Happy Holidays,

I am new to the forum. I have a small collection of Marklin running stock from the late 1990 and early 2000. At that time I was using the Delta Pascal program to run my layout. Now that I retied, I am trying to restart the hobby and get back into the layout building. In order to replace the Delta program (I do not have the good old DOS PC any longer) and to be able to check my old engines I purchased Mobile Station from E-Bay and it seems to allow me an entry into the new era. I plan to use the desktop program once I build the layout but for now I am in test stages of the new technologies.

Last week I received from an E-Bay seller a 3696 engine and I tried to test it on my test setup that includes the Mobile Station. I searched the Mobile Station database and found the engine and tried to run it but only the dim light of the engine seems to work. The engine itself did not move. I opened the engine cover and looked on the dip-switches (they seems to be mounted up side down by Marklin) and based on the switches that were on: 2/3/6/7 I determined that the switches are set to 10 not 8 the default address. I then changed the address in the Mobile Station to 10 and did not seems to help. I then moved the switch just to make sire that they did not move during the travel and I set them back to 8 but nothing changed. I now was trying to see if I can try to see that the motor works but I do not know how to tell the engine to operate in non-digital mode. I assume that I can connect the power of the power supply I got with the Mobile Station directly to the track (I am in FL for the winter and my old transformers are in NJ) and see if the motor works or perhaps I can try to connect the power to a location near the motor and eliminate the possibility that the electronics is not working but I did not see any way to switch to Non-Digital mode.

Just to have complete picture, the eBay dealer told me he tested it before shipping using his "digital controller 6021 operated the loco just fine from position 1". As I do not have 6021, I am not sure what is it doing? Is it running the engine in digital mode? What address is it using from position 1? With the Delta controller the 4 addressed were hard coded into the device but I do not know how to read the position 1 of the 6021 controller part of the message I got from the vendor.

Any advice you can give me how to "debug" the engine will be appreciated before I declare it dead on arrival.

Thanks for any help you can provide,
Meir Chen

Dear John,

I reconnected my setup and changed the dip-switches to 1 and it worked. I then changed it back to 8 and it worked as well. The funny thing is that I tested one of my existing engines to make sure it is not my mistake, but I assume I must have made something wrong and we can close the post.

Thanks for your help and happy holidays,
Meir