One of my particular interests in the time I was away from the MR hobby has been RC flight - a hobby that has been entirely transformed in the last 15 years by (primarily) lithium batteries, brushless electric motors, and spread-spectrum radio technology.
I’m curious; is model railroading taking notice? Is there a(ny) movement towards battery-powered, radio controlled trains in popular indoor sizes (HO, in particular)?
I’m imagining a layout that needs no track wiring, no reversing circuitry, no hunting down shorts and wiring faults underneath the benchwork and scenery.
I haven’t started the conversion to DCC yet, and I’m of half a mind not to bother. The potential for R/C just seems… better. Am I alone in this thinking?
Ring Engineering http://www.ringengineering.com/ , while out of the box does require voltage on the tracks, it can easily be converted to battery power.
The initial offering of a Bachmann HO product with Blue Rail Trains circuit board (it is not a DCC decoder) installed is not dead rail. It is powered from either DC or DCC picked up from track. When DCC is used, it uses just the power not the information in the DCC packets. Per Bachmann product advertisement, the wireless touch-screen is an E-Z App equipped locomotive is controlled through your Bluetooth 4 supported Apple smart device. Available realistic, dynamic engine sound broadcast through your Bluetooth 4 supported smart device. However, Blue Rail Trains has tested their circuit board in a dead rail configuration. It is shown in a video on their website. If interested, keep an eye on any direct product sales from Blue Rail Trains.
RR Baron
The stuff from Backmann is coming out now with more in NOV. The company that makes the chip is coming out with a plug-n-play 8 pin in Dec. and can be converted to dead rail. Even my DC train setup is wireless to the controler (Train Engineer by Crest) and I have their plug-n-play stuff made for HO but I will proubly go with the new stuff, much easyier (never could spell and I have two college degrees).
Now not to start a flame war but DCC reminds me of early code writing, one mistake and it didn’t run or run well. My train friends have them and there is always a problem with learning the ins and outs of each decoder and the different systems, even the old Crest stuff (from before the breakup) runs on any DC or DCC system.
Maybe people try to hard? I install decoders in my locos, program an address, and off they go. Only real mistake could be keying in say 567 when I meant to key in 576. Can’t fix that. Keyboards have been around since the 1800’s and people still make typos.
That is because you know your particular system well or you don’t try and tweek the CV’s. People constantly forget they consist locos and I know many who have seen that puff of smoke and sometimes it is not their fault. Sure you can do some neat things in DCC but that is coming to dead rail, some already have it but what I am talking about is we are going to get plug and play dead rail instead of doing it ourselves, it will get a lot of fence sitters off the fence, I am sure.
I’ll have to look into some of those commercial systems. Maybe wait to see how the Bachmann version works out. Their dcc setup is about as easy as they come (albeit limited), might bode well for their wireless too.
Rrinker: I’m also a bit of a Reading fan. Grew up along one of their former branches, near a small classification yard. Started my train interest in a lot of ways.
Wait til people start blowing up LiPo batteries because the charging circuit isn;t hooked up right… there are plenty of ways to smoke things with dead rail, if anythign there’s MORE to wire than with DCC. You’re just moving around where the complexity lies. Perhaps it is the way of the future. Once there is some standard it may indeed take off. Too many different systems - picking one today would be like picking Dynatrol or Keller or Railcommand in 1992, right before the DCC standard started being worked on.
Besides having some sort of common control signals, IMO for a dead rail system to succeed, it must offer charging from the rails so you don’t have to constantly take your locos off the track to charge them. Even with modern LiPo batteries, you need a lot of space to get any sort of decent runtime, so smaller HO and anything smaller is just right out for now. Given how small they make DCC decoders these days, I’m sure the electronics for a dead rail system can be made small enough to fit even in Z scale - the problem comes back to the battery. If charging canbe done from the rails, you can get nearly unlimited run time, just like a normal track powered loco, yet still make complex trackwork like reverse loops completely dead to avoid autoreversers or other controls. Next problem is track detection - any sort of whole block detection system generally relies on sensing current flow in the rails. No problem for rolling stock, resistor wheel sets will still work, assuming there is power in the rails still. Except those dead sections. And what about light engine moves? If they do not have recharging fromt he track, the loco would be insulated from the rails. Or need pickups anyway, with a resistor across them. Further complicating the installation. Anything that applies to installing a DCC decoder and not having it smoke, such as making sure the motor brushes are isolated fromt he frame and rails, still applies to dead rail, so the very same ways people smoke DCC decoders wi
I think there’s a big difference, in that a decoder comes from the factory pre-programmed. If you want, you can just change the decoder ID from 0003 to the locomotives road number, and you’re done. For the first several years I was in DCC, all I did was change the ID, change CV3 and 4 to 10-15 to add a little momentum, and change CV 49 and 50 to change the lighting. (Most engines come with reversing headlights as the default. I prefer to have both headlights on at all times, but the one in the direction of travel bright and the reverse headlight dimmed.) I think many people not familiar with DCC think they get a blank decoder and have to spend hours “programming” it before it will work.
The battery problem, is not a problem, they have very small batterys now that will give 6 nours or more in run time, and that is with the existing batteries. The new batteries will work for a week and recharge in less than hour (thanks to the resurch for cell phone batteries, you didn’t think that this was done for trains, did you).To recharge the batteries, you can use a recharge track or a plug. As far as singnal systems, how many accually use them, a small percentage and like sound will be worked out (accually there are dead rail sound locos out there. As far as putting in batteries backward, once saw a fellow employee put in a dewalt battery backward, I ran over and pryed it apart in seconds but it was already getting hot.
Yes, Li-Ion batteries. Heavily used in radio control planes and drones as well. The battery in a typical cell phone would barely fit in an O scale loco, and no way would it drive an O scale train for 6 hours on a charge - just because it can power your cell phone for 6 hours. There really aren’t any small enough for N and Z. The one for my micro quad copter, which can sit in the palm of my hand, is too big for most HO locos, and it can only fly the quad for about 15 minutes. It’s getting there. The new 20V DeWalt cordless tools are a fraction of the weight of my old 18V one with the old NiCad battery, plus they run longer on a charge. That would be a good battery for a G scale loco. It’s all a trickle down, as things get smaller. G scale hasdone direct radio for a long time now - sure beats trying to keep track clean outdoors in all sorts of weather. It’s doable in HO now, but those small battery packs don’t run for hours. If you could charge from the rails, you could theoretically run as long as anyone using DC or DCC, unless you spent all your time switching in an unpowered part of the layout.
HO DCC + sound equipped locos need provision for 1 Amp draw @ 15v (or so), though they may pull less current in normal operation (.3-.6 A). Either way, 180mah @ 7.4v isn’t going to get you very far; certainly not hours of operation.
OTOH, the situation is much less demanding than planes, where sustained current draws of 30+ Amps @ 12-16v are ‘normal’. I would think a system designed around 11.1v (3S) batteries of around 1000mah might be pretty achievable. Would work better for steam than diesel though, as you need the room to stash that battery.