Show off your DCC

[Red Tender 5]

There's DCC question threads on every page of the forum, but not so many DCC answer threads. I'm solving that now! I have several Bachmann Thomas & Friends DCC installations with sound and hand-built keepalive modules.

Before I talk about my installs, a foreword about why I installed DCC this way:

My club layout is extremely large. This presents challenges in two forms: it is steep, and it is hard to clean. Locomotives have to be strong, and they have to be able to deal with dirty track. This necessitates extra weight, traction tires, extra pickups, and keepalive modules.

You do not need to replicate what I have done to enjoy DCC, but you might find inspiration if you face similar problems.

Yes, I use Kadees on all my rolling stock.

Without further ado,

Thomas

This is one of my most complicated installations and has taken the longest. He's gone through several revisions to get working, as he is one of the lighter models. Lets dive right in:



Keen eyes will see a lot wrong here. The weights I have next to no information about, aside from finding them on ebay one day and I knew I needed them, as I have had perennial issues with traction in specific spots on the layout. What you cannot see is the Mashima motor inside the gearbox, which required shimming to fit in the space the Bachmann open frame motor once was. This motor is bulletproof and well worth it.

The gearbox has been unmounted from the shell and mounted to the chassis - this is an easy modification since the existing screws can screw into the running board once a hole is drilled.

The gearbox has been cut away in strategic places so that the eye mechanism can lift out. Normally, Thomas disassembles by removing the chassis block from the running board to access the shell screws, removing the shell from the runningboard, then removing the gearbox from the shell. With these mods, Thomas is one of the easiest models to take apart, as the eye mechanism staying with the shell means I don't have to fiddle with the eyes when reassembling.



Thomas also has a DCC Concepts lamp with a headcode for branchline train. This is appropriate since he is only capable of operating with Annie attached, since that's where the decoder is. In the future I may make a freight Thomas, either with a wholly new Thomas or by merely replacing Annie with a van or wagon with decoder in it.



To combat dirty track, Annie has pickups. Because the keepalive module does not have any control circuitry like ESU's own keepalives, it has to be manually connected and disconnected when programming on the Lokprogrammer. This isn't a problem when programming on the main, so that is my preferred method of changing locomotive addresses.



Annie has a DCC decoder, a speaker module, and a keepalive module. You can see the simple plug system which has to be disconnected to program the loco. I want to add an interior to Annie possibly along with interior lighting. When that is done, a physical switch will be used to make it easier to disconnect.

Percy



Percy was a relatively simple installation. I did not even bother trying to get Percy to pull cars, because I had another idea which I will elaborate on later. This was the first install I tried out small pieces of copper-clad board cut to a small size. I found these extremely useful as a "terminal strip" between the fragile DCC Concepts lamp wires and the much larger decoder wires.



A bracket was created to elevate the speaker module since Percy's gearbox attaches to the runningboard in a very strange way. Thanks to the small sizes of the capacitors I use and the Loksound V5 Micro, everything tucks inside the cab.

Cheater Boxcar 1

Percy would never be able to pull cars up the grades on his own, so another technique was devised. Cheater boxcars are sort of an open secret in model railroading. You can take any cheap locomotive, put a boxcar shell over it, and magically increase the pulling power of any locomotive. A lad out of England sells motorization kits for die-cast trolleys on Ebay, and I had been sitting on some for quite some time. Percy's installation was the impetus for me to actually put my plans into action.



Cheater boxcar 1 is a Thomas & Friends van with a motor inside. Salvaging a number of weights from -- appropriately enough a Bachmann F-unit from the 80's or 90's -- the cheater boxcar is a self-contained locomotive programmed to do the train pulling thing while Percy looks good in front. The boxcar also has a plug that connects to Percy, so the number of wheels collecting power is effectively doubled. The boxcar weighs 170 grams, which is over twice as much as Percy weighs.



Even close up, it's quite difficult to tell that anything is amiss.

James



James was another locomotive that has spent a long time in development. He has required many modifications to run well, including ballasting his cab to an extreme degree. He is probably the heaviest Thomas & Friends locomotive I own. He also has traction tires on his rear drivers, because there is no such thing as overkill. He is my strongest Thomas & Friends locomotive to date, and possibly will always be.

Complimenting his strength is the reliability of a Mashima motor. I have Mashima motors for 4 of my locos: Thomas, James, Gordon, and Henry. These were the first 4 Thomas & Friends locomotives I attempted to convert to DCC, and I got these motors after some pretty bad results using a regular Bachmann motor in Thomas. Aside from those 4, I am using the regular Bachmann motors in my other locomotives. Rest in peace Mashima motor company.

Like Thomas, I cut away the gearbox to allow the eye module to stay with the shell during disassembly. Very convenient!

