Dead Rail Conversion in detail

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To do this, you’ll need to open the locomotive to expose the electronics.  On the PCB board, find the main power IN terminal and disconnect from the PCB board.  The main  IN power terminal receives the power of 18 volts AC from the track pickups under the locomotive.  In order to convert to battery, you need to disconnect the track power feed and tie the IN terminal wires to the positive and negative wires of the battery.  Check out my YT channel for several videos.

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Once the locomotive shell has been removed, you’ll see the exposed wires and PCB board.  

* TIP* Take a photo of electronics before you begin unplugging terminals and moving wires around.  Locate the IN power terminal going to the PCB board. Trace the wires back to their origins, the wire colors are not always red and black.  Follow the negative wire to a ground point on the chassis and follow the positive wire to the pickup rollers under the locomotive trucks.  These two wires will go to a socket on the PCB board.  This should be the main IN power to the PCB board. To convert, you need to disconnect the wire from the rollers going to the PCB board and use the positive wire from the battery instead. 

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De-solder or cut the positive wire coming from the pickup rollers, then attach the tether’s positive wire to where track pickup wire was soldered.  Tape up the positive track power wire to prevent any accidental short, and if you want to convert back to track power.  The ground wire of the tether from the battery will be attached to ground wire on the locomotive. The main IN terminal to the PCB board usually has an odd type socket, so I utilize the original plug.  Depending on how the positive and ground wires are attached to the plug, you may have a solder point where you can separate the positive wire coming from the rollers.  This makes a clean conversion eliminating the need to cut or splice the main IN plug wires. Once the tether wires are correctly connected to the original plug,  go ahead and plug into the main IN terminal on the PCB board.  Since most locomotives do not have room for a large battery, an auxiliary car will need to serve as a battery car.  Any car that will fit the battery will do. To connect the battery car to the locomotive you’ll run a tether wire which will have a mid point connection point between the loco and battery car.

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The recommended battery would be the lithium ion battery, 14.8v with at least 2200 mAh. I have used both LiOn and LiPo style batteries.  The LiPo batteries require balanced charging, which is an extra set of wires to deal with.  On my LiOn  batteries, I installed a DPDT switch and 5.5mm x 2.1mm barrel port to charge the batteries without removing the battery from the auxiliary car. You can do the same with LiPo, but you’ll need to add an extension balance wire as well.  With my experience, the 2200 mAh battery provides about 3 -4 hours of run time.

 

So you may ask, if the track power is 18 volts AC, how does the locomotive run on the 14.8 volts DC? Answer is the PCB board has electronics that convert AC voltage to DC voltage and then reduces the DC voltage to 12 volts to run the locomotive's can motors and lights and sound effects. The conversion process is a convenient way to modify your locomotive to operate battery powered.  For older track powered and TMCC and Legacy Locomotives there are other options available, this path requires adding additional electronics and incorporating a different control system such as RailPro and Blue Rail controllers. 

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