Hellier Train Care

So, I've decided to make a few modifications to my class 56. To begin with, to smooth out its running I'll simply be chopping off the capacitor near the motor, as from my understanding, this can cause problems when running a loco on dcc. Once this is done, and I've made any other requirements for it to run smoothly, I will work on motorizing the roof fans. From what I've read, this can be done by installing an additional decoder (and set it to a different number) which connects up to a specific motor (a mashima 1020) which should fit in the space left when removing the drive shaft. Then all I should need to do is to program the chip before installing it (I'll be making use of the speed function that usually controls the loco's main motor) and add a little rubber ring to the end of the motors drive shaft to enable it to rotate the fans at the speed I require, when I want it. When I start on this, I will add pictures showing what I'm doing.

As not much has been done to the layout recently, the blog laid more or less dormant. Though now of course two posts come up at once. So recently my birthday came around and I gained a few extra wagons, now I already had the appropriate loco to pull them so I just had to chip it. This however is where the problems started, once I installed the chip and reassembled the body, I noticed a strange issue with the lighting, only one ends lights, if any were on when they were meant to be on. So a bit of fiddling later, almost giving up and returning it and checking the internet, I came across a couple of articles about the lights on Hornbys class 56. Satisfied that it wasn't a dodgy unit, to a certain extent, and more of a manufacturing fault, I reinstalled the chip (having removed it earlier to test it on analogue control before almost giving up completely). After cleaning the light contacts and making adjustments to the springs on the body to help improve the lighting powe...