Opening a 30+ year old DUPLO electric train for repair.

At the Repair Cafe meeting in Delft (Netherlands, 16th. March 2024) a gentleman brought in a model train he bought for his 4 year old son, some 30 years ago. Now he wanted his grandson to be able to play with it, but it wouldn't run anymore. It appeared to be a very early model electric train being sold under the DUPLO brand name. The train didn't run and at first it looked like this was because of some bad contacts due to battery leakage. After cleaning those up however, it still wouldn't run so we decided to open it up. Because it wasn't immediately obvious how to do that, I decided to film my 2 colleague Repair Cafe friends, Erik and Pedro, while they tried to open it. They managed to do so after some struggle without damaging the train. In the end we got the train to run, so the gentleman left with a nice present for his grandson. I hope this video may be of some use for anyone wanting to repair one of these trains.
Only later we found a video by Marcel Reinieren which shows in much more detail how to go about opening the device. You can find Marcel's video here: • Duplo klassieker trein...