A 2000 Mah, 9.6v, NiMh battery gives me 2.5 hours of run time. Takes 2 hours to recharge at 1A/hr. Been over 5 years now and None of the 18 battery powered engines I own have quit working and no batteries have needed replacing.
I’ve gone close to 9 months without recharging some of the batteries and they still had enough juice to run for 10-15 minutes. I keep a charge log of when each engine goes on the charger, at one time I was running trains daily so I had to charge them frequently, past 2 years not as much (other hobby got in the way).
I’d trade having to charge a battery any day over the troubles I had with DCS and TMCC (and reading the Bible’s on them) and I honestly didn’t have anywhere near the issues some of you guys have had.
The Deltang system I use doesn’t have smoke or sound, but the BLueRail units I was using had sound. It came out of my Ipad but it was there. Plus, with the help of Bob Walker, I was able to install a Bluetooth speaker in all 3 of the engines that had the BlueRail board install. Made the sound a lot louder and it came out of the engine vice the Ipad. There’s some YouTube videos showing the Weaver RS3 and Williams E7 that had them installed. Also put it in a Bachmann G scale 4-6-0 Annie.
The new BlueRail/DCC boards have sound, not sure about smoke and are rated for higher amperage than the ones I have.
