Not to sound like a commercial, but we have been very pleased with the Quikcharge 64vdc unit Ryan Scott mentioned. The price is reasonable for what it is, I can't imagine not having it.

David Farlow
Whitewater Valley Railroad

A little bit of commercial recommendations is exactly what I want. :-)

Greg

At the Connecticut Eastern RR Museum, we are using the Model 6080a charger from Associated Equipment. If you go to: http://www.associatedequip.com/associated/index.html and select Multi Chargers (series) from the left panel, you will see the one we use. It handles from 1-36 Lead Acid cells / 2-106 Vdc up to 6 amps charging.

We have them in the LIRR 400 44 tonner and the CDoT 2057 FL-9. In both cases a location was found to safely house the chargers, in both cases we connect them directly to the battery side of the knife switch. We have had them for about 6 years with no problems, and on the 44 tonner, the charger was definitely making an improvement on the batteries in her, until we forgot to plug her in and got hit with a somewhat early freeze that was harsher than usual for that time of the year.

Rich C.

The pair of Copper Range Baldwin Diesels that McHugh Bros. used on the New Hope & Ivyland RR had 112 volts of batteries, 14 8 volt batteries. They could only MU with each other. One was scrapped for parts, the other is on SMS Rail System. The charging voltage at 2.3 volts per 2 volt cell was 129.6 volts. If you removed all the wood blocking from the 2 battery boxes, there was exactly enough room to jam another 8 volt locomotive battery in each. Mr. James McHugh ordered that done so that the battery voltage would almost equal the charging voltage. Without any clearance between batteries, it was hard to reach the side handles when it came time to lift them out!
Our 44-ton General Electric Diesel had 64 volts of battery and charged at 73.6 volts; our 45-ton General Electric Diesel had 32 volts of battery and charged at 36.8 volts. Our American Locomotive Crane was supposed to be the same, but we put 5 6-volt truck batteries in it, and hoped it would start easily.
We did make a large semi-portable battery charger with a Variac variable transformer for regulation. It could charge anything below about 140 volts. Occasionally I would unscrew it from the wall and take it and a lot of extension cords to a locomotive that wouldn't start, but was somewhere near commercial power.