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.

[sieggs1]

Hey All,

Interesting feedback.

Maybe it's because I'm coming back to model railroading after a 35-year hiatus and DCC (or rather, RailPro), keep-alives and all this technology is new to me. Back then, as a kid, my locos never ran very well. Of course, I didn't really understand the importance of cleaning track or locos.

I knew I wanted to try a keep-alive with RailPro, so I bought the PBM-2 for about a half-dozen of my locos, since it was RailPro.

Well, needless to say, the costs add up. Pricing is up to $49.99 retail for the PBM-2, but they do work.

Then I saw some folks were using keep-alives other than the PBM-2 successfully.

I also saw Larry Puckett's YouTube videos on making your own capacitor modules. So I ordered the parts, all from Amazon, and built a few.
https://youtu.be/nm2b7MfQrFs?si=ctzjD-S-pv-0StN-
https://youtu.be/bhK4HuJb6Ws?si=tk9QRY0EXbfLDm3h

What's amazing is not only how cheap and easily these can be made (I made two for less than $10 each), but how well they work. At 1/5th the cost of the PBM-2, they can run much longer. I was able to use five 3.0v 2F capacitors in series and fit them into my SW1500 in place of the PBM-2 and have room for a larger speaker. And the things never stall. You can also rearrange the capacitors to fit the space.

I think I will be going this route in the future. It's just kind of a no-brainer. I was very surprised.

I get that if you power your frogs and keep your track clean, you should have minimal issues. However, I like the security of the homebrew keep-alive.

In addition, by using RailPro, we are in a unique situation in that the modules still respond when on capacitor power whereas folks with DCC lose control of their locos for the short time they operate on said power.

Maybe this is all old news but I think this will save me a lot of money.

Has anyone experimented with DIY Keep-Alives?

Rob S.