Hi, I'm EMD Trainman and I'm a G scaler. You are probably wondering why I'm even in the HO section. I went to a G scale only train show this weekend and talked to a manufacturer called Bridgewerks who normally only makes transformers for G scale trains. The good news is they finallly are getting into making power for other scales starting with HO and On30 One of my favorite manufacturers to talk to was Dave at Bridgewerks, he has done it again and came up with a huge impressive 25 amp transformer, but he does warn you about it's power. According to what Dave said, there was a guy who bought one and had a incident where the train derailed and the track was stainless steel, well the train derailed in such a way that the wheels got welded to the track, now thats power. In the end nothing got hurt including the locomotive motor. Dave did say he wants to perform a test to finally prove to everyone that there is AC current ripples and that other transformers don't filter them out when transforming the rippled current to DC power, these ripple are harmful to locomotive motors and such ripples causes a lightning storm condition constantly zapping the armature in the motor until finally, failure results. He wants to do a 8 hour full run time test on a motor being powered by Bridgewerks and a motor being powered by a MRC transformer. He did say only 8 hours because he stated thats all the longer it would take for the armature in the motor being powered by a MRC transformer to show damage, now thats scary. Good news for HO scalers, Bridgewerks now offers transformers for that scale.
PowerPacks from everyone Else With all due respect to your buddy, welding trains to the track is not exactly an accomplishment with a DC powersupply designed for model railway use. Transformers coupled to either diodes or some other form of device (rectifier?) converting the the track current to DC is nicely handled by MRC for sixty years or so, along with a host of past (e.g. TROLLER, SCINTILLA,MARNOLD,UNIVERSAL POWERMASTER) , and presumably future makers. Furthermore, delivering the optimum form of DC to trackside is related directly to the type of motor that is being used to power the loco/EMU/trolley being used. Even within that constraint, how you wish to operate with respect to speeds and train weights has a bearing on the suitability of the waveform that the power is being delivered at. In other words this is not transplant vascular surgery, but there are also issues that are not resolved by who brings the most watts to the party. The guys who are already doing it, even in the form of cheap powerpacks for small train sets, do a decent job of it. Afterall, they put the motor loco combination together, and then give it a powerpack to run it round the oval of track adequately. Good-Luck, PJB
