Powering MTH 262 Crossing Gate with battery - lights don't light up

Did you try swapping the polarity of the supply?

Do you mean wire negative to Power and positive to Ground?  I was fearful of reversing polarity in case it might mess something up.  So, no, I didn't try that.  Will it cause any problems if I feed it the incorrect polarity?

Just to give you more info.  Normally, the gate is supposed to be wired through a T.A.D as follows:  

--Positive on the lock-On is wired to Common on the TAD

--(NO) on the TAD is wired to Powered on the gate.  

--Common on the lock-On is wired to Ground on the gate

So, it looks like Positive on the lock-On is wired to Powered on the gate and Common on the lock-On is wired to ground on the Gate.  

I'm not the electrical expert that Gunrunnerjohn is, but I think you're asking a lot from a 9-volt battery....even a fresh one.

The solenoid-actuated arm will draw a fair amount of power, but the flasher circuit + bulbs (I'm assuming yet filament-type, not LED) added on will tax the power of a common 9v battery....IMHO.

Maybe others can chime in on this.  I'd suspect polarity is less the problem than adequacy of power.

If so, a properly sized 'wall wart' AC (or DC?) transformer with actuation button/switch should do the job in this situation.

FWIW, of course...

KD

Yes, the bulbs are filament, not LED.

That could be it: The solenoid is pulling most of output from the battery, leaving little for the lights.  Would this be a voltage issue?  What voltage do I need from the battery?  If this is an amperage issue, I would think that the battery would just be overtaxed but could still light it up.  I could try it in complete dark to see if the lights are dim but working.  It really looks like no power is getting to them though, as the room wasn't very bright.    

One other piece of information.  When I took out the bulb, I could just barely make out an imprint on them that looked like 18v 2a.  A 9v still powered it though on its own.  There are two lights in the unit plus the solenoid though.  How do I determine how much power I need?

I would be up for a plug-in transformer, but I'm concerned about safety.  Would it be safe to just wire up a wall wart transformer with bare exposed leads like that?  If it's safe, then what kind of transformer would I need?

Then again, battery operated would be nice because of its portability.  He would like to use it with his lego trains and wooden brio sets which would require moving it all about.  My idea was to mount everything (gate and battery power supply) to a large lego platform so that it could be moved about.

The polarity of the battery won't damage anything, it's designed to run on AC power.  I agree the 9V battery probably won't last long, but I'd try it in reverse polarity anyway.

It was the polarity after all!  I just reversed how I had the positive and negative wired from the 9v battery and everything works!  The alternating lights come on and the gate goes down!  Thank you for the help!

I suspected as much.