Testing locomotives with a battery

[u18b]

This is actually a good question.

For example, if the question were about Z scale, they are rated at something like 7 volts.

T scale is rated at around 5.

Loved the car battery story....
Hey!  It was 12 volts!  Same as my power pack!
hahahaha.

But actually, it reminds me of my grandfather's old - what did they call it?- Standard Gage  (sort of close to G scale- maybe smaller) from the 1910s or 20s.  It ran off a big battery.

[peteski]

Ms. Dee's kidding aside, N scale trains were designed to run from a 12 volt power supply.  Just as it was mentioned few times, a large 12 volt lead-acid car battery outputs a correct voltage to power N scale trains (at full speed).  While such large battery has a capability to supply hundreds of amps of current, due to Ohm's law ( (yes, that guy had to get involved here with his equations) the model locomotive will only consume few hundred milliamps.  No damage will occur, no flying shrapnel.  People who are not familiar with electric theory somehow think that a large battery will somehow fry a delicate model.  No so. The only possible problem is the large current such a battery can provide (assuming that the circuit it supplies has a low enough resistance - such as a shorted switch). In those cases, enough current will flow to fry something which is not designed to withstand such current.  As Nkalanga stated, using automotive light bulbs in series with the track wiring is a simple way to limit the current to safe levels.  When model trains were in their infancy, they did in fact run using large lead-acid batteries.

[GimpLizard]

Hmm... I remember when
Kiz tested a loco with a
car battery. I was picking
shrapnel out of his fat
head for a week...

Fat "head", Dee?

[Kisatchie]

Hmm... I was just being
polite...