Keepalive for the Kato TGV
My Kato "sud est" TGV runs well considering its age, however since then N scale mechanisms have come on a bit, and the orange TGV is lacking in a few areas. Chief would be the lack of flywheels, causing very abrupt stops when the wheels loose contact with the rails. Since two of the eight wheels have traction tires, it doesn't take a whole lot of movement to cause this to happen.
So I decided to have a go at fixing this today. I decided that a small keep-alive circuit might do the trick. The theory is that by adding some capacitors to decoder, they provide a small amount of storage capacity, capable of powering the decoder for a fraction of a second until the engine moves a little further and regains power.
That's the theory. In my parts drawer I have a bunch of capacitors, so I pulled out a bunch and measured them up. The TGV motor car doesn't have a whole lot of free space, so most of my capacitors wouldn't fit. In the end only some 10V tantalums were small enough. ...