i still want to see the adams family level train wreck from the iphone controls.
While super caps are coming down in price while going up in capacity, and can get you through dirty track, they do take away some of your control.
Two trains are going to collide, or a train is running to fast through the curve, so what do you do…, hit the emergency stop or slow down. But the trains keep going at current speed until the caps wear down and… bump or …
You want the train to stop at a certain spot so you put a reed there to cut track power. But the train proceeds on until its cap discharges and fouls the crossing.
etc.
All my contributions deleted from continual battle with Todd Brody.
You win Todd… you win…
Greg
Greg Elmassian said:
Unless you are using super caps on a train controlled with a decoder/receiver of some sort, then you can control it as usual.
I’d imagine that is much more the case, since brief interruptions in track power have minimal impact on good old DC motors without sound cards.
Greg
If the caps are on the decoder and the engine is still powered from the rails, the decoder may not loose “memory” but the engine still stutters because you need current to make the motors move and it’s just not there.
“Brief interruptions” doesn’t begin to describe brass track that sits in wet vegetation all day that can create enough oxide to make the engines stutter and stall, especially in the most inopportune places such as frogs where you rely heavily on the other set of trucks to get you through, or out behind the buildings where the track is continually wet and shaded.
Unless people run a true “garden railroad” they don’t know the perils of the long term exposure of brass to the elements and foilage.
And yes the for ease of use and cleaning ability the LGB track cleaning engine does a great job compared to any “drag along,” but disks are very expensive (it shouldn’t cost $25+ to clean the track for an open house), and your rail ends up with zebra stripes. It can also be persnickety at times.
I sold mine to a Forum member years ago for $250 IIRC after being serviced by LGB.
Greg, sure batteries are an extra cost and take up space. So are super caps. Solutions cost money. Your solution is to spend extra money on stainless steel track–also a very viable solution to the age-old issue of poor track conductivity. There are two fixes to poor conductivity: (a) increase conductivity, or (b) decrease or eliminate the reliance on it. Neither approach is inherently “better” than the other–they’ve both been proven quite effective.
In terms of my vision for future control systems, particularly the sharing information between handhelds, that’s what the network is for. Everything ties in and shares the data, so each handheld knows how many other handhelds there are, which trains they are controlling, and the status of each train. As I said, the network that controls this is likely nothing we’ve imagined yet, but definitely within the realm of possibility–certainly in 20 years’ time it’ll be there. In terms of the processing power, if it’s not there now, it most certainly will be in 20 years–and the devices used as commonplace in our lives as the PC or coffee maker is today.
DCC can be a very strong player in this, actually. Look at what QSI is doing with their G-wire receiver. Consider them making such a receiver that can communicate to a phone or tablet instead of the NCE or Airwire throttles. All you need to do is download the app, and you can program and control the locomotive. (As an added bonus, they could make the CV Manager software tablet-compatible, too! Now, think of how cool it would be if every manufacturer offered similar interfaces to their decoders, or even offered the technology built into the decoder itself!
Same electronics + multiple means of controlling it + simple-to-use GUI programming interface = much broader customer base.
That part of the technological equation can already be done–it just takes someone to come up with the WiFi (or Bluetooth or whatever) receiver for the DCC decoder, and then write the control and programming software for the tablet. Networking it can come later.
Later,
K
All my contributions deleted from continual battle with Todd Brody.
You win Todd… you win…
Greg
OK seems some of us agree that running track power in the garden is best done on track that needs as little cleaning - as in removing current isolating oxide - as possible. The four most common rail materials for garden railroads are:
Aluminium
Brass
Nickel Silver
Stainless Steel
Funny how lining them up in alphabetical order also arranges them from worst to best as far as oxidation is concerned.
Todd Brody said:
If the caps are on the decoder and the engine is still powered from the rails, the decoder may not loose “memory” but the engine still stutters because you need current to make the motors move and it’s just not there.
“Brief interruptions” doesn’t begin to describe brass track that sits in wet vegetation all day that can create enough oxide to make the engines stutter and stall, especially in the most inopportune places such as frogs where you rely heavily on the other set of trucks to get you through, or out behind the buildings where the track is continually wet and shaded.
Unless people run a true “garden railroad” they don’t know the perils of the long term exposure of brass to the elements and foilage.
And yes the for ease of use and cleaning ability the LGB track cleaning engine does a great job compared to any “drag along,” but disks are very expensive (it shouldn’t cost $25+ to clean the track for an open house), and your rail ends up with zebra stripes. It can also be persnickety at times.
