I noticed that my HO Kato business lighted business car was starting to flicker.
My solution; a Craftsman 3/4 " diameter brass cleaning/polishing wheel that is softer
than steel, won’t scratch soft metal.
Install it in your favorite drill and spin the crud off the wheels.
Dirty wheels causing lights to flicker is, and always has been, a problem with lighted passenger cars ever since the first bulb was ever placed into one.
I remember when I was a kid, how the American Flyer passenger cars, that ran on AC current, had lights that always flickered as the train ran around the track.
Con-Cor’s new Burlington Zephyr has one of the best solutions to this problem that I have ever encountered, and that is that each car has a tiny electrical plug and socket that interconnects them, so all the wheels provide power to the lights.
As soon as I can find suitably small plugs and sockets, I’m going to do that with my Bachmann Spectrum HO-scale Santa Fe passenger car set.
While we’re on the subject, has anyone lit up their Walther’s standard Pullmans with the lighting kit available? I just completed my Walther’s Pullman train and I’m anxious to install lighting. Any feedback?
Tom[:)]
The Flyer days, we must go back to the same era.If I recall correctly some ran on DC as well.
I got a partial B/W film that A.C.Gilbert put out promoting the flyer
I was really surprised how well the Budd light bar performed. Double insulated wheels, all
four picked up.
The Kato business car has a chintz light kit almost for the same price as the Budd bar.
ALL passenger car light’s ‘flicker’ . It’s the rolling wheels on the metal track.
Differences are whether the filcker can be smooothed out so one doesn’t notice it.
‘Daisy-chaining wheels in mutiple cars help’s (ConCor CZ)
Capacitor’s (Walthers’ Budd) also
Best is Richmond Controls all solid state @ $35 (marker’s, drumhead, Mars lite, with flickerless car illumination and track powered)
Another train of thought is to go with battery power using minature on/off switchs,No flickering,able to light specific areas of a car ,being able to have individule passenger cars on sidings with their lights on.
I’ve been doing this for years. I use Miniatronics corp connectors 50-001 or 003
http://www.miniatronics.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Category_Code=4.
These are a little stiff so the harder part is keeping the wire from interfering with couplers esp. when negotiating a cross over.
Another problem is being able to run the cars with either end forward in different arrangments, which is why it works so well with a preset consist Zephyr. I’ve tried two plugs on each end, using female connectors on both ends of the cars with a male-male pin in between, and the three prong plug because the center is always the same rail. Still no “ideal” solution. I’ll leave it to the reader to imagine the problems with each one.
And then of course there is the great fun trying to reconnect them after setting out a sleeper!
All my psgr trains run in the daylight so all I need is lighting for markers and drumheads on the rear car. Joining the rear and next to rear car w/ one drawing power from one rail and the other from the opposite rail works real well. For connectors I use a goody from All Electronics that consists of a strip of 30 connectors that can be cut into whatever number of contacts you need. Walthers used to have a similar unit but I don’t find it in the current (no pun intended) catalog. WWW,allectronics.com charges $1.00 per each for a strip of 30.
As for Richmond controls. The units I’ve managed to get work fine but I’ve had an order for 4 Mars light units from Dec 24 and nothing but an occasional exchange of emails to show for it so far.