Making couplers with electrical contact idea

Garden Railroading
1

Don’t know if this has been discussed before but it would be pretty nifty if rolling stock could be modified to accept contacts on the couplers, with wires going under the cars, perhaps diskised as air lines.

Using this sort of setup would enable R/Cers to:

  1. Place your batter car anywhere in the consist

  2. Place pusher or helper locos anywhere in the consist

More than 2 wires would enable lights in caboose or smoke in caboose, ad infin

One problem I see would be turning the rolling stock the correct way as the + and - must be aligned.

2

It isn’t exactly the same, but I ran wires w/2-pin connectors from the front/rear to the circuit board posts, disconnected the trucks from the posts, removed the spring contacts to reduce rolling resistance, and therefore ran the lights on all of my Aristo Sierra cars either from a battery in one of the combines, or from a plug on the back of the tender.

In the above pictures, at the Botanical Gardens Luminaries display last December, the lights were plugged into the tender and powered by track power.

JimC.

3

Hi FG&J
Better to keep RC and lighting ccts seperate prevents induction problems
interfearing with RC
The RC and light ccts are two different systems one works on electricity the other needs a radio signal to work
Whats wrong with puting the wire where the jumper cables would be on a full size train Ok so it don’t work with freighters.
regards John

4

this isn’t exactly the same either.

used to be, when i tow my pickup truck with my motorhome, i used the hitchball as the grounding circuit, and the taillights flashed all the time.

i replaced this system with a real wire and no more flashing circuit.

seems like almost the same thing.

5

Trying to use a coupler as an electrical conductor would not be very reliable because of slack action in the couplers causing a loss of continuity, and your lights would flicker worse than if they were powered through dirty wheels. For passenger car lighting it would be much better to use wires with plugs and sockets on them between each car. Passenger trains are hardly ever connected/disconnected once they are put on the track, so wires between the coaches would not be changed that often. The biggest problem is trying to conceal the wires.

6

I thought about something similar once.Thought about running battery powered RC but have the battery in the caboose or Observation car and a tight slip fit jumper between each car so if something happened like a derailment or a coupler come lose it would go into “Emergency” kinda like the real deal.Only problems I saw was resistance,PITA of hooking the jumpers when I would make a train,and if the power unit shut down it would stop instantly due to motor lock down and friction but the now run away train behind it would crash into the rear and cause a real pile up.