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— WARNING —
Rapido products are designed to operate safely between 0V and 16V. Voltages in
excess of 16V - as well as irregular waveforms, voltage spikes or short circuits -
may cause severe and sometimes irreversible damage to the product. “Train set”
power packs are known to suffer from any one of these unexpected irregularities,
whereas higher-end systems have safeguards in place to prevent this. Rapido
always recommends using a power supply system that matches the quality of
the models you are running. If you’re reading this, you’ve obviously invested in
top-of-the-line, museum-quality motive power and equipment, so we hope you’ve
made the same investment with your model railroad power supply too.
While many power supply systems exist, some are known to have caused problems
with model train circuitry in the past. If you have any one of the following
systems, PLEASE DO NOT USE IT until you contact us for more information: MRC
RailPower 1300/1370-series, Bachman Spectrum Magnum, Atlas 313 Universal
Power Pack.
The DC lighting is limited. Some throttle manufacturers produce special thing-a-ma-bobs
which are meant to trigger the sounds in locomotives on DC layouts. As we have no
involvement in the development of those thing-a-ma-bobs, we have absolutely no idea
how they will affect your RS-18, for good or for ill, for richer or poorer, in sickness and
in … sorry, wrong transcript. As always, we’ll try to help you fix your RS-18 if one of
these thing-a-ma-bobs turns your locomotive’s circuitry into something akin to burnt toast,
but we can’t guarantee we’ll be able to.
It is usually at this point in the manual that Jason inserts a gentle dig at his fellow
modellers who won’t switch from DC to DCC. The rest of the staff continue to repeatedly
remind him what happened the last time he did that. Something about being kidnapped
by a band of journeymen from the masons’ guild and being labelled a warlock. He still
has nightmares about it. As long as we can keep reminding him of this event, he’ll be
nice to DC modellers. Not that we’re calling DC modellers Luddites. We’d never do that.
OPERATION – DCC (SOUND)
We go to extreme lengths for accuracy, in sounds as well as in looks. Our sound decoders
are LokSound Select decoders by ESU, programmed with sounds we recorded from a
real 251B diesel engine. Yup, the same one in the FPA-4s. So you can rest assured
that the sounds are bang-on accurate. We are also now using ESU’s new V5 decoder
complete with Full Throttle functionality.
As we do for all of our sound decoders, we recorded the prime mover under load – it
was a dead unit in tow, up a grade, both ways, in a snow storm, in July. Or maybe it
was August. Anyway, locomotives sound a lot different when they are actually working.