Review: Märklin mobile crane 46715

My Märklin mobile crane 46715 arrived this week. As reported by others, it is on the noisy side and somewhat faster than it could have been, but overall its a nice model.  Trying to operate it by selecting different functions and getting the motor direction is not very friendly, so I created a control screen in my software - and it provides a much easier method of controlling the crane....

Märklin Digital Crane 7651+7054

Some 14 years ago my wife bought me the Märklin 7651 digital crane. It is the classic rotary crane with a special decoder in the base to allow digital operation.

Preliminary tests indicated a nasty design flaw, the decoder allowed the crane to slew or raise/lower the hook but one cannot do both operations at once! I suspect that since there are two motors, one for each function, they designed it so that only one motor could be active at any one time - in order not to overload the decoder. Gebr. Märklin,  here is a solution:, use a decoder than can handle the load!