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!