Group,
The Houston S Gaugers were invited and participated at the local annual
train show in Stafford, Texas this past Saturday. Turn-out is always
good for this show, but it seemed even better to me this year. We set up
a basic "square" layout this year, which seemed to work well. We only
had a few electrical shorts early on in the show. A couple of us had
extended conversations with people who were interested in "S" or were
already in "S" but looking for product (locally).
I brought my SHS NW2 engine to see how it would behave on our layout. If
you recall, this engine has been converted to use the S-CAB radio
frequency receiver/decoder, and is directly powered by a cell-phone
sized battery. On my home layout I was able to get three hours of
running time out of the engine with no track power.
Neil Stanton had informed me that even though the engine's battery is
being charged while it is running on a powered layout, the motor's draw
from the battery will be faster than it can be recharged. In other
words, he expected the engine to eventually run out of juice, at which
point it will just stop. Our club layout uses Digitrax DCC, with the
command station powering one mainline track, and a booster powering the
other mainline track.
I fully charged the NW2's battery before the show. I started running it
at 10am (when the doors opened), and it ran all the way until 5pm,
non-stop! That's 7 hours of running! As I mentioned above, our layout
experienced a few electrical shorts early on, but my engine just kept on
running. I was pulling a 15-car train and had the engine's headlight on.
So, the bottom line is that from a practical application point of view,
the S-CAB with battery made no difference in my ability to run the
engine all day at a show, except that it was completely immune to
system-wide shut-downs due to shorts, immune to dirty-track problems,
and I could drive my train on any track on our layout that I wanted to
(some of our passenger and freight yard sidings are still power-routed,
so that we can park trains that do not yet have a DCC decoder
installed). Several people mentioned that they thought the engine ran
extremely smooth, and we had several visitors come by the layout a few
times to see if the "battery engine" was still running!
Neil had been concerned about interference in the radio frequency, but I
noticed no such problems at all. I had complete control over my engine
at all times, even though there were a number of other layouts at the
show, including G-scale clubs (which, according to Neil, use systems
that can potentially interfere with S-CAB's system).
All-in-all, good news. I will now proceed with converting my other
engines to S-CAB and battery power.
On a separate note, the recent discussion about Kato installing two
motors in their HO-scale engines... I just got a dealers' note that Kato
is coming out with the HO-scale GE P42 "Genesis" in May of this year
that has the motor-in-the-trucks system, and it is available with
double-speaker Loksound or Tsunami sound decoders (priced at about
$320). So, it is not vaporware. If we could have something like that in
S, it would make installing a complete S-CAB system, with sound and
battery power, in the smaller switcher engines, such as the NW2 and SW1
models, a possibility.
- Peter.
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Peter Vanvliet ([email protected])
Houston, Texas
My Model Railroad Site <http://pmrr.org/> (RSS feed
<http://pmrr.org/rss.xml>)
Fourth Ray Software <http://fourthray.com/>
Houston S Gaugers <http://houstonsgaugers.org/>
N.A.S.G. <http://nasg.org/>
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