I sold mine to a Forum member years ago for $250 IIRC after being serviced by LGB.
Todd
Adding backup power in the locomotive without addressing the rail to wheel pickup does improve things especially when your wheels and track are basically clean to begin with but it does have its limitations. I can say this from first hand experience as I was using this technology on our garden railroad in the early 90s.
When you combine on board power and one of a variety of techniques that address the wheel to track issue them the problems you mention go away,
I know this is a strange concept for most on this forum but not so in Europe where at least one manufacturer has combined capacitance pickup with super-cap on board power built in from the factory in all of their O scale Locomotives including a Kof which is an extremely small locomotive. Another way to do this in a pure RC solution is to have both on-board and track power in use at the same time.
I have only had time to install onboard power to part of our fleet but it does make a great difference in operation for those I have done it to, Especially to sound control which is very time sensitive. When I run alone it is almost always with one of these locomotives.
Most all of what Kevin mentioned is available today commercially and the costs are coming down its just not fully integrated across the industry yet.
Stan
PS We outlawed the LGB track cleaning locomotive on our railroad many years ago. It did an excellent job of cleaning the track but left the residue on the rails which was quickly picked up on the wheels of the locomotives.
Having been indoctrinated into the Large Scale hobby by Father Fred and coming over from the RC boat group, battery power and RC just seemed the natural fit. Having past experience in HO and N scale never really had any problem with rail power at least in those scales. But must admit it is nice not to have to worry about how to wire a layout. For me at least the 2.4 ghz universe is the way to go.
Stan,
in at lkeast one point i am with Todd.
if one runs an automated layout, where stops are forced by “dead” sections,
a loco with a capacitator would treat a station equal to a dirty spot.
that would mean, a station would need a “dead” section, longer than the capacity of the capacitator.
may be, using rustfree rails, more pickup points, or cleaning devices would be the better solution?
Greg Elmassian said:
Todd, I was addressing your statement that said you could not stop, the train would keep going.
It would be nice that you could concede that point, only for the edification of people reading this, not for keeping score.
You have opened another couple of topics, and I’m really not sure what you are trying to say, I get you are trying to warn people that track power pickup and oxide and water, etc. is not a trivial problem.
I see you mention that track cleaning discs are $25 but then you say you should not have to pay $25 to clean track for an open house, i.e. you imply that you have to buy a brand new set of track cleaning discs each time, or at least you personally did, or you saw it happen.
I’d wholeheartedly agree that buying a completely new set of disks each use is ridiculous, and if you know people in that situation, please do take the loco away from them immediately, clearly they are not able to run, maintain, or understand the operation.
I luckily was not in that position, and ran mine many times before replacing the cleaning disks. I sold mine when I went to all stainless, and last time I checked, the new owner was still happy with the loco. I submit if this was the normal case, then they would not be sought after nor continue to be sold and manufactured.
Greg
OK, one point at a time.
If the logic circuit still had power, the train may stop on command, but you can’t make it go on command. To use your own words, “you still had control it as usual” and that’s just not so. Besides, I want the train to stop when the track voltage is removed, and your inference is that it wouldn’t so long as the controller has power. So set up in this fashion, the controller is not doing what I want it to do.
I never said disks are $25. (I don’t know where you get this stuff.)
I said that it shouldn’t cost $25 to clean the track. I think last I priced disks, they were ~$35 and yes, I would go through an entire disk, or thereabouts, preparing for an open house.
What I’m trying to say is that Super caps are not the be all end all to solve brass track problems
Stan, I agree that there is benefit to putting caps in the engines and that this would help in situations where “power dropouts” are short making the trains run both faster and smoother though these areas. Dave Bodner showed us all how to wire the caps using diodes to route the power to do just this.
But as Korm alludes, to be of real benefit, I would want the caps to be able to make the trains span several inches, at least, and this would mess up the stops.
What Greg said, many posts ago, makes sense. I overbuilt my railroad, so that I would not have power problems. I used 5 foot rails, and each rail has a feeder going to it from the bus wire buried alongside the track. My bridge and some small sections of track do not have feeders, so those few sections rely on the rail joiners or rail-clamps for power. But the joiners and clamps are mostly for mechanical alignment of the rails, and redundancy in power distribution to the rails.,
I also went with stainless track, because of my experience with the olde HO Tyco brass track. My opinion is that the railroad should be built well, with good track, and that investment will pay off with years of good and reliable operation. So, to me, spending more money on stainless track, and proper bus wire, was an investment for future reliability. I know I over-killed on my design, but I knew that I didn’t know what I was doing (at the time) and I knew I didn’t want problems. So yes, I also agree with Greg in a way, spend your money on quality track. No, I didn’t say that anyone has to buy stainless track, that was a personal choice of mine (and others).
