Electrify a what? You read that right. Why would you need track power pickups in a boxcar? To light it up as part of a Christmas train!
If you have been to Night Trains at the Twin City Model Railroad Museum, you have seen the beautifully lighted Christmas train on the big O scale layout. It has thousands of fiber optic lights, as many as 2,000 in a single car (or so I’m told – I didn’t take time to count). Those are examples of track powered box cars. But they didn’t come that way!
Lighted passenger cars are common, and they come with track power pickups built in by the manufacturer. But boxcars and flat cars don’t come with track power pickups. The truck from a passenger car typically doesn’t fit a boxcar, so stealing from a passenger car isn’t an option. There are very limited options for buying after-market power pickups. There are a couple of options available, but they only fit a very limited set of trucks, and didn’t include my LGB and Bachmann rolling stock.
Based on what I was seeing as original manufacturer design and after-market design, I came up with my own design. I 3D printed the thing I will call an adapter since I don’t know what proper name it might have. The adapter includes a screw hole to mount it to the truck, and slots to hold brass strips that I bend into wipers that are in contact with the wheels.
I put a set of my newly wired trucks on a boxcar that holds the most power hungry of the Christmas cars I am designing – the LED marquee powered by an Arduino. The display is a 64 x 32 array of RGB LEDs, almost like a low resolution video screen. This box car also holds a sound board and speaker for playing Christmas music. It runs! As long as the track is clean, that little Arduino with a big display keeps running as it rolls down the track. And Ella Fitzgerald is singing “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town” all the way down the track (along with 10 other artists singing other songs).
