The Bells are a Ringin'

From early on I've desired to have sounds coming from my engine to add to the joy of running it. While I wanted realistic sounding steam engine noises, for the first couple of years I had to satisfy myself with the occasional leaf getting caught between the wheels.  While it was pleasantly reminiscent of a baseball card in my bike spokes, I never really knew when it was going to start or end and it wasn't very prototypical.

The Piko starter engine I have doesn't have a lot of room inside for add-ons. Looking around I learned that sound system, batteries, and other things too large to fit inside the engine are often held in converted box cars or the tender that comes with many smaller engines.  My engine has only a small little coal tank so I considered converting the starter kit box car, but I didn't really want to always have a box car on the tourist line. So I decided to buy my first rolling stock to convert and started searching for a tender on eBay. I found one that looked in working order and reasonably priced.

Recently acquired UP coal tender

It wasn't until later that I realized I didn't really know enough about this tender. I looked around online to see if I could find out more and maybe even find some instructions to open it up (I hadn't taken any of my cars apart at that time) but I didn't find anything. I searched around on the body but couldn't find a manufacturer mark either. Every online search only led me back to the eBay offering. I'm continually surprised how hard it has been to find information on several cars that I have added to my collection. Many don't have manufacturer marks that I can find so I don't even know where to start. And even if I have the manufacturer's name, I've yet to find a exact match online. Maybe a rant for another post.

So I just dove in to taking the tender apart. It wasn't very expensive and I guessed I probably wouldn't do anything too destructive. Maybe I wouldn't be able to get it back together? But this whole train hobby was about learning to do more mechanical and electronic things -- so time to close my eyes and jump in with both feet! 

Surprise find: it already has a sound card

There was a small cover with a screw, revealing a place to hold 3 AA batteries. Interesting; what could they power? The coal load popped off revealing a holder for rechargeable batteries. I think. That is, there are alternating + and - marks but no sign of contacts or anything to connect the batteries to. Maybe just a battery sleeping compartment? No, probably for an after-market addition. I was left asking myself why would the tender need all of this power? A few more screws and I'm into the heart of the tender. I felt like I was opening up Tutankhamun's tomb but without the dust and fear of mummies. And the discovery: in this cheap coal tender was a sound card and speaker!

Now I really wanted to understand more about the tender so maybe I could just start using this one instead of hacking in a new sound card. I went back to the computer for more searching of pictures and descriptions. And again came up empty-handed. I did note the 8-pin connector that had been glued to the front edge of the tender on the undercarriage. I'll come back to that some time. A few weeks later I took it to a club meeting to show a couple of the experts there. There was a general consensus that it was a Bachman product but that tackling the sound card was probably not worth the effort. Getting this far had been a good bit of effort, so I readily agreed. Plus, I also wanted the sound card to be a DCC decoder so I could do things like have a walk-around throttle. 

For the time being it remained just the coal supply for my engine and extended the length of the train a bit. If you have seen previous videos, you've seen it silently at work.

Earlier this year my wife bought me a combined DCC decoder and sound card as a gift. I had been researching systems and found a couple that I liked but they were all pretty significant investments. It was still going to be a while before I had the full DCC setup but I figured I could at least get some basic sound out of it. The card also came with a small speaker that would fit the tight space in my engine. 

Previously I had opened up the engine to peek at the inner workings, wondering if I might get a view of the hamsters that power it?  Now it was time to open up the engine again, to make sure that any card that I wanted to install would actually fit. I've run into that problem too many times around the (1-to-1) house where a "standard" part didn't quite fit. 

The installed wiring in the engine has a wire harness on each side that takes power from the pickups and splits it between the engine and the front and rear headlights. This takes advantage of the fact that diodes only allow electricity to flow in one direction. [See, my electronics starter kit is already paying dividends.] When power is flowing to make the engine go forward, electricity flows in the correct direction to light the front headlight and in the wrong direction for the rear headlight. If the power on the tracks is reversed, the engine would run in the opposite direction and now the rear light would get the power that it needs. 

Since the wire harness fitted snuggly into the small opening to access the power from the pickups and to feed the engine, I felt I needed to reuse those connectors. So I cut the harness apart and soldered the connectors onto wires that would connect to the sound card. I'm still learning soldering techniques and I ended up twisting the wire and connector together to hold them and then soldered it and covered with a shrink wrap. This works electrically. But it does mean every wire has a weird appendage that does kind of get in the way of squeezing the wires together. This also bit me later when the front headlight didn't work; I had plugged the wire into the appendage instead of the connector. They do look surprisingly similar. I really need to learn to solder the connections in line.

Comparison of connector pin and soldered joint

I had checked that the sound card / decoder would work with DC power and it could be triggered by a reed switch. This is what I expected to use for a while until I had my full set up. My first run led nowhere. But at least the lights turned on so I had done something right on the board. I tested the connections and all seemed OK so I called the help desk. They reported that I needed to set a control variable (CV) on the card to be able to run on DC power, but setting the variable required DCC.  Also, no sounds would be forthcoming without DCC. So basically, no point in having the sound card with my current setup.  Now I had to rewire back to the original set up, and bump up the priority for investing in the full DCC system.

A couple of months ago I was able to take the plunge and get the full DCC system. I'll go through that set up soon but the short version of the story is that I was able to get the new set-up working well enough to run the engine on a test track and play sounds. 

So keep an eye out for out refurbished number 814 pulling in to the station and be ready for your dino experience.