Back in 2002 my parents picked me up the Holiday Express animated train. It comes with really cheap track that is just brass wrapped over plastic. Ran it on my future garden layout track on 10 foot diameter curves. Runs quite nicely. Will be re-purposing LGB track I have and smaller curves for next year’s setup in the house.
What fun!
I have that same set–I run the train with an LGB locomotive. Actually, I have the cars from a number of different ones of these–you can pick them up on eBay quite reasonable.
The lights work off track power–though I can’t make the music play, since I don’t have the controller box it came with.
The controller box it comes with supplies power to the rails right away. It’s like the engine has some sort of DCC in it. It doesn’t play music though, just fake engine noise and an annoying startup sound. I mute my right away as I find the sounds cheesy and the start up sound annoying.
The power supply it comes with only supplies 10V and 3.2 amps (will double check) so be careful applying more to the cars then that. Not sure which part of the whole setup would not like getting too much power.
Nicolas Teeuwen said:
The controller box it comes with supplies power to the rails right away. It’s like the engine has some sort of DCC in it. It doesn’t play music though, just fake engine noise and an annoying startup sound. I mute my right away as I find the sounds cheesy and the start up sound annoying.
The power supply it comes with only supplies 10V and 3.2 amps (will double check) so be careful applying more to the cars then that. Not sure which part of the whole setup would not like getting too much power.
Good points. At one time I thought about grabbing one of the controllers and an oscilloscope and trying to find out what “signal” it was sending on the rails. But I haven’t seen any of the controllers for a reasonable price, and I’m OK with how it runs. I have a mini MP3 player and battery powered speakers that I use to play carols as it goes around. I take power directly from the rails and haven’t had trouble with overvoltage, though my analog power supply is an old Lionel power pack–so not a lot of power there anyway.
They’re cool (http://www.largescalecentral.com/externals/tinymce/plugins/emoticons/img/smiley-cool.gif)
Nice video Nicolas. We had the same set until a couple of years ago. We gave it to our oldest son’s family to put around their Christmas tree after the locomotive they had in their set had a back accident. I ran it off of the repair table after I got it fix and it fell 3’ to the concrete floor and broke. My grandkids love the Holiday Express and I like to see the smiles on their faces.
Dan Hall said:
Nicolas Teeuwen said:
The controller box it comes with supplies power to the rails right away. It’s like the engine has some sort of DCC in it. It doesn’t play music though, just fake engine noise and an annoying startup sound. I mute my right away as I find the sounds cheesy and the start up sound annoying.
The power supply it comes with only supplies 10V and 3.2 amps (will double check) so be careful applying more to the cars then that. Not sure which part of the whole setup would not like getting too much power.
Good points. At one time I thought about grabbing one of the controllers and an oscilloscope and trying to find out what “signal” it was sending on the rails. But I haven’t seen any of the controllers for a reasonable price, and I’m OK with how it runs. I have a mini MP3 player and battery powered speakers that I use to play carols as it goes around. I take power directly from the rails and haven’t had trouble with overvoltage, though my analog power supply is an old Lionel power pack–so not a lot of power there anyway.
They’re cool (http://www.largescalecentral.com/externals/tinymce/plugins/emoticons/img/smiley-cool.gif)
I’d help you out but I do not have an oscilloscope or the know how to sort it out. The only sounds it makes are some intro sound like “All aboard”, the clicklty clack sound as it runs, and there are 4 buttons to have it make additional sounds.
There is a train station that you can get as an addon that is powered by the track and just plays Christmas music but the quality is pretty bad and it plays the tunes in the same order everytime. It gets old quickly so I usually just leave it on the min volume to get the lights of the train station without the music.