Track Cleaning Hack

The problem with track cleaning cars is that if the track is dirty enough to need cleaning, the loco pulling the car is going to have spotty performance on the dirty track. Sometimes I daydream about getting a radio controlled battery powered "dead rail" loco for this purpose, but it suddenly dawned on me that I could hook a 9 volt battery onto an ordinary HO diesel chassis and have pretty much the same result at far less cost and trouble.

I wound up ordering a 3-pack of what Amazon calls a DAIERTEK 9V Battery Holder with on-off switch at $6.99. I used an old Stewart/Kato F-unit chassis that had couplers mounted. I disconnected the ttrack leads from the trucks to the wire bus on the plastic mother board and soldered the leads from the battery holder to those same wire leads. I installed a 9 volt bettery, taped the holder to the chassis, turned the on-off switch ON, and it went whirring away.

I can turn the Stewart chassis back to a model loco simply by untaping the battery holder, unsoldering the battery leads, and reconnecting the track leads from the trucks, but I would probably add a DCC decoder if I did this. If the whole idea doesn't work out, that's what will happen.

My layout cleasrances are set up for "Ezceeds Plate C" auto parts cars and such, and the battery holder has no trouble with tunnels and bridges.

My main line is an oval in a sort of double folded figure eight, about 160 feet. At 9 volts, the Stewart chassis runs at a medium-slow speed, which avoids derailments. It takes several minutes to do a complete transit of the main line. A big advantage is that the layout has really too much hidden track, but this setup will clean in the tunnels. The hookup works on 2% grades on the main line.

The photo shows it coupled to an A-Line track cleaning pad mounted in an Athearn box car. I've also used it with a Bachmann track cleaning tank car. So far, it seems to need at leastr a dozen transits of the main line to get things in acceptable shape. Full testing is still under way.