The Randall Museum in San Francisco hosts a large HO-scale model model railroad. Created by the Golden Gate Model Railroad Club starting in 1961, the layout was donated to the Museum in 2015. Since then I have started automatizing trains running on the layout. I am also the model railroad maintainer. This blog describes various updates on the Randall project and I maintain a separate blog for all my electronics not directly related to Randall.
2024-02-25 - NCE Boosters Voltage Level, Continued
Category RandallAfter noticing that one of the NCE boosters had a different output voltage, I double checked the setup. We do indeed use NCE PB5 boosters, and their power brick has a switch for 12 V (N scale) or 13.8 V (HO scale). One of them was incorrectly set on 12 V.
That was enough to fix the voltage issue on the track:
Booster 1 |
13.1 V |
P1 V1 (Valley1), P1 STKYD |
Booster 2 |
12.4 V |
P2 V2 (Valley2), P2 NAPA, P2 TOWN LODI, P2 FAIRFIELD |
Booster 3 |
12.5 V |
P3 MTN-1, P3 BRN RCH-2 |
Booster 4 |
12.6 V |
P4 MTN-2, P4 BRPORT, P4 SIA RND, P4 STK STN |
Booster 1 |
Booster 2 |
Booster 3 |
Booster 4 |
I also added a static display of the voltage of Booster 3 by the command station:
This covers the power districts for Mountain 1 (MTN-1), Branchline (BRN), and Richmond Yard (RCH-2). This is the area where we suspect some trains struggle and Allen and I wanted to have an easy way to visualize the voltage.