I recently attempted speed matching a couple of my locomotives with a Digitrax PR3 and Bachrus Speedometer (Got a good deal and great service from TrainTekLLC.com) with the intention of speedmatching since I don’t have a large enough space to run them in parallel. I’ve got two of the fairly close, but more on that later.
If you find yourself purchasing a Digitrax PR3 and don’t already have a Loconet cable you should probably remember to add one to your order. The RJ12 connector isn’t something you will find at Radio Shack. If you do find yourself without a cable check the O-scale section of your local hobby shop as Atlas makes a cable that works just fine.
On to speed matching… I got two of my locomotives pretty close but did all of my work by taking the shell off, putting it on the rollers and using alligator clips to hookup directly to the decoder which worked well but I discovered afterwards that one of the locomotive’s wheelsets is either having pickup problems or is enough out of gauge to not have good electrical pickup.
I also installed a rotary beacon on this troublesome locomotive (I didn’t realize it was troublesome when I started) and while it works great I’m having trouble remapping the functions on it. I installed it as F1but ran into problems when consisting it with my sound locomotive. When the beacon is on the sound locomotive’s bell is on too. I tried using JMRI but didn’t get it working. I guess I’ll have to hit the drawing board on that one.
Matt's Railroad Blog 