Hi, I’m a bit of a rookie in this hobby but I wanted to give it a start and bought a marklin system (mainly from ebay) but I got stuck because the loco is not working on the rest of the system.

I bought a Marklin Hamo 8398, a huge lot of marklin M tracks, transformer and wagons. The problem is that when I connected everything the train didn’t work. Only now I got to know that Hamo trains works on DC and not AC.

I think the best thing to do is to try and convert the train to AC. I was reading that I need a pickup shoe and a lockpilot decoder. Basically I have two questions:

1. the loco has a small pickup pin on its side. Should I place the pickup shoe instead of this pin since its not really at the center of the loco?
2. what model of pickup shoe and lockpilot shall I buy since there are a number of models available for both items?

thanks

hi, thanks a lot for your reply, its very useful.

would you know what model of the Uhlenbrock i should look at?

thanks

You can also use 76300/76320, which are somewhat cheaper and will do the work.

When converting this loco, just make sure that the front truck is not wired, or, if it is, make sure that the wiring does not shortcircuit the decoder (this may happen sometimes with some locos, i.e. 8366).

Regards.

Although not being Cem,

I believe I can help a bit even though I haven't converted any DC engines to digital, but I have converted them to analogue AC. A bit of a warning though - many European (and European protype) DC models have wheels that may work on K or C rails (there could be a need to adjust the distance between the wheels), whereas I have my doubts that an American model would work if it has RP25 wheels. (I have converted Lima and Jouef and they have even worked on M rails).

First you have to check underneath a truck if there is enough room to mount a Märklin or Roco (all according to your own choice/preference) 3R pick-up.

If the answer to this question is yes, then it is very similar to when converting a Hamo engine, however you may have to put some thinking into how to hold the pick-up in place - whether you can drill a small hole and cut e.g. an M2 thread and use a screw or whether to use superglue.

The next step would be to identify and electrically join all cables coming from the original DC pick up, which are in contact with the wheels. From there on it is just as Cem describes it to connect the cable coming from the 3R pick-up to one pole and all the DC pick-ups to the other pole feeding the decoder.