Wrestling with a BLI locomotive

 

This is a fine looking SD7, sitting in Interbay, isn't it? Last week, Ray Wheeler, who used to work for the BN in the early '70's, told me SD 9 BN 6004 was often the locomotive used to switch grain covered hoppers in and out of the Cargill export grain terminal at Seattle's Pier 86. I was eager to use this information, because he (and others) had also told me that how I operated the arriving grain train on my recent YouTube video was, basically, incorrect. This was an opportunity to correct my mistakes, and improve the layout's operations to be more prototypical.

Hearing about the locomotive number BN 6004 "rang a bell," and I quickly found it in my active storage area of "excess locomotives." I had purchased it in 2016 from BLI, along with a "Rolling Thunder" sub-woofer system, to try out their innovative approach to making locomotive sounds more realistic on the low frequencies. The sub-woofer worked as advertised, amazing my friends by filling the entire house with a low-frequency rumble not unlike what you would experience standing next to an SD7, or in an earthquake. It drove my wife crazy, though, so I only use it on the rare occasions when visitors are curious and she isn't at home.

But there's another reason I had the locomotive stored off the layout ever since 2016. BLI, in what I understand was a derivative of the older QSI decoders (which I also had trouble with and eventually banned from my layout), flaunted the NMRA DCC standards and produced a DCC decoder that, in addition to transmitting low frequency sound information to the Rolling Thunder unit, has a number of divergences in its functions from what I was used to in the SoundTraxx and ESU decoders in the rest of my fleet. After I fiddled with standard CV's like 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, it still came to a screeching stop instead of displaying momentum-like behavior, when I reduced the throttle setting quickly. There was nothing in the very sparse documentation that came with the locomotive to explain what to do, so I put it on an high shelf and never incorporated it into my operations, even though it was the perfect locomotive for my railroad and era. That was 2016. I swore to never purchase another BLI product again.

Between then and now, I invested a lot of time in learning how to set up braking functions in my Tsunami and ESU locomotives, even to the point of presenting clinics on it. This involved time spent looking up manuals online and playing with both JMRI DecoderPro and ESU LokProgrammer. I can't say I enjoyed it, but the end result is that all my (80) Tsunami and ESU locomotives are now speed matched, can be consisted together, and respond to the brake button (F9) with the same deceleration rate.

So last week, when Ray said BN 6004 was THE locomotive for switching strings of hoppers into the grain terminal at Pier 86 in Seattle, I thought I would try again to get it running better. With difficulty, I found that BLI has a couple of documents on their website for free download that list the various CV's and their nominal purpose (mostly without explanation). After trying a few things, I finally came across a CV185 called something like "brake sensitivity" (whatever that means) with a default setting of 20 and a range of 0 to 255. Using "programming on the main" (POM) with my NCE throttle, I randomly tried setting CV185 to 200 and, like magic, the problem of rapid deceleration vanished! With CV3 and 4 set to values of 12, and CV5 and 6 set to 80 and 40 respectively, the loco ran smoothly enough that I decided to call it good, slapped on some pan pastel weathering, and placed it in the engine terminal, as shown in the photo above. It will now be the main actor at Pier 86 on the Burrlington Northern.

If I wanted to spend another three (or more) hours on it (which I don't), I could probably try to study the BLI documents some more, and experiment some more, and figure out how to re-map functions so that when I pressed F9 I would get a braking deceleration different from the existing CV4 deceleration. But even then, the consisting features (like headlights and sounds) work so differently on BLI locomotives from the other locos that I wouldn't be able to use the loco in a consist anyway. So BN 6004 will remain dedicated to the grain terminal, solo, for the foreseeable future.

I have a lot of respect and gratitude for every company that invests in making products for model railroaders, and that includes BLI. My wife likes to say "people are just people." So I guess "companies are just companies." They have to decide what products will sell, at what price points, what they cost to make, whether to outsource their decoders, how much to invest in user manuals and support, and so forth. I simply get to benefit (or not) from their various decisions. There are probably modelers out there who have (doggedly) figured out how to get what they want from the BLI decoders, and don't want to deal with learning about the other brands. I'm just not one of them, that's all. I would pay more for a locomotive that I could easily then figure out how to use after I bought it. This blog is about my own personal experiences of this wonderful hobby of model railroading, not any sort of comprehensive or objective evaluation of anything. It pains me that I avoid BLI products just because I don't want to climb yet other learning curve, because they sometimes make products that would be perfect on my particular railroad (BN in the early '70's in Seattle). That's all.