Locomotives that have digital decoders easily can be used on analogue railway layouts without risk of damage.
However, the following aspects should be considered:

1. Operating requirements

• The CV29 value of the decoder should contain the value 4, which generally corresponds to the factory set values 14 (= 8 + 4 + 2) or 06 (= 4 + 2). So the requirements are already fullfilled.
• The track power supply should be provided via a full wave or half-wave DC output of a transformer that is as less as possible "smoothed" by capacitors. Other analogue formats such as pulse width or phase angle control are not at all or only very poorly recognized by the decoder as an analogue control: The decoder then does not respond to it!

2. Operating behavior

• For a safe analogue voltage detection, the "normal" decoder requires about 5.5 to 5.8 volts, the sound decoder even about 10.5 volts. This means that the locomotive will start running at an accordingly later time; the sound in the sound decoders (requirement CV13 = 1, mostly factory value) wich requires even 1 volt more power supply, then is equally controlled.
• The final speed that a locomotive w i t h decoder can reach, will not be quite as high as for a locomotive that has no decoder (and is only equipped with plug-in jumpers).