pole, right¿? ;-)

The meaning of "step by step" doesn't make me conclude any specific thing other then they are committed to improve and want to do it in a systematic way.

I think it is the way things should be done, but the steps taken need to be the correct ones. I trust in them to do it, and as such I also hope they review all the previous work Märklin did (at least in the last 2 decades) on motors and load regulation. It is not mandatory, but it may save a lot of time to them, and as a consequence save money. We must also understand that the current technology and demand is not the same as it was before, so the solution may not necessarily be the same.

Thanks for taking the time to do you own testing and keeping us informed of the outcomes. There's been a lot of discussion over the three-pole vs five-pole motor issue.
If you're wondering if anyone is listening, I've understood the message that it's the combination of decoder and motor that's a potential problem. Not just the motor in isolation.

The original 5 star symbol, and description, was applied to the 5 pole DCM motors with regulated analogue control. By extension it was also applied to the 3511 which had a can motor, so we can see that even at the very beginning there was no one clearly defined motor that it applied to.

Over the years the symbol has been applied to locos that were described as having "high efficiency propulsion", which I take to mean that there is a degree of speed or load regulation, but even this was not always true.

It is not really an indication for a 5 pole motor either, because the same can motors that were used in 3511 were used in 3411, and the latter did not use the symbol.

I have always taken it to mean that the loco will run smoothly and slowly, and usually with speed regulation.

So what does this symbol mean?

It's unclear. See my post above.

Originally it meant that the model had a 5 pole DCM motor with analogue load control.

I think we need to go back twenty years ago....
Back then, Marklin seemed to have combined the package of (early generation) digital decoder & DCM 5-poler into 1 symbol.

Do note that back then, there were no 8-pin or 21-pin plug-n-play decoders as we have now.
So it was quite natural to combine the symbol, as even the shape of each decoder was specifically customized for each different model.

There were only a few models with bell-shaped armature back then, and the aforementioned BR18.1 has a 5-poler Faulhaber motor,
so Marklin's new symbol make absolute perfect sense.
5-star symbol seems natural to go with 5-pole DCM... and still is.

But as time went on, MM gets updated with MFX, while DELTA is gone...

So the (digital-controlled) speed regulation part of that 5-star symbol had become meaningless when the new MFX symbol was introduced.

Arguably if the symbol only means "speed regulation", then all of those 36xxx TRAXX and Ludmilla models should have the same symbol too.
But they don't.



Which bring us to the next problem....
Marklin's product development had a brief affair with bell-shaped armature from early 2000s; resulting in some very good models.
The list was made up of BR17, BR38, BR89.70, BR45, BR59, BR05 streamlined; Big Boy, and GG-1.
But they all shared the same 5-star symbol and the old age DCMs.......

At this stage, 5* symbol starting to get confusing, but somewhat justified because Marklin probably wanted their customers to think that those bell-shaped armature were of the same level as their mid-range DCM model. Besides, none of those bell-shaped armature are 3-polers, and those motor are indeed quite pricey vs DCM.
The Big Boy motor cost around 90 Eurs; while the Maxxon on BR45/59/05 cost about 120 Eur.

And more importantly, Marklin was slowly rolling out Sinus motor back then. It was to be their golden boy -- the top dog, the top motor.
So they probably think that differentiating bell-shaped to DCM could possibly take the gloss off their 39xxx Sinus models.
But another update happened: the Sinus motors are gone!

Conclusion:

Basically that 5* symbol in Marklin database had became meaningless or misleading, as Marklin never updates it as time progressed,
and the level of technology is changing.

I originally thought every model with that symbol has the DCM 5-poler; and only thanks to Marklin-users.net that I learned that it is not true.

To associate it with the new 3-poler is just plain misleading,
because it was originally meant to be paired with DCM 5-poler anyways.

Helmut kern's website has a lot better explanation vs Marklin's parade of meaningless symbols in their database.

Edited by user 08 February 2014 07:32:51(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

That's not the symbol in the database for 37923. It's this one:

I made 16 test runs with an ESU class 66, 8 forward, 8 reverse - all runs at speed step 1.
Fastest run forward: 31.112 seconds. Slowest run forward: 31.151 seconds. Max vs. min: +0.13%
Fastest run forward: 31.014 seconds. Slowest run forward: 31.140 seconds. Max vs. min: +0.41%

Same test was done with a Märklin BR 218 (#37745). I made 32 test runs with this loco because the results of the initial 16 runs were surprisingly bad - the final 16 were as bad as the first 16.
Fastest run forward: 17.814 seconds. Slowest run forward: 33.884 seconds. Max vs. min: +90.21%
Fastest run forward: 17.610 seconds. Slowest run forward: 33.850 seconds. Max vs. min: +92.20%

The results for the Lollo #37740:
With factory-installed decoder it was +53.04% forward and +61.23% in reverse.
Same loco, but with ESU LokPilot V4: +0.31% forward and +0.93% in reverse.

Results for the Ludmilla #36424 with mfx: forward +42.67%, reverse +35.44%

My TRAXX loco with factory-installed mfx decoder shows similarly bad results.

Four out of four locos with three-pole motor and factory-installed mfx decoder show bad results.

The 03 1001 (#37915, bell-shaped armature) performed much better: +0.94% forward and +0.63% in reverse. I do not say that Märklin mfx decoders always perform bad.

Märklin select the motor, Märklin select the decoder. The ESU loco shows which precision is possible. The #37915 shows how good Märklin locos with bell-shaped armature were.
The Lollo shows how much better precision is with ESU decoder instead of Märklin decoder.

I don't know how good or how bad the BR 41 does perform. There are two orders of magnitude between the best and the worst Märklin locos - I play it safe.

John,

The AE 8/14 you are referring to is 37591 which was an MHI item and has two 5 pole DCM Motors, also 37593 (the only one to appear it the 1999 & 2000 Catalogues) and 37596 with sounds more recently, and there were at least a couple more with two DCMs.

39590 in Machinery Green (2007 new items) had two SDS Motors as did 39591 in fictional Brown, a Swiss Dealer special of a couple of years ago

In the Marklin Database and the Catalogues, (for 37593 and 39590 only) where they appear, their descriptions are quite clear about what type of motor they came with, either 5 pole or SDS, so sorry your are wrong on this one

I repeat, the information Marklin gives on their information page makes no mention of the number of poles for this icon. Read it!

http://www.maerklin.com/...ten.html?sCountryCode=en

The icon for 5 pole motor is a different one, and has been used recently for Z scale.

I agree that originally the symbol was meant to show that the motor had been upgraded to 5 pole, but Marklin have always been careful to describe the propulsion as "5 star", not "5-pole".

Sorry for this off-topic post...

This (the 3511) was what made me come back to the hobby when I bought it used in the mid-90's... This model set a new
standard of how Märklin "should be" for me... I had bought a 3000 starter set and brought my old trains from my childhood
for my son to play with, and I thought it was fun to see the trains run. After some additions to my son's roster, I bought the
3511 + a 4228 Rheingold set for myself and then I was hooked myself by the quality & silent running of the 3511...
Never looked back since then, and when I discovered Digital in 1996-1997 (bought a 6021 + 6051) I was really hooked...
This lead to this site being put online as an experiment in late 1998, and the forum start in 2001...

I have an elephant-eared Delta BR41 from a starter set that is waiting to be upgraded to the latest standards...