How to Inslall DCC and sound in HO Thomas


Artieiii

Artieiii

Member
I went to my LHS over the weekend and saw a Bachmann HO thomas for sale and a Digitrax SDN144PS N scale decoder with sound. I bought them both and when I got home I was able to install the decoder easily. Here is the video I used as a reference:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDSbVQgVfec
The N scale decoder Digitrax SDN144PS fits in Thomas's tender area nicely. I drilled a few holes in the back of his tender to let the sound out. Even though the speaker is itty bitty, it sounds pretty good. I did not want to have thomas permanently hooked up the Clarabelle or Annie.

The next step was to find some sound clips of Thomas saying "Bust my Buffers" and "I'm a useful engine" as well as his signature Toot toot. I was able to find the sound clips on Youtube. I used www.keepvid.com to download the video in MP3 format then used Adobe Sound Booth to clean up the sounds. I used a sound project from Digitrax Sound Depot for most of the sounds (chuff chuf etc) from the BR 0-6-0 "light prarie tank" engine then added my thomas sounds using soundloader. I uploaded my project using my PR3 sound programmer and Thomas looks and sounds like the TV show. This was a really fun project.

Next is to add directional lighting at some point.
If anyone needs any help doing this conversion just send me a PM and I'll be glad to help.
-Art
 
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"I'm a useful engine"
Click to expand...

Just had to bring that up, didn't you...

A few years back I was the engineer on the life size Thomas the Tank engine for a "Day Out With Thomas" event. That's kind of like being the skipper on a boat in the "It's a Small World Attraction" at Disneyland.

Took days to get that song out of my brain, and every time I hear "I'm a very useful engine" that songs gets stuck in my head!
 
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really have an interest in this since I will be switching my layout to DCC soon.
I still don't know why Thomas doesn't at least have a light up front
 
From Wikipedia:

"Britain did not adopt bright headlights as they would affect night-adapted vision and so could mask the low-intensity oil lamps used in the semaphore signals and at each end of trains, increasing the danger of missing signals especially on busy tracks. In any case, trains' stopping distances were normally much greater than the range of headlights, and the railways were well-signalled and fully fenced to prevent livestock and people from straying onto them. Thus low-intensity oil lamps continued to be used, positioned on the front of locomotives to indicate the class of each train. Four 'lamp irons' were provided (brackets on which to place the lamps): one below the chimney and three evenly-spaced across the top of the buffer beam. The exception to this was the Southern Railway and its constituents, who added an extra lamp iron each side of the smokebox, and the arrangement of lamps (or in daylight, white circular plates) told railway staff the origin and destination of the train. (In all cases, equivalent lamp irons were also provided on the rear of the locomotive or tender for when the locomotive was running tender- or bunker-first.)"

Thomas does use a single headlamp at night, correctly placed on the fireman's side (right) of his front buffer beam. I would like to eventually have a Thomas that speaks in George Carlin's Thomas voice and has the ability to play the theme song...
 
Ok, finally got to use my stepson's laptop so I programmed thomas saying "I'm a really useful engine".....this is hysterical. I have a sound clip from the opening theme song but I don't think I will be able to add that as the decoder has limited memory and to make the theme song sound good you need several seconds of continuous play time. I can't say why Bachmann did not put an LED in the front or the back I guess to cut down on the price. I will get it to work when my contact tells me how he did it. And NO I am NOT gonna program it to say the 7 words you can't say on television despite my admiration for George Carlin RIP. Stay tuned for a video with sound effects.
-Art
 
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