Recently made lemonade from a lemon and thought I'd share...
While trying to attach a 154C contactor to a piece of O-gauge track, the curved portion that snaps onto the center rail broke. I couldn't find anyone selling that part (Trainz has a lot of the pieces for 154C, but not that one). The 154C seems to be like gold these days, so I had to fix it. Rusty ones are offered for as much as $30 on ebay - for that kind of money I'd rather buy an electronic actuator and get a more realistic flash rate.
The 154 crossing signal is 9" tall, which is 36 feet for O - about the height of a 3-story building! It's tall for standard gauge too - at 1/32 scale, it's 24 feet and even at 1/24 it's 18 feet tall. So I decided to try to fix the contactor so it would work with standard gauge track.
I measured the thickness of the remaining portion of the connector strip at .020" and bought two brass strips - 1/2" x .025" and 1/2" x .016" since .020" thickness wasn't available. I used the .025" strip, but I wonder if the .016" would have been easier to solder and would provide more flexibility.
Used needlenose pliers to bend an S-curve at the end, did a rough measurement for the length of the piece, cut it to length, then used a piece of SG track to find the finished length and location and marked it with a pencil.
Due to the thickness of the pieces, I decided to use resistance soldering. I also considered drilling a hole and mounting the repair strip in place with a small screw - it might have made for a neater job. Applied flux to both pieces. The next challenge was to connect the grounding clip while keeping it out of the way of the soldering iron. The 15-watt lightbulb in my head flickered briefly, and I decided that connecting to the #1 clip on the 154C would provide the necessary electrical ground. I soldered the top side first, then flipped it over to do the bottom.
Please ignore my lousy soldering skills - the end result is that the contactor works on standard gauge track.
Edit: Looking at the piece that broke off, it appears that it might be possible to add the clip for standard gauge to an unbroken 154C.
