Is there possible way to run o gauge on DC and or Dcc?

I'm not GunrunnerJohn, but here's a little basic information...  Most Lionel locos made before 1979 have universal "Pullmor" motors and electromechanical e-units which will operate on AC or DC.  Lionel gradually began using DC motors through the 1980s and 1990s, and almost exclusively after that.  Steam locos built by 3rd Rail and other manufacturers have "can" motors which, themselves, run on DC.  One of the key functions of the on-board electronics is to convert the AC coming from the rails to DC, which runs the motor.  (The electronics also reverse the polarity, regulate the speed, provide information to sound circuitry, control smoke and lights, etc.)  If the electronics were designed to accept 0-18V AC as input, you could destroy them by putting DC on the rails.

If you're willing to live without speed control and other features, and also to reverse your loco by changing polarity with a switch at the DC power pack, you could remove all of the electronics, wire the motor directly to the power leads coming from the rails, and the loco should run on DC.  This is what 2-rail O scalers and model railroaders in other scales did for years, until the advent of DCC.  In 3-rail O scale, this is a good way to verify operation of the motor and drivetrain before installing an electronics package.

Running on DCC would require a full DCC system, and also replacing all of the on-board electronics with a DCC decoder, sound card, etc.  Likely an expensive proposition.  To achieve inter-operability, you would also have to perform this conversion on every locomotive you add to your railroad.  Hope this helps!

The 3rd Rail steamer is very unlikely to have an AC motor, AAMOF, I've never seen one equipped that way.

You can run it on DC if you use the MTH PS/3 upgrade kit, the MTH electronics runs on AC or DC.  For TMCC, you will have to use AC.

As John said, PS-32 board via the PS-3 upgrade kit.  AC or DC and pull the jumper on top of board and it will operate on DCC.  Jumper in is DCS or Conventional.   G

Since you are working to cobble together an engine, have you considered making this one Battery Powered Remote Control (BPRC)?  Given the size of the engine(s) you're working with, you should easily be able to fit all the modifications AND be on the cutting edge of a new train control technology.  With these changes, you essentially get DCC control without having to change your layout wiring or modifying all your other equipment.

Search for "how to" info on this forum and on YouTube.

Chuck

@PRR1950 posted:

Since you are working to cobble together an engine, have you considered making this one Battery Powered Remote Control (BPRC)?  Given the size of the engine(s) you're working with, you should easily be able to fit all the modifications AND be on the cutting edge of a new train control technology.  With these changes, you essentially get DCC control without having to change your layout wiring or modifying all your other equipment.

Search for "how to" info on this forum and on YouTube.

Chuck

Well I don't have a o gauge layout . Just a n scale layout....when I ran o scale use the good old tube Lionel track around the living room ...ps I do run Dcc on my n scale ..

@gunrunnerjohn posted:

The 3rd Rail steamer is very unlikely to have an AC motor, AAMOF, I've never seen one equipped that way.

You can run it on DC if you use the MTH PS/3 upgrade kit, the MTH electronics runs on AC or DC.  For TMCC, you will have to use AC.

John what ERR run by? AC or DC or both. .  guy I got that railsound tender said it ran on DC and tried it and it runs on DC too. And ya 3rd rail has a DC can motor which id wired temporarily to run on DC to do some test runs...

ERR is TMCC it is AC only for the circuit boards.

The nice thing about BPRC is that you don't even need track to run an engine; you could run it (CAREFULLY) on a table top.  You only need power of some type to recharge the batteries.

Chuck

@joseywales posted:

John what ERR run by? AC or DC or both. .  guy I got that railsound tender said it ran on DC and tried it and it runs on DC too. And ya 3rd rail has a DC can motor which id wired temporarily to run on DC to do some test runs...

Like George said, ERR is TMCC and is AC only.

@gunrunnerjohn posted:

Like George said, ERR is TMCC and is AC only.

John how reliable is ERR and how hard is to install that with sound?

@PRR1950 posted:

The nice thing about BPRC is that you don't even need track to run an engine; you could run it (CAREFULLY) on a table top.  You only need power of some type to recharge the batteries.

Chuck

What's BPRC?... Never heard of it..

Battery Powered Radio Control.

Blunami is one brand of circuit board that will facilitate this.

Jeff C

@joseywales posted:

What's BPRC?... Never heard of it..

Battery power is a whole different ballgame, and you'll be using your smart device for control for most of the systems.

The ERR TMCC stuff has no reliability issues, I've installed a ton of them.

@gunrunnerjohn posted:

Battery power is a whole different ballgame, and you'll be using your smart device for control for most of the systems.

The ERR TMCC stuff has no reliability issues, I've installed a ton of them.

Can you run a smoke with it?...another question..if and I mean if I do DC and seam rail sound does run on DC too....can I use the Lionel sound activator/ the push button to to trigger the sounds?..

@joseywales posted:

Can you run a smoke with it?...another question..if and I mean if I do DC and seam rail sound does run on DC too....can I use the Lionel sound activator/ the push button to to trigger the sounds?..

Run a smoke unit with what, TMCC or the Blunami?  For conventional running with DC, you don't have any capability to use Lionel Railsounds or trigger sounds with a sound activator, that only works with AC.

@gunrunnerjohn posted:

Run a smoke unit with what, TMCC or the Blunami?  For conventional running with DC, you don't have any capability to use Lionel Railsounds or trigger sounds with a sound activator, that only works with AC.