Greg’s other point about tuning up locomotives is also valid. I have had to change out tender wheels, and fix power pick ups, on locomotives to improve their operation. I have also had to fix the wheel gauge and slop on some locomotives to improve their operation.
Its fun to dream about coming technologies and where we will be 20 years from now. When I was in high school, the latest and greatest control system for model railroads was the CTC16. Now its DCC for the smaller scales. But a DCC locomotive can still be run on a DC layout. Simple DC power is the least expensive, and simplest, option out there for folks who want a fleet of locomotives. I cant see where I would have saved money by not using stainless track, and putting any type of control system in my fleet.
Of course, this is a hobby, so what is the perfect solution for one person, may not even be a viable solution for the next person. Its not a “one size fits all” kind of thing.
Todd Brody said:
Stan, I agree that there is benefit to putting caps in the engines and that this would help in situations where “power dropouts” are short making the trains run both faster and smoother though these areas. Dave Bodner showed us all how to wire the caps using diodes to route the power to do just this.
But as Korm alludes, to be of real benefit, I would want the caps to be able to make the trains span several inches, at least, and this would mess up the stops.
Todd
There are a variety of ways to have a train stop at a specific location in a very reliable fashion. Using a non powered section is a rather poor one in part because the sound also goes off. That said my locomotives will stop correctly on a dead section of track.
One of my locomotives has 14 large C cells for backup power. This locomotive will run for a very long time on icy track yet it will stop immediately upon entering a dead track section.
Remember I use capacitance pickup in combination with backup power. The decoder is constantly looking for a DCC signal and when the DCC signal is not there the decoder stops the locomotive.
The very first prototype did not have this feature and the locomotive it was installed in ran for quite some time after the power was shut down without stopping the locomotive. The problem was fixed rather quickly.
Stan
All my contributions deleted from continual battle with Todd Brody.
You win Todd… you win…
Greg
Greg, even you must be able to see that there is a difference between it costing $25.00 to clean the track for an open house, and the cleaning disks costing $25.00 each.
A couple years ago I looked into using supercaps to power Madam Mallet, who draws around 2 amps. I figured on a high voltage cap and using a buck converter to get the low voltage needed to run the remote. To get about an hour’s runtime, the capacitor would cost about 4 grand and was a bit too big to fit in the tender.
I didn’t do any more research.
Interesting though, you can determine the amount of charge left just by measuring the voltage of the cap.
All my contributions deleted from continual battle with Todd Brody.
You win Todd… you win…
Greg
“Wheel” being a pair. And Steve is correct in that there is a difference between $25 to clean the track and $35 for a PAIR of wheels.
Also, I contend Greg, that you never had to endure the foibles of a TRUE garden railroad and what happens to the track over time.
First off Greg, did you water your 15 year old track 750 times for ~10 minutes at a time, making sure that some of it sits under the water for at least half an hour each time, and that the water has a very high mineral content, before you tried to clean it for your first open house of the season?
Next, did you bury your track in a combination of ferrous ballast (that rusts) and alkali soil up to the railhead?
Did you ensure that some of your track sits in wet soil/ballast up to the railhead in the shade 24/7/365?
Also, did you place alkali “Holy River Rock” adjacent to the track so it can leach alkali over your tracks on a continual basis? (Does a HELLofaNUMBER on brass.)
Did your vegetation grow out and intertwine with and cover the rails up until you are ready to clean them?
Once you done all of these things for 600 feet of brass, try to run an LGB track cleaner and get by with less than a set of wheels and report back.
And to be honest, I’m betting that if you do this to your stainless track, you won’t just pass a Swiffer around on a pole and have your trains run as if the track were in new, clean condition.
Todd, but why?
Why would you use ferrous ballast? Motors have magnets that will attract that stuff you know.
Why would you not have adequate drainage for your roadbed? Soggy roadbed is a bad thing.
Why would you put an alkaline rock that close to your track?
We all heave vegetation issues, and we deal with that.
Since stainless doesn’t corrode, nor does it oxidize, it just needs crud and dirt cleaned from it, and a damp rag works for normal cleaning. The more tenacious crud does need an abrasive to remove it.
Each railroad has its own climate and its own set of challenges. So what works well for one person may not work so well for another. Some people seam to forget that, and prescribe their remedy for others, as if its the only workable remedy.