All this expertise among forum members and yet still no command control "fix" for a conventional P.E. berk with the whistle steam effect?

I never knew Lionel made whistle steam effect for conventional run engines,Interesting.

Doug

If I understand you correctly this is what you are looking for?

http://www.electricrr.com/Hobby/PWW-Ctlr/PWW.htm 

This will drive a conventional motor driven steam whistle with the whistle button on a Cab remote.

Carl

Carl,  Thats for the old fan driven whistle sound, He's asking about fan driven smoke(steam) effect the way I read it?

Doug

He's also asking how to do it in command mode, not conventional mode.  I actually have the means to cobble this up at this point, but I haven't gotten to building the "official" board that will support this.  I haven't actually looked at the PE locomotive in question to see exactly how the whistle smoke is done.  As I recall from discussions, it's actually a puffer with a little fan to tap off the whistle smoke.  My target is going to be for retrofits so I can add a smoke unit and get whistle smoke.

Interesting that nobody's tried this. Could it possibly be that not many of this P.E. model was made and sold?

No one has added tmcc to theirs yet?

Any help or suggestions are most welcome> Thanks.

If I remember right, the fan motor just picks up the same DC offset the whistle receives and operates the fan.  You are correct, John, another member with the PE set with a station sound car was trying to do this, and I believe Jon Z was going to help produce it.  G

I guess the bigger question is...

What is the demand for adding TMCC, TMCC controlled whistle smoke into a starter set engine?

I bet the same demand that drives LC and LC+ over TMCC engines.

I do think the PE has a special place because of the numbers produced and demand for that engine.  Would not surprise me if a LC+ was the next Lionel PE to come out with Whistle Steam to resell this product and meet a demand in the middle that can't afford the Legacy version.  G

John,

  If you want, I can lend you my conv Polar Express engine after Christmas, it just never smoked good.

Art 

I looked at the PE with whistle smoke, it indeed has the puffer with an aux fan for whistle smoke. 

Personally, I doubt I'd expend the effort to make this work with TMCC, I'd rather have a better and larger locomotive that I could install a second smoke generator for an update like this.

 I know that Jon Z. is certainly in a position to assist, he's already produced a board that decodes the serial data and outputs a signal for whistle or bell.

If true, and I believe it would have to be a dc offset produced to operate the conventional bell/whistles it should drive the whistle smoke board.  So maybe it is out there. 

Not sure why a bigger loco matters?  If it is a Lionel whistle smoke aren't you going to trigger the same way?  Legacy already has it, MTH looks like there are going to produce it in O now.  So If a demand exist it is a back fit to conventional or TMCC engines.  I would believe trigger method is the same.   The harder part as I have said a few years ago, is the plumbing and space for this.  G

The key point you make is the plumbing and space.  A larger locomotive makes that much easier.

If I'm going to expend the effort to do an upgrade like this, it's going to be in a fairly nice locomotive that I'd actually want to run.

Legacy does this on their integrated controller boards, not really suitable for a DIY installation unless you want to get fairly involved.  As for MTH, I have no idea how they'll do it, but I presume it'll be another integrated solution that would be very difficult to transplant to a TMCC environment, or probably even to a PS/2 upgrade.

It's not going to produce a DC offset, at least when I do it.  It's going to be an output that can operate a smoke unit.  Since the whistle smoke unit heater has to be energized at a low level all the time to provide instant smoke, it'll also have to have variable power control for the heater.  Besides the heater, it has to produce the DC for the smoke fan.

My thinking is to use something like the MTH HO smoke unit, it's a pretty small unit that would produce the right amount of "steam" for a steam whistle.

Understood, your not doing.  My point was if ERR produced the board that can trigger conventional whistle and bell sounds (replicating a DC offset) that board must read the TMCC and than send the DC Offset to the conventional board to trigger the effect.

The PE Whistle effect is pretty simple.  It uses the smoke unit heater, with a tap off connected to a small fan/motor assemble.  When a Whistle DC signal is sent that same offset is received by the small relay board (same as the one on a basic air whistle tender) and passes the DC signal to run the fan.  The fan pumps the smoke through the whistle port as long as the whistle button is pressed.

The whole issue is that translator that reads the TMCC whistle signal and creates an offset.  G

MartyE, it's not a starter set engine but rather Lionel's #6-18754, a P.E. 2-8-4 Berskshire that was produced by Lionel as an upgrade, traditional size locomotive for their P.E. rtr freight and passenger starter sets. It features a puffer smoke generator which also supplies smoke to the whistle so that steam appears to blast from the whistle when the WHISTLE button is pressed on the transformer. Smoke production commences momentarily, faster if you run your locomotive at high speed.

Gunrunnerjohn, I would love having a better and larger engine but unfortunately I don't presently have the space available for the bigger radius curved track that a larger loco requires and I want to run it now in tmcc rather than "wait" until I might someday have the space available for larger curved track which unfortunately I don't anticipate happening anytime soon.

*** I was hoping Christmas would come early as someone on this forum could likely help me out but while not being electronically savy, it seems the responses so far indicate there won't be anything looming in the near future to accomplish what I want to do. The Grinch seems to win again.

. 

You'd be correct, the board does indeed read the serial data and translate both the whistle and bell into DC offsets while passing the AC as well.  This allows you to drive conventional stuff that is looking for these offsets.

Well, to actually do the whole job would be a fairly good sized Christmas present, probably why nobody is jumping up to take it on.   I'd like to do something with this capability, but I also want to make it more universal in it's capabilities, that's going to take some time.  My idea is to create a board that reads serial data and has a number of outputs that can drive lights or servos.  One thing I want to be able to do is the whistle smoke.  Another is have a PWM output that will drive a model servo to provide motion for opening doors, the engineer waving, etc.  Finally, I'd add some lighting outputs that would be programmed for various uses.

Marty, it's kind of a "starter +" set.

Marty, Yes.  It is a stand alone engine tender with whistle smoke.   G

It's this one.

http://www.lionel.com/Products...neID=&CatalogId=

I have this engine and it is one of my favorites!  Not only does it come with WS, it has a full RS tender as well that is really close in quality to the Legacy one.  The sounds play over each other, unlike the RTRs.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...amp;feature=youtu.be

It's one of my favorites too. The high quality sound is due to not only to higher-end railsounds chip but also that the tender shell is diecast rather than plastic which RTR starter set tenders typically have plus it's also has two-channel audio that allows it to run two sounds simultaneously rather than single channel audio where when one sound it activated it cuts off another sound (such as chuffing) that's already be playing.

Only shortcoming I see other than being unable to add command and cruise control to it is that I can't understand when Lionel designed it with a fan unit to move smoke to the whistle that they likewise didn't add a fan driven smoke unit for the main smokestack. Was there really that much $$$ saved by using a puffer unit instead of a fan driven one for the smokestack?

While I'm thankful Lionel made such a great little P.E. conventional unit for those of us with small radius track, I'm still optimistically hopful someone might know how to "cobble" a way to add cruise and command control to it.

BTW, maybe Lionel might someday make it a LionChief Plus P.E. engine with all the sounds from it's 10th Anniversary RTR starter set and incorporate the whistle steam effect into it too. That would really be something to be thankful for by P.E. lovers who lack either the big bucks, big curves, or both needed for Lionel's current bto Legacy P.E. Berks.

Here are some video clips of this engine in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v00dzXoRzXI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6X_bCFi9tk