The capacitors worked great, thanks @gunrunnerjohn. I thought I was on the home stretch and was attempting to tap into the power feeds for the always on blinking light on top (to power lights for the cab). I found out the blinking isn't because of the light bulb, but it comes from the circuit board to the power for that light. I will have to tap into the raw track power to power the cab lights. I don't want the engineers to be in the dark.
Another question came up, the picture of which is attached. This strip of aluminum (?) is loosely connected to a plastic protrusion from the roof of the engine, and it connects to the circuit board. Nothing is connected to it, and I could find no metal to which it connects. Any idea why it's there. The only thing I could see that it did was to block the blinking light from leaking through to the cab. That's fine, but why connect it to the circuit board? I've kinda run the engine and don't see that anything has changed.
As I'm writing this I thought, is this some type of antenna? It says it is Command Control equipped, although I can't use that right now.