Unfortunately I don't have any photos of the decoder itself, but you will see more-or-less the same thing in Emily's tender later.

Cheater Boxcar 2

While working on James, I made a decision to alter the standard weight of my rolling stock. Before the change, I was using NMRA specifications to weight all wagons. The standard specifies 1 oz per car plus 0.5 oz per inch length. This meant that the standard wagon required 2.5 oz or 71 grams of weight. McKinley Railway has done extensive testing including testing the NMRA standard, and they discovered wagons worked best when weighted to 0.5 oz per inch length. This meant wagons would be weighted to 1.5 oz or 45 grams. For comparison, a 40ft boxcar weighs 3.5 oz, so a 12 wagon train weighs more than 8 boxcars. Decreasing the weight by 40% per car is a significant change, and although James can pull long trains just fine under the new weight standard, my experience with James pulling wagons using the old weight standard suggested that a cheater boxcar was mandatory.



And then there were two. Cheater boxcar 2 uses weights from Hornby Mk1 coaches instead of from an old Bachmann toy.



The operation of cheater boxcar 2 is identical to cheater boxcar 1. James has a recepticle for a plug in his tender, and the two are basically interchangeable.

Due to several factors, I ended up swapping the boxcars, so Percy was pushed by cheater boxcar 2 and James pulled around cheater boxcar 1.

Donald & Douglas

Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of Donald's tender, but it's basically the same as Annie's. Donald is one of two Thomas & Friends locomotives I have that do not use Bowser #691-1294 speaker modules. Although I have 4 locos with the speaker modules, Thomas is the only one where the sound is satisfying. I have not yet found a suitable alternative as Loksound V5's amplifier tends to be too strong for a single speaker.



The interior of Douglas's tender. Donald & Douglas are set up to run together and have only a single sound decoder and headlamp between them. TCS plugs were used to connect the tender to the locomotive, but a manufacturing defect meant that for the longest time, it would be possible to blow up the decoder by swapping the tender. Swapping the tender would not have been easy since the wire routing was mirrored and the drawbars are held captive with a screw, but it was not an ideal situation. When Douglas's decoder stopped responding to Lokprogrammer input, it was the appropriate time to fix the problem. Using an 8-pin expansion board salvaged from another locomotive and a mountain of 3M foam tape, Douglas is now DCC ready!



All of my tenders use pickups made out of brass wipers intended for cabeese. By cutting them in half, they can be glued to a piece of paper or soldered to copper-clad board and adjusted to rub the inside of the wheels just enough to get electricity. Annie has these same things cut into quarters.

I believe I bought these wipers from TCS, but after scratching my head for a while and finally calling them on my cellular telephone, they told me that the person who made them died. Rest in peace, brass wiper maker.

Intriguingly, Bowser sells the exact same thing as part #74056, although I can't find this part on Walthers.

Emily

Have you ever seen a Bachmann Emily pull 14 wagons up a hill?



I had never run Emily on DC nor had I heard anyone else's experience with Emily when I converted her to DCC. The secret sauce is in the 8 tungsten weights tucked around the shell - can you spot them all? A traction tire also helps, which I put on the front drivers (despite appearances, Bachmann Emily is a 2-4-2). I did the front instead of the main driver because it would have been easier to get an even application.



"This is my spot!" - Bowser speaker module.

There are two walls at the back of Emily's tender. One of them helps the shell stay in place, but the other has seemingly no significance except that a Bowser speaker module fits perfectly inside it, so that's where I put it.

Instead of plugs, i decided to try expanding the "terminal strip" idea I talked about with the Percy install. I cut squares for all the wires that needed bridging and soldered everything to the strip. I did other ones for the keepalive plug to prevent stress on the decoder and one for the speaker wires to avoid having to manage shrink-wrapped wires. Overall I wasn't very pleased with the all-on-one-board approach, as the board size was somewhat too small and the wires were clipped a little too short.

Gordon

I don't have any pictures of Gordon's installation, unfortunately. It's basically the same as Annie's. Gordon is the other locomotive that does not use the Bowser speaker module.


That's it for now! I hope it was inspiring or at least interesting to read. I will post more pictures and maybe a tutorial when I get back to working on Thomas & Friends models. I'm happy to answer any questions, too!

[Red Tender 5]

[reserved]

[Chaz]

Kelson, I love all the specifics you shared with your experience with DCC and using your "cheater boxcars" on the forum!  DCC is something I feel gets a little overlooked when it comes to Thomas modeling, and I'm genuinely excited for the upcoming HO DCC sound Thomas and Percy models. I'm looking forward to your posts talking about Gordon and when you eventually add DCC and sound to the rest of your collection.  It's very inspirational to me and I hope to one day add DCC to my N scale collection as well.