The Bachmann ANNIE has the distinction of being the easiest loco to convert to battery R/C and one of the most difficult, depending on which version. I will leave the elaborate way until a later date. The main difficulty with that is reassembling the loco. The upgraded ANNIE’s have all sorts of piping added which make reassembly more than a touch difficult. I have reasoned that most people with an ANNIE they want to convert to battery R/C will be quite happy with lights that follow direction and brightness just as they would on track power but oh so more reliably. So the easy ways it will be. It has taken me a long time but at last I can put up the pics of the easy way and really easy way of converting a Bachmann ANNIE to battery R/C. If the ANNIE has a back up light you can do it the really easy way. The motor drive connection is made in the tender by tapping into the rear light wire in a suitable place. If no back up light, then you will have to run a 2 wire cable through to the loco. No sweat really as you will not have to dismantle the body, just remove the base plate and disconnect the track pick up wires. We will start with the really easy method first. Remove the chassis base plate. You will see this:
Then gently grasp the two little plugs and remove them from the wiper contacts, insulate them and tuck them up out of the way inside the chassis:
It is not necessary to do so, but we also remove all the actual wiring and wipers from the base plate before reattaching the plate to the chassis. The loco mods are done. Easy eh? The rear light socket will carry the motor power into the loco.
You can use whatever sorts of batteries you like. As the ANNIE will only draw around 1 amp with a regular load of 5 - 6 cars I normally choose 12 x 2,000 mah ENELOOP AA hybrid Alkaline - NiMh cells for a total of 14.4 volts. This installation had two 6 cell twin stick battery packs. In the future I will be using 3 x 4.8 volts packs of the same batteries normally used for R/C RX’s, as they are much less expensive than getting packs custom made.
The output wires of the motor driver ESC are spliced into the rear light wiring as shown above and in the diagram later on.
The next pic shows where I mounted the switches,charge jack and programming pushbutton under the removable coal load. If you wanted to use the charge jack as a port for auxiliary batteries in a trail car you can mount it on the back of the tender.
The Bachmann plug marked LIGHT simply plugs into the correct socket on the back of the loco and the installation is complete. If the loco runs backwards just reverse the two wires at M-M on the ESC. If your ANNIE does NOT have a reversing light. The loco may have the light socket but, if the tender does not have a rear light, the connector on the back of the loco cab will NOT be wired in. So you cannot use it. You will need to run a two wire connector cable from the tender through to the loco to make the loco go. You start this the same way as above. Remove the base plate and pull out the two little plugs. Instead of insulating them attach them to the two wire cable you have installed from the back of the cab. We drilled small hole for the wires and then fed them through the chassis to where the pick up wires are located. Once attached securely (we solder the wires) make sure they are insulated and replace the base plate. Loco is finished.
The tender wiring is similar except we drilled a small hole in the front beam of the tender for the two wire cable which is then connected to M-M on the ESC.
The new cable looks like this.
Here is how I wired up the two versions.
If your ANNIE has a rear light and you want constant brightness directional lighting that is easily done using a small relay (RCS # RELAY-1) to change the polarity of the battery voltage. I will show how to do that soon.