Who's Using Stay-Alive/Keep-Alive, PBM-2 Capacitor Modules?

[sieggs1]

Hey All,

Just wondering how many of you use some kind of Stay-Alive/Keep-Alive capacitor in your locomotives?

How many of your locos have one?

What brand do you prefer to use? RailPro's PBM-2 or something else?

Do any of you roll your own stay-alive capacitors? If so, how do you build it?

I'm curious.

Rob S. "Sieggs"

[Coal Valley BNSF]

Not me! I don't need any band-aids and spend extra cash!! Mine run prefect without them after I spent some time figuring it out.   

[sieggs1]

Coal Valley BNSF,

Excellent. What's your secret? Clean track? Good wiring? Long wheel-base locomotives?

I ask because I am getting back into model railroading after 35 years and I am re-learning all the fundamentals. My old locos from the 1980's run better on RailPro than they did when they were brand new. But I needed a keep-alive for my SW1500 switcher and some other locos to keep them from stalling over unpowered frogs and track that, in the summertime seems to oxidize faster than I can clean it.

I recently started building my own keep-alive capacitor units and I was wondering if anyone else does the same. They can be really cheap and work better than the commercial ones.

Rob S.

[CPRail]

I use the TSC Keep-Alives. It's what I started doing my installs with. So far, 90% of my installs barely have enough room for the LM, the Keep-Alive and a Speaker. There's no room for the relatively huge RailPro PBM-2! I do have one Rapido loco factory installed with their Mo'Power unit, but it barely gives me 3 seconds of power, so I'm not sure about it, but the rest of the install is working perfectly, so I'm not worrying about it!

[LVRR1856]

I'm like Coal Valley - non so far. See how it goes. Moving on to loco #5 & 6, I did buy a PB-1 for a future if needed ? Switcher maybe ?
All the first installs are 8 axel loco's, run great.

[faithie999]

i moved to Tortoise switch machines, and use them to power the frogs in my turnouts.  that, plus keeping the track clean, works for me.  i didn't want to figure out how to cram keep-alives into the shells of my locos.  i know many here do so, but i'm very happy with the tortoise machines.

Ken

[Espeelark]

Howdy Rob,
I do not need to use Keep-Alives in my locos. I keep my tracks clean and my frogs are powered through either Tortoise or Blue-Point turnout controls.
Also, in my return loops/staging tracks, I have circuitry installed that kills the power to the track when the train reaches a certain location in it. If I had KA's, the train would go just keep on going - which I don't want.
There is only one application where I used a KA and it was in my short wheel-base SW1500 that needed to go through unpowered diamonds. I used a TCS KA2 (because it was the smallest available) and documented that install here under the "Finished RailPro Installation Examples" folder.