NCE Power Cab consistently loses its mind

[NtheBasement]

I've had issues with consists in the past and finally narrowed it down. Wondering if anyone knows of a fix for this glitch.

When I'm done with the layout I turned off the power strip that has all the layout's power supplies and the Power Cab plugged into it. The problem occurs the next day when I fire things up again. Say I am running a consist led by loco 7012. When the Power Cab boots up 7012 shows up as the still-selected loco. But when I try to move it nothing happens. Turns out if I select 7012 again even though it is already selected, it works fine.

In short, the system does not treat the selected loco as part of a consist at boot-up, even though it clearly "knows" what consist number it was assigned to when power was turned off.

[Scottl]

I've had problems similar to this of late.  My consists seem to still be on the NCE but some won't operate.  My workaround is to cancel them and reset them quickly and they immediately work.  There is no pattern with locomotives or decoders, it happens with both ESU and TCS. 

I don't power down with the power strip:  I disconnect the NCE cable from the jack first to power down.

[peteski]

I never ran into this problem with my Power Cab, but I don't use consisting on it (I use it for loco testing and programming after I serviced them).  Even with the latest 1.65b firmware it has some bugs, so it's possible there is a bug in the firmware.

However I have been a member of https://groups.io/g/NCE-DCC group for several years and I don't recall anybody mentioning this problem there.  If you don't get any useful answers here, I would suggest to either contact NCE directly, or join that NCE-DCC group and ask there.

Would a workaround be to select another (even a non-existing)  loco address on the throttle before powering down?  Since Power Cab has a capability of recalling multiple addresses stored in the recall slots, then you could keep the "phantom" address on one of the recall slots and the consist address in another.

[NtheBasement]

The workaround, re-selecting the loco, is easy enough.  Faced with repeated "why doesn't it move?"s every day I too was clearing and rebuilding the consist to solve it.  I finally started to read up on consisting and narrowed it down - not the second cab, the CVs look good, but "how does the system know that loco 7012 needs commands sent to address 127 instead of address 7012?" was the key.  I wonder if the NCE Pro system has the same bug.

[peteski]

The workaround, re-selecting the loco, is easy enough.  Faced with repeated "why doesn't it move?"s every day I too was clearing and rebuilding the consist to solve it.  I finally started to read up on consisting and narrowed it down - not the second cab, the CVs look good, but "how does the system know that loco 7012 needs commands sent to address 127 instead of address 7012?" was the key.  I wonder if the NCE Pro system has the same bug.

Good question.  NCE does handle advanced consisting differently than other command station manufacturers by aliasing the 2-digit consist number to the "real" addresses of the leading and trailing locos, to make it easier for the human to address the consist.  That information is stored in the command station (well in this case that command station is built-in into the Power Cab).  The behavior you describe does seem like a bug to me. I don't know if the Pro system has the same bug.