Where can I find or kitbash a 3rd rail shoe that works for an HO scale truck that go under coaches? How will I intergrate a toggle switch between track and 3rd rail power?
Can’t point you toward any commercial products (my juiceburners run off catenary) but there is one question you have left unanswered. Do you need over-running or under-running third rail shoes? (The NY subways use over-running shoes, the former NYC third-rail trackage - Metro North? - uses under-running shoes.) Either way, you will be dealing with some rather small forces.
There are a variety of very small switches in SPDT form, any one of which would meet your requirements. It’s just a matter of deciding where to install one and how to reach in to activate it.
Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
Tomar pickup shoes may be your best bet, I tinkered with 3rd rail pickup, I decded not to do it.
To be exactly prototyipical would require critical tolerances than the model could take, or the modelr to handle.
Take a CTA or North Shore prototype 3rd rails shoe, it would be a brick riding the rails, the model could barely get contact with its weight, so the models have simulated 3rd rail shoes and you just do 2 rail pickup with simulated 3rd rail.
There have been a number of articles in the hobby press over the years addressing this subject matter. Go to the general index and keyword “Pickup”; this search will return 29 items. Some of these do address “pickup trucks” but a few of these items do address pickup shoes to improve electrical contact.
You could also do away with the working pickup shoes, and just make them for show. That would be quite a bit easier than working out the kinks of 3rd rail shoes.
I know back in the 60’s there were many O scale layouts that used 3rd (outside) rail pickup, some 1/4" scale traction layouts also used it, but it really isn’t very practical in H0. Cal Scale or Precision Scale (both Bowser) have had brass castings of the pickup shoes. For efficient electrical pickup you need something more reliable.
Although HO-Scale was considered to be the pioneer in two rail operation that wasn’t always true; in fact I encountered an outside 3rd rail layout in Massachusetts in 1965. This layout, I understood dated back to the immediate post-WWII era; why this rail had opted for AC operation is beyond me but he had and his reason could well have been that he had been in HO-Scale in the 1930s when AC had been more prominent than in the 1940s and '50s. He was a frequent visitor to our HO-Scale club and about the last time that he visited prior to my departure from the area announced that he was going to build a new layout and convert to 2-rail operation.
His was the only ourside 3rd-rail pike I ever observed firsthand although I frequently encounter photographs of both O-Scale and HO-Scale equipment in older hobby press magazines. A considerable number of club members had been in the hobby since before WWII and quite a few had been O-Scalers in their early hobby days. One of our club members had not converted to DC until just a few years before and he had stayed with HO-Scale AC because of his pre-WWII experience.