EL17 Flåmsbana from NMJ

Introduction

EL17 in the Flåmsbana livery is actually a locomotive I have seen in real life back in 2004 when traveling the Flåm Railway together with my family. The trains on the railway is per 2024 pulled by EL18, but it was pulled by EL17 back in 2004. I do unfortunately not have any pictures of the locomotive from that time.

Having travelled with the locomotive in real life was the reason why I decied to buy it as a model train. It was also the last model in stock. I bought it as a DCC ready locomotive and bought a sound decoder sperately from a different store as no sound decoders where available from where I bought the locomotive. The sound decoder was bought pre-programmed with suitable sounds.

Tools

Some tools where needed as the locomotive was bought as DCC ready, not DCC fitted. I used the following tools for installing the decoder and attaching some detail parts.

The reason for needing the servicing cradle was related to some issues with the bogies. It's possible to install the decoder without a servicing cradle. The tweezers are nice to have for removing the dummy plug where the decoder will connect. Tweezers are also a necessity if you for some reason need to bend the pickups into place.

Unboxing the locomotive

The locomotive came in a sturdy box with proper protections. One flaw with the box is that there is no spacer for the mirros and way to tight space in the front if the front coupler is fitted, which makes it a bit cumbersome to transport the locomotive.

Installing the decoder

The decoder I decied to go for was a LokSound 5 decoder specially designed for the locomotive. There is a speaker enclousure included with the locomotive that makes a perfect fit for the speaker included with the decoder. The decoder have a 8-pin connector. Bellow is a picture of the locomotive after deatching the body and before installing the decoder. Note the dummy plug that needs to be removed before fitting the decoder.

The body of the locomotive is quite easy to remove. You simply bend the body carefully outwards on the long sides and move it straight up. The decoder and speaker mounting bracket can then be assembled by gently pushing them into their respective holes. I initialy decided to leave them unglued to make later maintenance easier, but I later decided to glue the bracket for the speaker into place, as it didn't sit properly in one of its sockets. The decoder and speaker where secured to their respective brackets using double-sided tape.

The annoying part of the assembly is all the wires that are in the way. It's also importan to ensure that no wires are touching the driving axel! Bellow is a picture of the model after installing the decoder and speaker. Note how the red wire in the 8-pin connector lines up with the red mark on the socket as described in the included manual.

Attaching detail parts

There is a total of 6 detail parts that I wanted to fit on this model. 4 mirrors and two ladders. The two ladders where fitted using super glue. The reason for glueing them was that they simply wouldn't stay in place without. They where glued as shown in the bellow picture. Please note that it will be more challenging to assemble and disassemble the body from the chassis when the ladders are in place. Also note that the bogies will hit the ladders if you run the locomotive through an R2 curve.

The mirrors on the other hand didn't go well at all. All 4 mirrors is at the time of writing this article either broken or impossible to fit to the body. There are in my opion two reasons why they broke. The first one is that i broke them loose from they packaging instead of using a plier. The second reason is that they constantly fell off as I didn't want to glue them. So I will have to try to order new ones if possible. I might also just use the model without the mirrors, as there is not that much difference (there is a larger difference for the EL11 and Y1).

Why didn't I glue the mirrors in place? I usually try to avoid glueing parts onto locomotives and rolling stock I have. The reason for that is that I want to be able to easily replace them or take them of when doing maintenance. My Y1 and EL11, both from NMJ, have mirrors attached without glue. I have so far had no problems with the mirrors on those models. They all stay on, even during transport!

Another thing I decied to do right away was to add a coupler in the front. All NMJ models I have bought so far comes with a coupler in the rear and a "fake coupling" in the front with more details. Everything needed to add a coupler in the front was included in the box. Adding a coupling in the front involved removing some detail parts and changeing the snowplow to make room for a coupling.

Changeing the snowplow seemed to be sucessfull, but I actually ran into some issues right away because of it. Bellow is a picture of the model after fitting the front coupler.

First run

The first run of the model went poorly, something I didn't expct. The model actaully got stuck at one place of my carpet layout due to a slight incline on my floor barely visible to the human eye. It also stopped due to loss of electricity at several places at the layout. Another peculiar thing that happend was that the front bogie fell appart for no apparent reason (that have in total happend twice at the time of writing this article).

The reason why this suprises me is that models by NMJ or NMJ partners usually works flawlessly out of the box. This is the first time I have had this much problem with an european model train.

Luckily the mentioned issues where quite easy to fix once I did some investigation. The first issue was due to the new snowplow not being properly pushed into place. Pushing the snowplow properly into it's slot fixed that issue.

The second issue where related to the pickups. They where not properly aligned, so I had to use a tweezer to bend it into place. I have at the time of writing this article adjusted the pickups twice. Bending the pickups fixed the electricity issue in both cases.

I have published a video showing the first run of the locomotive on my YouTube-channel. Check it out here.

Decoder adjustments

One of the great things about ESU decoders is that you have lots of settings to mess around with. I have recently decided that I want to control the directional lights indepdently of the direction of travel on all of my models. That allows me to reverse while still having the rear lights red instead of white. I used JMRI Decoder Pro on my MacBook Pro for reprogramming. The programming change where done under the Function Map tab. I decied to use function 15 (F15) to toggle between forward and reverse. Bellow is a screenshot of what the function map looks like after reprogramming.

Another programming change I did right away was reducing the volume. I initially halfed the volume, since this is an electric locomotive. The issue with that however was that certain sounds where not very audible, especially the door sound. The horn where also to low in my opinion. I therefor set the master volume back to the default for the decoder (128 for master and 64 for faded) and started tweaking individual sounds. Bellow is a table listing the sound slots I have changed so far.

Sound slot	Sound description	Default volume	New volume
Slot 1 and 2	Startup sounds	128	64
Slot 5 and 6	Running sounds	128	32

My opinions of the model

The model have so far worked flawlessly after doing the mentioned adjustments. I would also say that its a good looking model. There are however a few things I do not like about the model. The first thing is that the front and rear lights can't be controlled independently. If white lights are on in one direction, then red lights will always be on in the oposite direction.

Another thing that is a bit annoying is that the bogies do have way to many detailed parts. That means that something easily could break during transport or in normal operation of the locomotive. The mentioned issue with the ladders is also annoying.

The driving characteristicts of the model is otherwise great as long as the pickups are properly aligned. The model is able to crawl nicely and have smooth acceleration and deacceleration.

It's important to remember though that this is an older model even though I bought it as new. Older models will be less complex and are in my opinion more likely to have issues than newer models.