Model Railway Forum

I stumbled across some forums on battery trains & wonder if anyone has tried the conversion. This was initially brought out for G-rail. But I went the DCC route with on30 scale & so wished i had found this first. It all runs on dry track, so no voltage problems, can use cheap trains, run 12 trains at the same time on one controller. Its very similar to DCC, but works via very similar to RC planes. But there are a few restrictions. You can still have sound, lights, reversing lights & more. The train just needs a battery & receiver. This will normally give about 1-2 hours running before a recharge or battery swap is needed depending on battery size. So here is a list of pros, pop some cons up for me.
PROS:
Controller for 12 trains with facility for switch whistles, lights, horns, sound for each train individually.£75
No points/frog problems
No turnaround loop problems.
No transformers for track
No having to run cables to each length of the rail
The track could be 150met away from where you stand
Doesn't matter if the track gets a short out.
Points on a simple on/off/on toggle switch
Leadless controller
Cons:
Can't stop a train automatically crashing into each other so easy
Recharge needed
Better with trains that have coal tenders to carry batteries & possibly get up to 3-4 hours running per charge.
Any other pros & cons??
Train controller 2.4ghz image below

I saw a OO version of a battery driven train at a show sometime back and was amazed at the size of the batteries. The thing that struck me was the battery swapping and recharging which involved considerable handling of locos. I was going to ask the exhibitor for more details but he seemed tied up with other punters. It did occur to me afterwards it would handy to recharge the batteries in situ. I was thinking of a powered siding where the loco could be parked up and recharged.

Richard

Spot on Tricky, most that run this sort of layout now days have clever ways to disguise the jack plug for recharging. I have seen one using the buffers to recharge. I have even seen an N gauge layout using this. Too tiny for my shaky hands. lol. Many larger trains, you can get the very flat lipo batteries between the wheels of the loco.
Are we going the way of the electric car?.

There is also this company for battery controlled model railway engines. Seems more suitable for engines larger than OO. R-

RogerB wrote: ↑Wed Jul 01, 2020 1:45 pm There is also this company for battery controlled model railway engines. Seems more suitable for engines larger than OO. R-

I think that is the system I saw the components that make up the system look familiar.

Richard

Must admit, there are a few sites out there dealing with this type of thing, but most are very poor quality sites & you wonder if to deal with them. One site that looked good was www.rctrains.co.uk But this went offline. Spoke to the fellow who owns the site & said sack your IT team. He messaged me back & said i sacked myself. oooops.

Got to be the way forward, anything to get rid of wireing the track

mick1219 wrote: ↑Mon Jul 13, 2020 1:22 pm Got to be the way forward, anything to get rid of wiring the track

Its certainly a lot simpler to deal with & battery technology & RC control is getting a lot better these days.