Sound in N Kato Amtrak Baggage car?

Model Railroader Electronics and DCC
1

Has anyone done this? I put the Kato lighting in all cars. I was looking on eBay and a guy was selling a CP Passenger train with sound in one of the cars and I thought it might be something to try.

I would appreciate any insight.

Thank you [;)]

2

Maybe he means the locomotive sound, since there’s not much room for a speaker and sound decoder in the loco, especially N scale. Sort of a trailing sound car. You would be able to get larger, multiple speakers and better sound this way. I’ve done it with HO scale dummy locomotives.

3

I would like to put a sound decoder or sound bug in the Baggage car that would give the illusion of sound from the P42 Loco. Do I just use the digitrax Soundbug and solder it in?

Thanks

4

Well, you need power pickups, so you’ll have to rig some wipers of some sort to get track power. Power input to a soundbug is on the 2 large rings alongside the 8 pin connector - the 8 pin connector is NOT the standard NMRA pinout. So, just solder the wires fromt he wipers on one side to the one ring, and the wires from the wires on the other side to the other ring.

–Randy

5

Hi Randy;

The Kato baggage car has the wipers in it already used to light the car. Can I just connect the power wires from the sound bug? Or am I missing something?[8-|]

Thanks,

6

Should be good.

Check out the Digitraxsound Yahoo group, dunno if they’ve fixed up a P42 project, but the one guy did a heck of a job with an F40PH one, with HEP mode and all. Use the biggest speaker and enclosure you can fit in there, a long oval or multiple small round ones. Do not skimp on an enclosure. Soundbugs use 8 ohm speakers so you can find suitable ones anywhere.

–Randy

7

Yup, but I really wanted to say I think it is a great idea. In N-scale you can get so much more speaker cone area in a passenger car and it will make a great enclosure for the speaker(s). Might want to consider some acoustically transparent batting to fill the car with and keep the sides from vibrating.

8

Hi there -

No need to do this unless you want the baggage car to sound like a set of passenger cars.

I model N scale and I’m able to fit a Digitrax sound decoder inside my Kato P42 without any modification to the frame whatsoever.

The speaker will fit between the decoder board and the roof of the shell. The only modification is replacing the large capacitor (which won’t allow the shell to close) with a much smaller tantalum capacitor. I was able to buy a bunch of 100uf/25v tantalum capacitors on eBay; you only need one for the loco. It fit in the area between the decoder and the roof of the shell (I protected the top of the decoder with some Kapton tape) and the shell snapped on and I had DCC sound!