I picked up a railsound tender and guy said he tested it on DC ...and yes it works on DC..id tried it...smoke units can run on DC power on mth Lionel's and TA..I'm no hurrys to do anything just yet...just getting ideas...or what's the best feasible route....

@joseywales posted:

I picked up a railsound tender and guy said he tested it on DC ...and yes it works on DC..id tried it...smoke units can run on DC power on mth Lionel's and TA..I'm no hurrys to do anything just yet...just getting ideas...or what's the best feasible route....

Well, you have a choice.  Believe the guy that is totally incorrect or believe me.   You can not trigger the horn or bell in conventional mode for a RS tender.  AAMOF, a RS tender will continuously sound the bell or horn on DC.

A smoke unit can run on DC, we never addressed that.  However Lionel TMCC and Legacy does not run on DC.

Last year my son and I took a post gp9 and converted to dc with decoder. It ran much smoother than ac a course. We just did it to see we were capable of doing it. I don't why lionel didn't do dc from the start. Now all there new engines are dc. They start with ac and convert it to dc on board. It would been a lot more efficient to change to whole thing when they started command control. That's my 2 cents. But all this stuff is what makes the hobby interesting to me. Amazing the technology today.

@Ccriss posted:

Last year my son and I took a post gp9 and converted to dc with decoder. It ran much smoother than ac a course. We just did it to see we were capable of doing it. I don't why lionel didn't do dc from the start. Now all there new engines are dc. They start with ac and convert it to dc on board. It would been a lot more efficient to change to whole thing when they started command control. That's my 2 cents. But all this stuff is what makes the hobby interesting to me. Amazing the technology today.

All fun and games until you absolutely smoke a Lionel TMCC engine, sound car, or other accessory that is AC only attempting to run it on DC.

This is because many of the Lionel circuit designs from around 1995 well into the 2000s was designed only around AC even if parts of the electronics are DC- there are still AC only sections- like the TRIAC controls for lights, smoke, couplers, and so forth. They require the dead zero crossing of AC to turn off after being triggered. Running one of these on DC, the TRIAC outputs get stuck on forever as long as there is DC power present and smoke coupler coils and other problems. Again, there are sound cars, accessories, engines, and so forth that in the manual explicitly state never run on DC and it's not a suggestion- it will bite you in the posterior.

Easy there, Vernon.  What you say is certainly true.  But the post you're quoting is about installing a DCC decoder in a postwar GP9 (and good on you Charlie for trying this!)

Almost every Lionel made before 1979 had a universal motor, and it's known that they often run better and smoother on DC.  The electromechanical E-units work just fine too, although some folks have reported them becoming magnetized after many hours of operation. During the postwar era Lionel stuck with AC on the rails because they generally reserved DC for controlling horns and whistles.

It's my understanding that Lionel developed its own command system in the early-to-mid '90s because the electrical noise (sparking) inherent to high-current open-frame motors and existing AC layout environments interfered with DCC.  If someone knows the whole truth, it would make for an interesting thread!

That makes a lot of sense. Thank you for sharing the info.

If you really wanted to go DC dcc with lionel it is so hard but alotnof work and very expensive. And like they said anything with electronics in it has to go as you will destroy them with DC as they are designed for AC only. We did just to see if we could do it. It was a challenge as we even built our own rectifier. But it is kinda like trying to reinvent the wheel and expensive.  I did put the engine back the way it was. The DC boards are just as expensive as ERR boards to me. Just my thoughts.

"It's my understanding that Lionel developed its own command system in the early-to-mid '90s because the electrical noise (sparking) inherent to high-current open-frame motors and existing AC layout environments interfered with DCC.  If someone knows the whole truth, it would make for an interesting thread!"

When Neil Young and Richard Kughn founded LionTech in the early 1990s to develop TMCC, DCC was still pretty new.  There were no decoders that could handle 4-5 amps and AC motors.  You needed multiple power boosters that would make a medium to large size layout much more expensive than a TMCC layout, because TMCC was independent of the power sources used.  This was in the early to mid-1990s.  Also, high quality sound was non-existent in the DCC world at that time (or anywhere in the hobby), and sound was particularly important to Neil Young. Thus they developed a higher quality sound called Railsounds that outshone the existing sound capabilities on the market.  So both DCC and sounds were in their infancy and Neil Young thought he could do a lot better.  At least this is the story they told us. .

Thanks Karl.  RailSounds was earlier- it made its debut in '89 or '90, and by the time TMCC locos appeared they were already up to RS2.5 or so.  I knew that Neil Young was integral to its development.

Lionel wasn't alone, or the first.  Marklin had some type of independent digital control for their AC-motored Gauge 1 trains circa 1995.  I don't know the specs.  A company called Zimo (which was affiliated with Lenz I believe), also made high-current decoders designed for DC-powered G-scale trains during the 1990s.  The best of these, the MX69V had back-emf speed control!  I found the original TMCC somewhat unreliable and vague, so I researched alternatives and contemplated converting my O gauge trains to the Zimo/Lenz system.  I never followed through.

AristoCraft (also G scale) took a different approach with R/C direct to the loco, i.e., receiver on-board.  This approach is most similar to LionChief, AirWire, or Ring Engineering's RailPro.  I don't believe the Aristo/Crest system had a "command base," nor made any attempt at DCC compatibility.  This approach makes a lot of sense for the vast distances associated with G scale outdoors, and is easy to install because G-scale locos are often made of plastic that doesn't block the radio signal.  Good discussion!!