There have been a number of discussions about lighting passenger and special circuits or batteries to eliminate the lights flickering when the wheels break contact. I was wondering about the pros and cons of this idea:
Using minature plugs, connect the lighting sets of all the cars together. You would have to define the front of each car and be consistant with putting the male or female plug on the front. The plug would have to be color coded so the polarity would not be reversed when connected. Also, the wheel sets and internal wiring to each light set would have to be consistant. By that I mean the insluated side of the wheel set on the right side of the front truck on all cars. The connecting wiring and plugs would be hidden by the car diaphragms. The result would be 4 or 6 wheels times the number of cars pickup for the passenger set. That should eliminate any flickering lights.
Does this make any sense or would this just fry the whole lighting set?
Con-Cor did that with their Burlington Pioneer Zephyr HO scale model and it works very well. I think in their Zephyr the all-wheel pickup is also wired to the motor, which helps avoid the problems associated with dirty track and dirty wheels.
Since the Zephyr was an articulated train and the cars were not meant to be separated, this was feasible; however, for individual passenger cars you would need to insure that your couplers are reliable and don’t come apart on hills or curves.
Could you just add a capacitor or something on each car that would hold a charge for a second or so and therefore even out the power flow to the bulbs?
Yes, you could, but an electrolytic capacitor with a slow-enough discharge rate would have to be rather large. I’ve used memory backup capacitors designed for VCRs, etc., but they require regulators and diode circuits because they are polarized and rated at only 5.5 Volts.
That is what the original poster was talking about with this first line –
What you are asking about has been discussed at length in those threads elsewhere.
That would be a LENZ gold decoder with uninteruptible power.
Yes it makes sense, it is just a lot harder to implement than one would think. I don’t understand why one would think it might fry the lighting set??? A parallel circuit is a parallel curcuit.
I have many sets of ABBA locomotives that all share power pickups. I have one passenger train I attempted to do as you mention, it even connected and shared power pickups with locomotives. The problems I encountered are as follows:
Getting the plugs connected. There is very little space between the cars with which to work to have the leads to the plugs short enough that they don’t drag or are visably annoying and still have them long enough to flex and be easy to connect. I was having to use two sets of needle nose plyers to get them connected. Requires great dexterity.
Keeping the minature plugs connected. There is an amazing amount of flex between the cars that is constanly working to disconnect the plugs. Then when one does disconnect there is a chance that the male plug hangs down and shorts out on rail tops.
I’ve fitted Rapidos’ Easy Peasy light boards to some heavyweights and they work really well. No flicker and you don’t have to stuff around with connectors or have all cars orientated the same. The only thing you have to worry about eventually is ease of access to change batteries.
If you use connectors and wiring it kind of makes it a PITA if you want to cut cars in and out of the train. As someone said, not a problem with something like the Zephyr or Aerotrain that doesn’t get broken up, but for ops with a regular train it makes it too hard IMO.
The capacitor and resistor discharge system is the best if you have space for it. Each car has to have the circuit but that seems better to me than connecting wires between the cars. I prefer to keep each car as an individual car without connections.
You really sure use LED’s instead of bulbs since LED’s use much less power and the capacitor can be much smaller.
I did something like that once. You can find humungous capacitors like 0.47 Farad at All Electronics. This caps are electrically tender, they can only withstand 5 volts and they are polarized, they have a plus and a minus terminal and hooking them up backward does various bad things. I used a Radio Shack full wave bridge rectifier to make the track power stay the same polarity, and a 5 volt regulator in a TO-220 case to keep the capacitor from frying when the track voltage goes up to 12 volts. Then I homebrewed a 3 volt regulator circuit out of an NPN transistor and 3 diodes to keep the 3 volt grain-o-wheat lamp happy. All this fit inside an HO caboose. The cap had enough juice to keep the lamp burning for 20 seconds after track power was removed.
[#ditto]I’ve got 8 lighted Bachmann Spectrum, 9 or 10 Walthers with their light kits, and 4 Rapido cars. The Rapidos (equipped with their EasyPeasy lights) win hands down - not too bright or dim - no flicker - and easy to get at. The Bachmanns are the worst to change a bulb or remove the roof to insert passengers - “re-making” the contacts are a real PITA! EasyPeasy/Rapido is the way to go - forget all the fancy electronics (capacitors/plugs/etc)!![8D]
That is what the original poster was talking about with this first line –
What you are asking about has been discussed at length in those threads elsewhere.
Yes it makes sense, it is just a lot harder to implement than one would think. I don’t understand why one would think it might fry the lighting set??? A parallel circuit is a parallel curcuit.
I have many sets of ABBA locomotives that all share power pickups. I have one passenger train I attempted to do as you mention, it even connected and shared power pickups with locomotives. The problems I encountered are as follows:
Getting the plugs connected. There is very little space between the cars with which to work to have the leads to the plugs short enough that they don’t drag or are visably annoying and still have them long enough to flex and be easy to connect. I was having to use two sets of needle nose plyers to get them connected. Requires great dexterity.
Keeping the minature plugs connected. There is an amazing amount of flex between the cars that is constanly working to disconnect the plugs. Then when one does disconnect there is a chance that the male plug hangs down and shorts out on rail tops.
Small power blocks. My train was HO scale, 15 cars long, and an ABBA set of locomotives. With the gap
I have no problem with wiring cars together, as I usually keep my passenger trains together. I plan to use the miniatronics miniature polarized plugs, and put some rechargable AA batteries in the baggage car. I would like to put a miniature jack of some kind in the end of the baggage car, to plug in a line from a charger. Real passenger cars, and trains have all sorts of cords between the cars, and on the ends, so it wouldn’t look out of place. They even hook up large steam lines to the trains, to warm the cars, before the engines couple on. I have a bunch of AA NiMH high capacity batteries, of 2600 mah capacity, that are available online, at a pretty good price.
The above discussion explains why I don’t bother lighting my passenger cars. Lights that flicker are negative realism (one loses more than one gains), and the effort required to avoid this is monumental and creates another set of problems.
That is just one reason I don’t light my passenger cars.
A second reason is that during daylight hours, passenger cars aren’t fully lit. During most of the night they aren’t lit to allow the passengers to sleep. Since most of us model the summer time when it doesn’t get dark until around 9:00, there isn’t much of a window of time when the cars would be fully lit and how many of us do night operations. It is a dramatic effect to see a fully illuminated passenger train running in the dark, but how realistic is it for most of us.
Another reason I don’t light my cars is that many are used in commuter operations and spend the day in the coach yard. I run DCC which provides constant power so the cars would be sitting in the coach yard with lights on. (I don’t put passengers in my cars for the same reason). Now I know I could block off power to the coach yard after all the cars are parked, but one of the reasons I went to DCC was so I wouldn’t have to create electrical blocks.
In certain situations, a lighted passenger car could be realistic, but in most cases, it is a distraction. Detail that is missing is not nearly as distracting as a detail that doesn’t belong or doesn’t look right. The viewer’s eye will overlook the missing detail but something that is wrong will grab their attention. I use this same philosophy for building interiors. With few exceptions, I don’t detail the interiors and instead use black poster board as a view block. This effectively prevents the viewer from seeing into the buildings and disguises the fact they are just empty shells. It is a lot cheap and less time co