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RailPro on Battery Power

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Terry:
Rings all-in-one design makes it quite easy to come up with a fully battery powered locomotive.  This example uses an 850mah Lipo cell which produces 3.7 volts.  The little(!) circuit board under the tangle of wires boosts the voltage to 12 volts.  The unit is charged externally by a hobby LiPo charger.

This installation lasts about one hour of continuous running on a level circle of tracks.  The pay off, however, is in operation.  We get from two and a half hours up to an incredible four hours on the layouts we visit.  Why the difference?  Just like the prototype, it’s ‘hurry up and wait’ progress, although the ‘hurry up’ might be a misnomer.  Our five units (from Bachmann, Athearn, and Walthers) play nice with the DCC and DC folks, and unless we tell people, no one knows the difference.

NOTE!!!  LiPo cells can explode when heated, shorted, punctured or used with a non LiPo compliant charger!   Unless you can fit the connectors the cell comes with into your conversion, you will need to make some changes.  This is the only twitchy part of these projects.

Parts sources:
   LiPo batteries: from the internet, I searched by ‘850mah single cell LiPo’
   voltage converter: Pololu U3V12D12 from Litchfield Station hobbies
   Plugs/wire: Miniatronics 50-001-02

A note about that tangle of wires.  Originally we thought best to make the battery removable for charging.  This extra wire allowed us to lift the RailPro and slide out the battery.  In the end, we taped the battery to the floor.  This was easier to handle.



William Brillinger:
Very Nice Terry!  Do you have any diesel examples?

[Note: I inserted your image into the post for easier viewing.]

G8B4Life:
Welcome Terry.

Your post will certainly give a few here a renewed vigor in their quest for deadrail. I'm still yet to see anyone fit all this into a hood unit though. Have any of your group done that yet? It would be interesting to see them.

- Tim

Terry:
Hi Bill,

Funny thing; tonight I received the batteries to do a GP35 conversion.  I've had the chance to confirm the fit (rear end of long hood), the placement of the Ring module and the sugar cube speaker toward the cab.  There's many a slip twixt the cup and the lip. . . we'll see how the rest goes.

More later I'm sure -
Terry

KPack:
Terry - This is the first picture I can remember of someone actually using Railpro with a battery.  I'm sure people have done it before but I don't remember seeing it.  Good info on the converter from Litchfield Hobbies.  That is certainly a tiny circuit board, which is great considering all the other stuff that takes up room on an install like this. 

This particular install doesn't allow charging from the rails, does it?  So in order to charge you must disassemble the tender and manually plug in the battery.  I'm not opposed to do that, I would just need to find a way to easily access the plug; hopefully without having to remove the shell in order to do so.

I model only diesel (late era) and removing the shell on my models is a delicate procedure.  If I could find a way to make the plug easily accessible then I would be much more comfortable.  I know that people have talked about putting the battery in the fuel tank, but I have yet to see a model that will actually allow that, as the fuel tank is normally taken up with the mounting for the motor.  I'm looking around at other batteries and wonder if they will work.  Lower mah batteries are smaller, but how long would they last?  I'd love to get a good hour out of a locomotive with lights (LED) and sound. 

-Kevin

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