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I have a thread going on the Flyer "S" Gauge thread.  Trying to fix a Flyer 490 whistling baggage car.  It uses a DC relay, ala Lionel, to cycle a 'reverse' unit to turn the whistle on and off.  The DC relay is giving me problems.

I thought I had it fixed but no dice.  The relay responds to AC.  This in turn makes it 'chatter' and engages the reverse solenoid turning the drum, and thus, the whistle on and off constantly.

I took the relay apart, polished everything, but no change.  It gets magnitized (pulls the plates together) with AC and only slightly more so with a DC push.  I have several 'parts' Lionel relays and they only close their contacts with DC.  A Lionel relay won't fit in the baggage car (as a possible fix).

What goes bad in a DC relay?  How are they constructed as opposed to a AC relay used in many Lionel Postwar accessories?  It's all staked together.

Any 'Chicago' Flyer collectors have a spare Prewar Flyer relay laying around?

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There's nothing in a plain DC relay to prevent it from chattering on AC. 

The Lionel horn relay is a special relay with a copper ring to act as a shorted transformer secondary and swamp out the AC component to the relay will only react to the DC component of the signal.  The DC component in on the tracks is not affected by the shorted transformer turn and thus picks the horn relay.

Johnsgg1 posted:
...

Any 'Chicago' Flyer collectors have a spare Prewar Flyer relay laying around?

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Is this a restoration or a repair?  If it doesn't matter what's under-the-hood you can replace the unique and possibly hard-to-find DC-sensitive relay with a modern circuit module as described in this thread

In your S thread it appears you're still messing with the reversing-unit mechanism.  Seems one approach would be to install a switch to bypass the reversing unit so the the whistle turns on only when the controller button is pressed.  Then your customer can choose (or not) direct control of the whistle (press button, whistle ON) rather than the alternating ON-OFF behavior if going thru the reversing unit.

Perhaps someone has come up with a modern replacement module for the combo (DC-sensitive detector and reversing unit).  In other words the module's relay would have the alternating/latching ON-OFF behavior triggered by pressing the Whistle (or Bell) button to turn a rolling-stock feature on and off. 

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