Large Scale Central

Crest Train Engineer 2.4...anybody have a broken one?

Does anybody have a broken or otherwise unused Train Engineer that I could have to cannibalize the screen display? I dropped mine and the screen is half non-displaying, although, fortunately, everything else works fine on it. Right now it’s kind of a guessing game as to which locomotive I’m dialing up.

Thanks.

I don’t have one, but the display probably isn’t proprietary. You might be able to find it on the parts market, but might have trouble buying just one. The biggest problem may be how the screen connects. I had a nice DVM that I had to toss because I accidentally tore the ribbon for the screen from the board - it was soldered in place and my mistake tore the traces from the ribbon - so in the trash it went. If it has a connector rather than being soldered in you should be OK.

Actually the screen was a difficult item for Crest during their development and early production. The one they had picked went out of production and there was a delay in getting another.

Nowadays very few LCD screens of that size have attached wires, but just contacts on the glass, and you use the flexible rubber conductor to connect it to a pcb:

Cheaper and more robust.

Greg

If it does use the zebra strip method (show above) the alignment can be a little critical, perhaps when dropped it shifted enough to lose contact in some places. I have not had one of these apart far enough to tell if that is what they use or how hard it might be to realign it.

Yes, the alignment used to be critical when they tried to use large contacts of equal size on each side, and the zebra strip was designed to “match” the contacts.

Then a smart guy said why not make the zebra stripe much “finer”, and then you have less of an alignment problem. That development made quite an improvement in the alignment requirements.

These things are somewhat “tacky” is it’s pretty rare for them to shift unless the lcd actually comes loose from it’s mounting.

Greg