More Trains on the Palo Verde & Southwestern RR

This is another video showcasing the many trains that run on this beautiful layout every year. Most of the video highlights our Cotton Belt GP-40's, which are in a consist with a Southern Pacific SD-45. These locomotives are AirWire Controlled and Battery Powered. In Fact, every locomotive you will see in this video is AirWire Controlled and Battery Powered. And taking this topic even further, over 3/4 of our locomotives are now converted to AirWire and batteries, which makes running trains so much more fun! It's the only way to go because of 2 issues: No more cleaning the track and no more polarity problems. With battery power, there are no more continuity issues - EVER! You can run your train on any track - anytime - anywhere - without ever having to worry about the positive and negative of electrical current!

On another subject, the Santa Fe PA's and streamlined passenger cars that you see throughout the video are products of MTH. We were able to interface the AirWire board with MTH's DCS system, so we could control the locomotive's speed and direction. We haven't figured out how to control the whistle and bell yet, or turning on and off the smoke unit with a throttle. But we are working hard on these issues, and hope to have them solved before our Christmas Open Houses in December.

Now for the power - since the B unit is a dummy, and has no electronics, we were able to place (2) 22.2 volt Lithium batteries inside the dummy to power each of the A units. And so far, that has worked out really well. It has given us about 4 hours of run time before the batteries need to be recharged. And 4 hours is a lot of time to have fun with trains!

After the power was fine tuned, we next turned our attention to the passenger cars. First, we separated the shells from the frames of each car. Then we siliconed 20 to 25 USAT figures and secured a 14.4 volt Lithium battery into each car to run the lights. That's why there was no flickering in the passenger cars as they went by because they were not reliant on track power. The battery power is constant source of power, and provides a much more realistic feeling as you view those cars around the layout.

This MTH Santa Fe passenger train is a really Great Looking set-up, and we get lots of compliments whenever we run this incredible train!

So sit back, grab a cold one, and enjoy . . . . . . .
"More Trains on the Palo Verde & Southwestern Railroad"