battery powered engine


I have looked on ebay now and then but i have not seen any. The main line on my layout needs a good cleaning and regular HO engines loose contact and keep stalling.
 
Great idea kenw I don't know why I never thought of that. I guess because I got a new one of these cleaning cars an it is so heavy it almost needs a DD40 to pull it.


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yes, I know what you mean. My layout has seen months pass between trains, and I find that pushing the cleaner car is about the only way to get things going. After a few laps, I generally put things back in the correct order, just to prevent any incidents.
 
I belonged to a large club when I was younger. One of the guys built a thre car cleaning machine. The first had a masonite ad to remove the gunk, the second had and alcohol tanks that fed another pad soaked in alcohol, and the past, and third had an absorbant pad that was also slightly abrasive to clean up the alcohol and the last of the gunk. The layout was located in a fairgrounds building that was a poultry barn during fiar tme so you can imagine how cruddy those tracks would get. Anyway, we got all three cars on the track and then lined up an A-B-B-A set of Athearn superpower F units as pushers. Top speed - about 2 scale mph with all wheels spinning. :eek: Got another superpower set and three SD-7's hooked up and finally got it up to about 15 scale mph. Since we had about 10 scale miles of mainline and passing tracks, it took just about an hour to clean the tracks while the rest of us cleaned the yard, sidings, and staging tracks by hand. We did have some mighty clean tracks when we were done though. :)
 
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We were actually a little worried about the same thing. We had 8 MRC power packs that we could hook up to different power districts or hook two or more together in one power districts. I think they were each 8 amps. We had voltmeters and current meters for each district. As the cleaning train moved around, the dispatcher monitored each district. On the flat, the cleaning train was drawing just about 7 amps. When it got the mountains, it started going up until the maximum power draw was about 13 amps. We had to to tie in two power packs to get it back to the downgrade again and they were almost too hot to touch for about five minutes after the cleaning train went by. The first time we ran the cleaning train, there were a lot of people holding their breath. :)
 
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