Up in Smoke

[ajroland]

Tonight while running trains. I noticed that my GP38's lights began to flicker. Then I saw smoke coming out of my digitrax dcs50 command station. I unplugged the power supply as quickly as I could. The zephyr is under warranty. My question is what could cause this to happen? Could there be a problem with the loco, track, or is the command station just gone bad? I would have thought that the zephyr would have cut itself off before getting fried. I was running one loco at the time it happened. I will get it repaired or replaced, but what caused it? Does anyone have any ideas on what to check?

 

[TrainNut]

Mine was also quirky for the longest time. Lotsa minor things but the two major ones were that I kept frying the decoder in one locomotive in particular... my Challenger no less. Then, later on, I tried to wire a reverse loop modulator into my layout. It would not work no matter what I tried. Finally, we used an alternative system and it worked fine. This seemed to isolate the problem to the Zephyr command station. I sent it in under warranty and after a very short wait, received it back with a note that said something along the lines of - Tested unit, no problems found, replaced mother board. Hmmm, no problems found but they replaced the mother board anyways? Since then, I have not fried any more locomotives AND my reverse loop modulator works exactly as it should.
For what that's worth to ya.....

 

[ajroland]

Well, I'm going to send it in for warranty work on Monday. I am glad to hear that they fixed yours. Up to this point it was working fine. Thanks for the information. Time will tell I guess.