Stop me, as soon as I go off track here.
1)Our main goal is keeping power to the DCS board, over pesky frogs, and unnoticed dirty track sections.
2) The center rail is the weak point. There are lots of wheel contacts, but few center rail pickups. Also, the center rail has inherent gaps at switches and crossovers.
Wouldn't the easiest solution be center rail pickups on the front car and a single thin wire to the loco? Almost everything is already there, if you’re running passenger cars. You just have to pick a favorite front car or 3, for modification.
I strung my polar express cars together this way. Not to solve this problem, but because it allowed me to get rid of most of the electrical pickups on the passenger cars. I also added weight to the loco. I can now pull the 7-9 cars I like to pull.
The center pickups aren’t hard to attach to a number of trucks. I find the wiper style outer rail pickups to be a bit more difficult as you might have to tap the truck.
That thin wire might not be the prettiest, but I can’t think of anything that would be less invasive, or cheap. I think the battery or Cap setup would have to go in another car anyway. Wouldn’t both wreak havoc on DCS signal, if they were in the signal path? Also with a battery or Cap you would need fully powered trucks
