Garden Railway Forum

I have a standard 060 O gauge tender loco made by lima that I was thinking of modifying into a Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway style loco by adding half a driver to the front of the tender but before I do that I need to make it a battery loco.

How do I go about converting it to battery and what do I need to control the speed manually?

find where the wiring goes from the motor to whatever pickups are on the wheels, usually one wire to left side pickup/s and one wire to right hand side, cut them from the pickups (don't want to be sending our battery juice to the rails now do we!)

run wires to wherever you are putting the battery (tender? trailing van?)

strikalite do a nice selection of rechargable batteries or you could just use "normal" batteries in a holder (ebay/maplins)
http://www.strikalite.co.uk/index.asp

if you use a two way switch you can change direction at the flick of a switch (DPDT)

then if you are happy adjusting speed via a knob/chinmey/exhaust/dome/tender filler bump just use a variable speed controller (maplin/ebay)

you could of course radio control it by using something like RCS
http://www.brandbright.co.uk/remotecontrols.htm

you can pick up a potentiometer pretty cheap these days to control the speed manually, just make sure you pick out one suitable to the voltage (that you dont mention) you will use

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/10k-POTENTIOM ... 43a9485501

I have 2 chassis , one being as fitted to the Peter Jones Sir John BAKER.

I will warn you the flanges are small, and the wheel base inflexible due to the plastic bushes sticking out of the chassis.
I got around it by trimming the none powered front and middle to float, and fitting top hat bushes to the chassis.

Metal wheels (as with 12v version are better than the 3v plastic (which mine are)

The 12v has a motor similar to those found on the diesels and 3v a vertical motor with plastic wheels (red or black)

12v find the wires for the pick up and connect to speed controller and batteries.

Crackingjob

Lima 3v chassis


Sir John BAKER chassis as obtained from late Peter Jones family
front axle floats to allow 2'6" curves..does slip off on occassions as flanges are not as deep as 16mm wheels

Voltage? well the motor installed is 12V with pick ups on the wheels, I was thinking of maybe using 9V to keep speed down to realistic speed but I'd welcome any thoughts on this.

to be honest if your going to use a manual speed controller go for 12. If your not My Faller conversion has a 7.2 volt battery on a 12 volt chassis (4WD) and runs at a nice scale speed (although it is Rc with a lipo battery)