Upgrading Intermountain Passenger cars to Track powered Lighting.

[u18b]

I have almost zero experience with this, except I bought the CSX and Conrail car that came out last year.   These are my first and only Rapido cars with that internal lighting board.

I removed the roof, installed the batteries.  Gave it a try.  I liked the light.  I loved the wand to turn on/off.

My short thoughts have been:

1.  The roof was absolutely perfectly tight when new.  But when I removed it, that little bit of stress began to change things.  It was not perfectly tight.  Still looked good, don't get me wrong.  But looking down the road, taking the roof on and off again does not look like a good option.

2.  I also shared some of Rangust's thoughts.   I don't run trains a lot.   I get stuff out of the box and periodically run them on the Plywood Plains. Then put them away.  So leaving the batteries in for years seemed like a prescription for battery leakage.    I just came across a shirt button that had a flashing crossing signal on it.  Probably 7 or so year old.  Button batteries were a mess.  So they can and do leak.

So I pulled the roof again to take the batteries out for storage.

So now I'm back to #1.   Roof on/roof off.  Repeat/repeat.   Don't like the idea.

I *like* the battery idea over cleaning wheels.

However, I wish they could have made a battery access port from the bottom of the car so that no disassembly of the roof would be required.

That would have been a win/win for me.

Maybe that would be an alternative project for another thread.   Moving the batteries to the bottom.

[peteski]

Problem with batteries is that they will leak caustic electrolyte. Especially the cheap batteries installed in those circuits. And tis is especially true in devices which sit unused for months or years.  I had too many instances of some device (a portable radio, multimeter or such) where it sits unused for years then I open the battery cover and everything is corroded. Even if the batteries were still fully charged when it was put away.  Same thing (even more so) happens with rechargeable batteries!

Adding an anti-flicker device to a track-power lighting circuit is the best possible solution. Cleaning wheels is a fact of life in model RR (and with a simple cleaning station it is rather easy and painless), and the anti-flicker circuit will produce steady light even when the wheels aren't perfectly clean.

To me that is no brainer.  I rather not have to replace batteries in the entire fleet of passenger cars (not even mentioning the cost of batteries).  This is of course a personal preference.