Help with wiring a static display

[FireEye]

I am making a static display for some of my Lionel O gauge that are not running on a layout. It is a stair-step display with 5 levels, each with a secrion of straight track. some of the cars have working features like lights and sounds, and one engine has audible bells, talking, etc. So how should I go about wiring this so each section has a switch to turn on the car's features, of course without the engines running? I know I can isolate the pick-up rollers on the engines, but is there a way to make their lights work and to play the sounds like you would get from the corresponding buttons on the transformer?

[El Fixes Things]

For locomotives with sound features.... it would be easy if they used mechanical E-Units- lock them in neutral, and feed power to the track, use your normal sound activation methods. As far as I know, however, most stuff uses electronic reversing units... I had a locomotive in the past I tried to do this sort of thing with. I'd lock it in neutral, and power up the track. But for some reason after turning everything off, if I turned stuff back on again... the electronic reversing board would default into "forward only", regardless of what position I had "locked" it in. 
I'm not sure there's a way to make this possible in that kind of case, without modifying the locomotive in some way.
My initial thought is to divide the track up into several indipendant blocks that can be turned on and off via toggle switches. I think having isolated center rails, with all track sharing a common ground, would probably work well. You probably need isolated sound activation controls for each isolated section that has a locomotive, to avoid the issue of activating mutiple locomotives at once if more than one loco's track section is powered up.

Not sure any of these thoughts are helpful, some of them are more or less re-hashes of thoughts you had yourself. 

Good luck, I really like this idea.
-Ellie

[pennytrains]

aboard!

[FireEye]

Thanks for the input. I really wish I had a wiring diagram to use, but I think this is going to require a lot of trial and error experimentation. 
one thing I'm not sure about is the ability to not require a train transformer control.  It would be much simpler to use a simple single voltage transformer, but I'm not sure what the voltage should be to power the sections of rail I will be using. 

[smokey1]

On the engines with a electronic E-unit/Command control you could remove one lead to each motor, doing that makes the motor inoperatable and a easy fix if you want to use it. You could add a wire to the motor where you removed the wire and put a female type plug on it and a male type plug on the wire to the motor. Or even run a wire to a micro switch and attach it under the engine like they do for sound or run/command.