No I haven’t decided to go to the dark side but I have had these Lionel HO cars lying around forever but not one HO engine to my name so I have a PS-3 SD70ACE on order. My question is do I run a “DC “power source to the input side of the TIU and run two wires to the track? That seems to make sense to me but I wanted to bounce it off those of you who know MTH HO way better than I do! Thanks in advance.
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To my understanding, you are correct, you can apply DC power to the FIXED INPUTS as they pass the DC power, the variable channels do not. Since this is a PS 3 model, two wires to the track and you should be ready to go (polarity is not a problem with PS3). This is rather simplified for wiring since you don’t say how big the layout is. A bigger layout would probably need additional power drops.
I had no idea that VAR channels don't pass DC thru. Interesting.
No DC from the variable channels, that is correct. Also, though I haven't tested this, I was told by several folks that if you use DC on the aux power input (which does work fine), don't also use DC on the power inputs. Not sure why this would be a factor, but it's something to keep in mind.
I have a small loop of HO track for running my ON30 engines on a hollow core door. The HO is kind of a side project but I figure I might as well run it with DCS even though I do have a small Bachmann DCC set up.
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