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 Post subject: Adapting Protosound units to a control stand
PostPosted: Fri Aug 09, 2013 10:24 am 

Joined: Sat Jul 02, 2005 7:16 am
Posts: 1998
Have any of you tried adapting model railroad locomotive protosound units for use in a control stand or on a static display locomotive?

It looks to me like the cheapest and most adaptable approach to this would be to use one of the three-rail protosound equipped locomotive chassis (MTH SW-8 as an EMD example) with the drive motors disconnected, powered by one of the small Lionel 60-Watt or 90-Watt trainset transformers with the control stand throttle operating the transformer throttle through a bellcrank linkage or a choke cable. The three-rail units have plenty of volume as they are designed to compete with the louder mechanical noise background of O-Scale. The volume on the O-Scale models is also readily adjustable, and the background noise features are programmable through the standard throttle and/or direction control.

Here is an example of the sound quality in recent O-Scale model locomotives. I don't know if this is someone's personal layout or a club layout, it is obviously under construction. They start moving at 1:30 into the tape. The station talk and crew talk features of these sound systems are programmable, and can be shut off. They have only a few messages and tend to get irritating after you have listened to them a few hundred times:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtP9MpkAf8Y

The model manufacturers now have very good sounding units for EMD, Alco, GE, FM and Baldwin applications, providing quite a variety of available options.

Anybody tried this? If so, do you have any additional recommendations about hardware that might be used?

PC

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