Airwire and USA Engines

2550 Views 17 Replies 9 Participants Last post by Bill Swindell, May 3, 2008

McGinty26

Discussion Starter · Apr 28, 2008

I have an Airwire system in a trailing boxcar with a power lead to the rear of a USA F3A. I also use the same configuration with the USA GP7. I don't double head them, only running them solo. At most, I get only one hour of running time. I took one of the motors out of the F3A figuring the run time would increase. Nothing doing. I haven't checked out whether the batteries are in proper working order. When I run, I always charge them fully. Beside a possible battery problem, are there any other things I should be looking for. Has anyone else had this problem ? I know USA engines are power hogs, but ???

Thanks in advance.

Pat McCarty

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Paul Norton

· #5 · Apr 29, 2008

I ran my GP-9 with two, 9.6-volt, NiMH battery packs with a trailing power car.

They usually provided 3 1/2 hours of run time without smoke or sound.

As Paul Burch has mentioned, the lighting boards in USAT Diesels are real power hogs. Each lighting board in the GP-9 will draw almost 1/2 an amp. For that reason I made mine own using LEDs for the headlights and number board lights.

These boards draw about 20 milliamps. I did not bother with the red/green, marker/classification lights.

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Paul Norton

· #15 · May 2, 2008

Posted By Trains on 05/01/2008 4:23 PM

Where does one go to see how you make new lighting boards?

Have a look at the following article Lighting Circuits on our club web site. The GP-9 LED board is shown at the bottom of the article along with three pictures and a wiring diagram.

There is also a good tutorial on Ngineering entitled LED Lighting Circuits and LED Calculators to obtain the proper size of resistors.

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