A 6th Video featuring LocoFi is now on YouTube

Please note that these first comments were written before viewing the forum this morning, June 2, 2022. I had read the “Interesting! We would love to hear more about it.” comment yesterday.

As a technical writer and editor for almost 4 decades, I tend to write things out and mull over them before posting to any venue. I also have a tendency to be quite verbose, but I try to format an intelligent response based on facts and not opinion or what I “think” in that moment in time.

Unfortunately, I did not do that yesterday.

It has been an interesting 24 hours of “thinking” about consisting locomotives with a dedicated battery car.

After sleeping on it, I realized that the methods that I was originally considering would not really work. What I was originally thinking was to either use series or parallel wiring from the battery pack to the motors, but that only applied to the motors originally, while not considering the two independent decoders/LocoFi modules to control the motors, lights and sounds of both locos.

I had arrived at that first erroneous way of thinking because it was quite common, in the very early days of radio controlled electric flight, to use parallel or series wiring to two identical brushed DC motors to be controlled either with a switch or some primitive speed controller. That’s not really applicable here, but that line of thinking threw me off for a bit.

For multi-motor planes and drones today, we use brushless motors and each motor requires their own electronic speed controller (ESC) fed from one battery pack via a “Y”-type harness for airplane twins while multi-rotors use their own controller, which may or may not contain the ESCs, to power and control each motor (simplified version). This type of system is a bit more germane to what we are trying to do, but way too complicated, especially for when there is more than one locomotive in the consist and only one battery car, as wiring would become quite cumbersome.

I now think that I should have included my first “gut” reaction, in video 6, that a Con to Dead Rail, when using a dedicated battery car, is that consisting is either extremely complicated or not really a viable option.

Like LocoFi itself, in its simplified way to do remote control of the motor with sound and lights, I’ve tried to make converting to Dead Rail as simple as possible for the end user following the KISS process. Removing cylindrical IMR Lithium-ion cells and charging them in a dedicated, no user input, charger was part of that process. Placing the batteries/cells in battery boxes in a gondola, with an easily removable load, or boxcar, with an easily removable shell, was part of the KISS process.

At this point, I really, really wish that I had noted that the ability to consist locomotives is limited to non-existent when using a trailing battery car with diesel locomotives.

When LocoFi releases its steam version, then consisting steam locomotives could be easier, as the trailing car could be the tender.

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This was written after reading the comments in this thread this morning, 06/02/2022.

I agree with John 100%. Small gauge wire and connector losses could be considerable. The tiny connectors, required between locomotives, could contribute to a lot of voltage drop, as tiny connectors, in general, have quite high resistance as well as the small gauge wire.

I got rid of the small, but not tiny, connector that I originally used in my Conrail conversion with the gondola battery car. When I removed that connector and soldered the wires, I reconfigured that “new” combination in the LocoFi App. The Conrail’s top speed, in the 7 step speed configuration in the App, went up from 65 mph to 72 mph, so I didn’t use a connector when I converted the CSX with the boxcar battery car. My battery cars are now permanently fixed/soldered to their respective locomotives.

The first thing that I did this morning was go to YouTube and use the search term HO model railroad. I was looking to see when locomotive consists were typically used. After briefly looking at maybe the first 50 or so videos, that actually showed HO trains running, I concluded that the majority of consisted locomotives appeared on club size layouts and very large home layouts. That didn’t really surprise me. The vast majority of the videos, showing HO trains running, appeared to me, to be single locomotives with not a huge amount of rolling stock trailing behind them. Just an observation.

Consisting diesel locomotives with a single battery car does indeed get quite complicated, and is probably not worth the effort for most people. I feel that a vast majority of folks going Dead Rail with small to moderate size HO layouts probably won’t use or need it. Just my opinion.