Rapido Trains Turbo PDC-28, Manual

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TurboTrain destroyed by a 1300 or any other “train set” DC controller. 

“Train set” DC controllers should not be used with sound-equipped 

models.

MRC is really cheesed off that we include the above note in our manuals. Other MRC 

DC power packs are no problem, and we use them at our office. But please keep the 

1300-series controllers away from your TurboTrain, cheese or no cheese. 

In DC, the headlights, front Gyralite and rear Gyralite all work as they should, but 

obviously you can’t turn them off. Some throttle manufacturers produce special thing-a-

majigs which are meant to trigger the sounds in locomotives on DC layouts. As we have 

no involvement in the development of those thing-a-majigs, we have absolutely no idea 

how they will affect your TurboTrain, for good or for ill. As always, we’ll try to help you 

fix your units if one of these thing-a-majigs scrambles your train’s circuitry, but we can’t 

guarantee we’ll be able to, and we will need to charge you for the repair.

Some people have mastered the art of stopping a sound-equipped train in DC without 

killing the sounds. You have to find the sweet spot and you have about a 0.1 Volt 

window to find it. If you can find it, you are a better DC operator than we are.

OPERATION – DCC WITH 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 Jason painstakingly 

restored and/or recreated from original BetaMax video recordings provided by Bill 

Morrison, who worked for CN and later VIA in the Turbo Bay at Central Station. The 

sounds are bang-on accurate for the Turbo, and we’re really proud of them. We had to 

shorten some of the station announcements due to memory constraints, but they are still 

pretty cool. 

More detailed decoder instructions, including all sorts of weird CV settings we still don’t 

understand after all these years, can be found in the ESU Loksound Select decoder 

manual. This is available for download on the TurboTrain page in the Support section 

of our web site. 

Please bear in mind that the two decoders in your TurboTrain are different from each 

other and are not interchangeable. The front decoder can only be used in PDC-26 and 
PDC-28, and the rear decoder can only be used in PDC-27 and PDC-29.

LOCOMOTIVE ADDRESS

Your Rapido TurboTrain comes from the factory with a decoder address of 3. Both PDCs 

have the address of 3. We suggest if you are using DCC control that you first test that the 

Turbo responds on address 3. If it doesn’t respond for whatever reason but other models 

do, we suggest you perform a factory reset. This solves most decoder issues. More info