[Al McEvoy]

Has anyone ever installed a large capacitor into a DC track-powered loco along with some circuitry that (a) maintains correct polarity on the cap, and (b) automatically discharges the cap across the main loco power buss (but isolated from the track pickups)  if the track power fails momentarily such as when encountering dirty track, a dead track section, or the problematic frog of some mass-mfrd switches?   A challenge would be to have the circuitry "remember" the track voltage level at the time it dropped and limit the capacitor discharge voltage to that same potential until track power was restored.

The benefit of this over DCC would be no requirement to buy controllers or do any programming to gain smoother performance using traditional track power on electrically less-than-perfect track.

 

[Al McEvoy]

Posted By calenelson on 02/27/2008 7:58 AM
Posted By Al McEvoy on 02/27/2008 7:41 AM


 if the track power fails momentarily such as when encountering dirty track, a dead track section, or the problematic frog of some mass-mfrd switches?  

Hey Al, With a Battery and RC setup all of those above problems would not exist!...just a thought


Your point is well-made Cale, but my objective here is dirt cheap improvement.  I'm not advocating any particular power source - that is best left to other discussions.  But for those with very limited funds - and there are plenty of them - this could ease some of the running problems that DCC power mostly resolves and battery power completely bypasses - at a fraction of the cost.

 

[Al McEvoy]

Gents - many many thanks for the lively discussion!  For the record, I appreciate Cale's suggestions as they are truly credible options that should be included given my stated caveates.  But it appears that Dave Bodnar has pretty much already "invented this particular wheel" so to speak. Turns out the key issue *is* capacitor size like Bill pointed out initially. Dave B. has suggested a few ways in which to conceal the large caps.  And the safety aspect cannot be overstated. That's why I knew there had to be some diodes and resistors to (a) keep positve and negative polarity correct to the cap's leads at all times and (b) to slow the discharge rate from being instantaneous.  I learned some basic electricicles too,...way back in the 60s and early 70s. 

Al