Dead Rail HO ?


azdiane

Member
The local garden rail club has a Christmas setup in a mall, with cute big toy-like G size steam locos. In chatting with the folks it turns out it's a "dead rail" setup, with no electric power in the rails. This lady was raving about it. All the electricity is carried on-board each locomotive in a lithium polymer battery, and all commands, including DCC steam chuff and the literal whistles and bells, are sent via radio control. It saves the modelers everything to do with wiring track power. The electrical pick-up problems that plague all model railroaders are completely eliminated by having the power hard-wired. Wow, what's not to like? Can it be as successful in my scale, HO?

This particularly interests me because hubby and I share a radio control model airplane hobby, and routinely use similar Li-Po batteries and radio receivers in our electric powered flying models. One of our more common large battery sizes, a 2200MaH 11.1 Volt, will fit entirely inside an HO boxcar, and is probably way more battery than would really be needed. I looked at the radio receiver in the big loco, and it's very similar to our flying model receivers, and small enough to be shoehorned into many HO tenders alongside the DCC unit. It seems to me that having to carry one dedicated Li-Po battery "power car" always coupled behind the locomotives, and connected electrically, is the only downside.

Everyone please chime in with any experience you have with dead-rail operations. Surely somebody has done it/is doing it in HO.

Merry Christmas, y'all.
Hugs,
Diane
 
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Hi azdiane yes they are battery powered. We had a member here "Lady Railfan" she is still on the member list but mysteriously stopped posting and then quietly left. She was an online friend and just up and left whatever the reason.
Hers was a "G" scale and the track was outside with radio control. She built a lot of her own structures from children's toys and also scratch built some structures. The sad part of this is all the photos and posts have been archived and no longer available but you can find information at a hobby dealer who sells a "G" scale line
Not much information but it's a start.

To my knowledge it is not done in HO, radio control is possible but battery would be on the heavy side.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E17N77BknU0

Willis
 
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Another reason why battery power for outdoor G scale is popular is due to the environment that the track is in. For instance moisture could be a cause of shorting across the rails, due to wet ground or a rain soaked branch across the rails. Also keeping outdoor track clean is a real chore.
So I can see where battery power would have its place there, but for HO I think the weight penalty would outweigh the operational benefits.
 
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Weight is an interesting consideration, flyboy, thanks for bringing that up. The battery I have on hand is, remember, a model airplane battery for a mid-size flying model. Although electrically correct, it's physically huge for the needs of an HO locomotive. But it will snuggle neatly inside the plastic shell of my boxcar, and it's simple to run a wire forward to the loco.

It's a 2.2 amp/hour Li-Po battery. It will provide eleven volts (just shy of the twelve most HO controllers put out) at one amp for 2.2 hours, or 2.2 amps for one hour, or any extrapolation thereof. One amp is a lot of current draw for one HO train. If a loco drew a more likely .5 amp this single big battery would power it for more than four hours between battery changes. It takes about 20 minutes to re-charge the battery, or two minutes to swap out with a fresh battery.

This big battery weighs 900 grams or 7 ounces and provides way more time between battery changes than is needed. A Li-Po battery that would provide half the duration would be about half the weight. So, now down to about 3 1/2 oz I think that would be doable. Smaller and lighter batteries are available that put out the same amount of power for a shorter duration. If I had to change a battery once an hour I think I could live with that.

I'm enamored of the concept, and hoping some folks have real-world dead-rail experience at smaller scales like HO. I can't possibly be the pioneer in this, and would love other's pros and cons.
Hugs,
Diane
 
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The Aristo Craft train control throttle has been around for at least a couple decades. It is a radio link from a transmitter to a receiver which can be used on any model railroad running DC power. With the on board battery on the locomotive, the Aristo craft receiver is an analog controller of the various functions you can put in the loco, i.e. motor control, sound system, lights etc.
 
The Railpro system by Ring Engineering is radio control and takes its power from the rails.
Can't see why a battery couldn't do the power in a car, a tender, or second loco.
I'll be going RC when I get the G scale going out on the hill.
 
When battery technology advances and a couple of AAA cell sized batteries can run an HO loco under load for several hours, maybe. Right now I think it's large scale only unless you like living on the bleeding edge.
 
Azdiane,
There has been some work done with both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth control both with live and dead rail! So with that said, if you wired in a receiver and electronic speed control with fwd/rev it would work! As for sound well you're on your own!
Damn, now that I think about this... I just might end up with an outdoor HO layout! HMMMM!
 
SHOOT! Three years too early with the windfall that brought me into this as DCC is about to be eclipsed by deadrail! The rate of the development of the technology is VERY fast and getting faster! In three years it will be time for us DCC guys to be like the DC guys are now! Stubbornly holding on to what we like and too broke or unwilling to swap out a fleet of loco's that have been tuned to perfection. I am beginning to feel their 'DC pain' with this wi-fi stuff that keeps showing up!
 
Thanks, bookmarked. I'm not likely to change from my NCE Pro-Cab-R (too much money invested), but wish I'd known about it beforehand, especially the Rail-Pro system (which isn't actually "dead rail" but has a really unbeatable consisting and speed matching ability, all contained within it's system.)
 
Thanks Alan. That's a great discussion about the several Dead Rail systems. Going to take my time reading it & checking out all the links. Want to do my new layout Dead Rail as don't want at all to do a bunch of wiring i.e. K.I.S.S.!. My layout is going to be modular on Styrofoam as living in an apartment.
 
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SHOOT! Three years too early with the windfall that brought me into this as DCC is about to be eclipsed by deadrail! The rate of the development of the technology is VERY fast and getting faster! In three years it will be time for us DCC guys to be like the DC guys are now! Stubbornly holding on to what we like and too broke or unwilling to swap out a fleet of loco's that have been tuned to perfection. I am beginning to feel their 'DC pain' with this wi-fi stuff that keeps showing up!

If I correctly understand how this r/c link works, and somebody please help me out if I don't, I think it doesn't replace DCC functions, including speed and direction and sound, it simply commands your existing DCC through r/c signals instead of through signals in the track power. It doesn't replace the DCC, it just adds one other receiver unit and a battery. It will pull a train across the kitchen floor because it's completely independent of track power.

I want to know more about this! Imagine never having to clean track again.
Hugs,
Diane
 
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Thanks, everybody for these links. These are super. It's clear that the radio receiver stuff is small enough to fit in HO. Please keep the info coming.
Hugs,
Diane
 
If I correctly understand how this r/c link works, and somebody please help me out if I don't, I think it doesn't replace DCC functions, including speed and direction and sound, it simply commands your existing DCC through r/c signals instead of through signals in the track power. It doesn't replace the DCC it adds one other receiver unit and a battery. It will pull a train across the kitchen floor because it's completely independent of track power.

I want to know more about this! Imagine never having to clean track again.
Hugs,
Diane

AND no more wiring &/or fixing it to power the loco either!!!!
 
RailPro is a perfect operating system for dead rail once batteries that can produce 12 to 18 volts DC and can run a couple of hours before recharging become available. I'm sure that will happen in the future. Along with RailPro, there is other new technology on the horizon. I am sure glad I did not choose to buy DCC.

Mel
 



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