For all you Christmas Tree, Coffee Table, Floor and other temporary pike folks out there, here's a quick modification you can make to a LionChief 10" FasTrack straight terminal that will let you run ANY locomotive with its required power supply on your temporary pike, "plug & play." I had posted on this subject last year and did some experimentation since then and here's the result. All you have to do is the following:
1. Get some 14 ga. solid copper conductor from a section of home wiring (Romex, etc.) and remove the insulation.
2. Open up the cover under the connector on the terminal track and lift out the connector and PCB.
3. Using the first attached photo as a guide, cut sections of the wire that match the PCB traces that send power to the rails. Make sure the longer section of wire is slightly curved as shown. The second piece will only be a couple of mm long.
4. Solder the wire sections in as shown. This will provide much higher current-carrying capacity than the PCB traces alone. When soldering, make sure the wire is lying flat against the PCB trace so you can get the cover back on.
5. Replace the connector and PCB and secure the cover and you're ready to go! The second attached photo shows the connection cable I made for my Z-1000 with a 5.5mm x 2.5mm plug 18 ga. cord from Mouser as shown in the attached .pdf. I also made a dcc cable from the same Mouser cord for my DigiTrax DCS-51.
I've run standard PW/MPC AC Lionel locos with lighted passenger cars, my MTH Big Boy on dcc, my Legacy Turbine on LionChief app all without any trouble whatsoever. I even ran three standard Lionel AC PW/MPC locos at once, so the conductor enhancement did the trick. And the indicator LED works just fine no matter what power source is used.
