Adding TMCC to conventional Lionel Shay

Lionel offers few if any wiring diagrams. For this engine a Mini Commander is marginal at best. It was made for motors smaller than the one in this engine.

It has no input for a chuff switch but a Railsounds card does. Not sure your Railsounds will work here though. Lionel tends to omit TMCC functionality in converntional engines even though the boards look identical to TMCC capable versions. Also I suspect your smoke unit puts out continuous smoke, not syncronized with the chuff sounds. If true you will need an interface between the chuff switch and the smoke unit, either GRJ's super chuffer or as I do, a double pole reed relay which takes the switch signal and sends that to both the smoke fan motor and chuff in on the Railsounds board. You can't simply use the switch wired to both inputs.

Pete

When they label the RS boards as conventional, Pete is typically right, no serial data is recognized to run in command mode.  I also agree that the MC-II is very marginal for this locomotive, the Shay tends to need a bit more current to run all the moving parts.  You may be able to fit the full Cruise Commander into that one, they managed to find room for a similar sized reverse board with heatsinks.

Thank you for the information. I was hoping to use the MC-II since I have one lying around (I'm sure I can find something to use it for)  I have included a photo of the boards so you can see the small interface boards I was speaking about in the bottom right corner. The smoke unit does "puff" in sync with the sound when the engine is moving. I was just curious as to why the chuff signal went to the motor control board first, then to the sound card.  Since the sound board does have some "crew talk" I was hoping it would work with TMCC, but from what Pete says it probably will not.

Again, Thank you for your help.

John

If the smoke unit puffs in sync now you may not need any type of interface with a new motor controller. If you have a Legacy engine now you could swap in this Railsounds board to see if it responds to command signals. Just verify the connectors are the same on both boards. My guess it won't work but you can never be sure with Lionel.

This is what the Legacy Shay Railsounds board looks like for connector comparison. This won't work with ERR though.

Pete