Atlas GP38 with factory dcc - sluggish performance

[Dwight in Toronto]

Hey Pete - thanks for following along.  Yes, the trucks and gearing roll and mesh nice and smooth, the motor spins beautifully, and top speed is what I would expect to see. 

I’m convinced that it’s a decoder issue (Rick B’s commentary, and a number of similar complaints that I came across after google-searching the problem, all point towards the same conclusion), so I’m not going to bother with a DC test … I’ve no doubt that the motor is fine. 

I’m confident that the ESU board will deliver far better performance.  I’ll report back in a week or two.

[peteski]

I agree Dwigth that all the troubleshooting seems to point to the decoder being  the problem.

[sschnabl]

I have two Atlas VO-1000s that behave the same way.  They have factory-installed decoders as well.  I will look at getting a replacement decoder soon.  Add that to the list of things to do...

Scott

[Dwight in Toronto]

As mentioned earlier in this topic, this was my first Atlas purchase.  Having completely dismantled and reassembled it in order to perform the cleanup and fresh lube, I have to say that the overall design, fit & finish appears to be of quite good quality.   So much so, that I would not shy away from buying Atlas again.   However, never again will it be a factory DCC model.  Any future purchases will be DC, followed by ESU sound upgrading. 

[peteski]

As mentioned earlier in this topic, this was my first Atlas purchase.  Having completely dismantled and reassembled it in order to perform the cleanup and fresh lube, I have to say that the overall design, fit & finish appears to be of quite good quality.   So much so, that I would not shy away from buying Atlas again.   However, never again will it be a factory DCC model.  Any future purchases will be DC, followed by ESU sound upgrading.

Yes, Atlas makes pretty decent models. You can check Spookshow's reviews (you can sort the search results by manufacturer).  Atlas even made some models with factory installed ESY V4 sound decoders.

[Dwight in Toronto]

Just to followup - earlier today I replaced the factory DCC decoder in that Atlas GP38-2 with an ESU 58751 micro DCC Direct ‘Atlas’ Legacy unit.   All in all, it was a walk in the park - super easy, and the loco now operates beautifully throughout its entire speed range.  Best of all is that nice little crawl at speed step 1, with cv2 set at an entirely reasonable value of only 2 (recall that the piece-of-crap NCE factory install, even with cv2 = 60, wouldn’t get the loco to budge until SS 8 or 9!). 

I carefully “milled” down the rear platform as demonstrated in a few TRW sound installation tutorials so as to accommodate the speaker (just a couple minutes work on my 1” belt sander did a wonderful job - nice and even, smooth & shiny!).  To this end, an ESU 9x16 speaker should be arriving in another day or two.

In short, a very satisfactory outcome, despite a frustrating and disappointing “out-of-the-box” start.