Cruise control for lionel standard gauge hiawatha and vanderbilt

@acid Yeah, that was my post. 10 years ago.....yikes!

I installed ERR Cruise Commander M kits both in my Hiawatha and my friend's Vanderbilt. It worked well. The only thing I noticed is that on the first speed step the motor generates a little harmonic noise. Not sure why. It never really bothered me because I usually run speed step 3 or 4 as my slowest speed.

I'm glad I install the cruise control. Makes these engines so much more fun to run.

Awesome! thanks that’s what I needed to hear. It is sort of funny when these old posts pop back up again

Be careful when and if you do this. No factory electronic parts are available.

Actually, lots of dealers still have most of the electronic parts for these engines.  I personally have all the boards that are in it, I don't have the actual sound chips, but I suspect we could come up with something close.  In any case, installing the Cruise Commander M is a pretty simple job with a low possibility of cooking anything if you're at all careful, one wire to solder to serial data...

I had Mike Reagan install cruise in both of these and it works very well. These have thick heavy shells and you have be aware of the additional heat from these boards with the heavy motors. Mike had a discussion about this upgrade with Jon Z and I think he added an additional heat sink to the locomotives. I have been very pleased the upgrade.

Scott Smith

The primary thing you need to do with a heavy load on the ERR Cruise products is to add heatsinking to the bridge rectifier.  It's actually the thing that suffers the most with a heavy load.