Barry & Jim Thank you for the information. I am slowing unpacking my locomotive fleet and do not want to damage any or create any problems by having bad or weak batteries. I will remove each battery and check them with a meter and charge them if need be as I have the MTH Charger. My long term plan has always been to replace the batteries with BCR's. The intent of this thread was to try and determine when the changes took place to help me determine how many of each may be required. I did contact MTH and got this reply on Tuesday:
Thank you for contacting MTH Electric Trains. We appreciate your interest in our products. I am afraid I cannot give you an exact date or catalog where we switched from the 5-volt ProtoSound 2.0 to the 3-volt system. For the Premier engines (steam and diesel) in was primarily in the 2004 volume 1 catalog; the majority of the engines offered in that catalog or after have the 3-volt system. For the RailKing engines the switch over was about one catalog later - the 2004 volume 2 catalog. If you have engines that were released around this time we can check on a specific models.
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Thank you,
Jim, to your point about knowing that there were 2 different boards 5 vs 3. I was aware of it just did not much attention to it as I never had more than 3 locomotives running at one time. When I would unpack one to run I would charge the battery for a while before running it and always noticed the different charging ports. I wanted to learn the cut off point for 5 vs 3 just to try and cut down the amount of research I needed to do in determining how many and which BCR's I would need to acquire. With the information that both Barry and yourself have supplied along with the MTH email I believe I have less of an issue than I thought as most all of my locomotives will be PS2 3 volts as the majority are post 2004.
I want to Thank both of you for your advice and assistence.
