Page 24 - November December 2014

Review: Soundtraxx SoundCar rolling-stock sound decoder
Mick Moignard
Some years back my friend Mark Kasprowicz dabbled in loading a CT decoder with wheel click sounds to get that evocative clickety-clack from the end of a train as it rolls past you. He never got it working to his complete satisfaction, but he, and I, have always wanted to get something like this working properly. And now, with SoundTraxx’s new SoundCar decoder, we can do just this. I’ve been playing with a review copy of this decoder provided to me by SoundTraxx, and I’m much impressed with it. SoundTraxx are already well known for their Tsunami line of locomotive sound decoders; the sound quality from this new decoder matches what we’ve come to expect from them, and it has a couple of very cleverly thought- out pieces of functionality to make it particularly easy and fun to use. They’ve already dabbled in this area with the reefer sound unit they’ve made for Athearn, and now this new SoundCar gives an off-the-shelf sound system for freight and passenger cars, ready to install and go. It’s intended to be used in any car, freight or passenger, so as well as sound, it has a four-output lighting setup, complete with all the features and functions of the existing locomotive decoders, plus some horns and bells so that it can fully animate the cab car on a push-pull train set, and operate the head, ditch and tail lights in concert with the locomotive and train direction.
Installation is pretty straightforward: standard NMRA decoder wiring colours, except that there are no orange and grey wires, and the two purple wires that go to the speaker. There is a socket for SoundTraxx’s new CurrentKeeper capacitor pack, too. I used one of these in my test installation, as they’d also supplied me with one. One thing in the installation that you need to be aware of is that the decoder has a magnetically operated switch to operate the consisting feature I’ll come on to later. You need to mount the decoder such that you can wave a magnet at it. The suggestion from SoundTraxx is to put it under the car roof, switch-side uppermost. That’s what I did, and it works well. They also suggest, as they’d really like you to have a number of these, that you place it in the same place in all cars, so that you don’t spend time trying to remember exactly where to wave the magnet. The decoder itself is 47 mm long, 14 mm wide and 8.5 mm thick, with wires at one end and a socket for the CurrentKeeper at the other. The magnet switch is near the wire end. You do need to supply your own 8-ohm speaker, and of course pickups on the trucks of the car it’s to be mounted in.
My installation was done in a Blackstone HOn3 caboose, partly because it already has pickup wipers, and partly because I figured that a caboose would be a neat place to have it. The decoder went under the cupola, with the magnet switch end in the middle of the car. The CurrentKeeper sits on the floor under the cupola, and a sugar-cube 8-ohm speaker is under the far end door. You do need to keep the speaker a decent distance away – at least 5 mm – from the magnet switch. I also installed
0603 SMD LEDs into the two marker lamps that come with the caboose, and wired those to the F5 output of the decoder. You’ll see why I installed them on F5, later. To be totally honest, I actually wired them to the green F6 wire rather than the brown one, so I function-mapped it back to F5.
I’m afraid I cheated a bit on programming. SoundTraxx have issued the manuals for the new decoder; find them on the SoundTraxx website (www.SoundTraxx.com) on the manuals page. Download both, and read them through; they really do show off what the decoder can do and how to get it to do it. However, as a DecoderPro user, I wanted to go that way, and I found that there is already a SoundCar definition file in the works – it will be in the next development release (3.9.2). I downloaded it directly from Sourceforge and imported it into my DecoderPro install. I’m not going into the details of how to do that here, bur if you’re interested, look me up in the directory and get in contact – it takes no more than about 3 minutes to get it installed. By the way, DecoderPro 3.9.1 already has definitions for the SoundTraxx HOn3 caboose and coach lighting decoders, too.
My steam locos all have Tsunami decoders in them, set up with lots of momentum and with the Tsunami F11 brakes active. I matched the settings for these in the SoundCar, placed it on the rails, and started to play. First of all, I tried out all the horns and bells: there’s two airhorns and a Hancock whistle to choose from, plus three different bells for modern head-end cars: cast, electronic and gong types. So my old wooden caboose blared out different bells and horns. Next I tried the generator, which can do always-on sounds, automatic intermittent running, or be manually controlled by F9, and I now imagined that my conductor had a small generator on board to power a portable A/C unit and a fridge. As if! Of course, as with all Tsunamis, each sound has its own volume level CV too, so you can match the volume levels to suit your needs, and turn off sounds you don’t want. These give you the ability to set up mechanical reefers as well as head-end cars, with all the lighting options you’d want.
So then I tried the lights: I had my old marker lights Mars-ing, strobing and rotary beaconing, before setting them back to plain ordinary on-off lights. And a first here is that you can make the F5 and F6 outputs directionally controlled, as well as the traditional white and yellow for forward-reverse, so that your push-pull cab car doesn’t flash its ditch lights when at the rear of the train, either. I tested that and then set them to “on” in both directions.
Next I settled down to the motion and speed-dependent sounds. Here’s why you load up the momentum and brake settings from the locomotive, so that as the train accelerates, coasts and decelerates, the clickety-click and any flat spots you’ve enabled, speed up and slow down with the train speed. You also need to tell it whether the car has two- or three-axle trucks, and how many trucks – one or two; so it can do anything from a two-axle bobber caboose to a 12-wheel heavyweight car. And you set a speed scalar, which matches the clickety-clack frequency to the speed of the train. Of course I did much of this work with DecoderPro and Ops mode, with the caboose in motion. That makes it so much easier to operate.
What I also did, and this is quite important, is on the Advanced Consist page, I set F5 and F11 to operate when consisted. We’ll come to why in just a moment, but first let’s add it to a train. Here is where the magnet comes in, to consist the caboose to the train. You don’t need to do this by programming or throttle consisting; the decoder does it for you really simply. First, wave a magnet over the sensor. When the switch operates, you’ll hear the handbrake release. The decoder is now listening for a locomotive to consist itself to. On the throttle, go to the locomotive in question, and press F8 four times, on/off/on/off. The caboose will react by playing a brake release sound, which
24 ROUNDHOUSE