Old School Cruise Control

Steven,

That's the way it was....yes, in the real world to the doubting few. IMHO  The Z was and still is one of the better transformers ever made for vintage Std Gauge.

God Bless,

"Pappy"

All I know is that a set of 2343 F-3's will really sing with a Z cranked up to 24volts .  I've got three of em still and keep an eye out for a great deal all the time.  I've picked a couple of em up for as little as $20 & $25.

Ha!  That's a great transformer!  I remember as a child running my Dad/Grandfather's original PW Lionel train set, they always put the "Wabash Cannonball" dual motored F3 with Magnetraction on the loop with the graduated trestle set because it "handled" the curves downhill better than anything else.  I have to admit though, throttling the uphill and downhill speed on the ZW was half the fun!

Old fashioned cruise control as you say, referred to setting up insulated blocks of track and applying different voltages to them but you can adjust speeds with dropping (current limiting) resistors as well.  On my loop with the steep incline, I set my ZW as high as 14V while on steep declines I use an old Lionel adjustable slide resistor to drop the voltage and slow the engine down. The engine is probably seeing 10 V here. I believe that the right series resistance (center rails) between insulated blocks on a downward slope block is around 1-3 ohms using a 10W power resistor.  Using the old Lionel slide resistors is really easy but might be considered primitive by the high tech remote control users. 

    While this method is ideal for conventional operation it is obviously not necessary with Legacy that has built in cruise control circuitry. Since I keep my layout hi-rel
"caveman style" it works perfect on my layout.

The rheostat method Dennis describes is much safer as it avoids direct unprotected high-current shorts across the transformer secondary winding.