I have, I find their site hard to navagate since they got away from their inital goal. They do have one ongoing thread there dedicated to dead rail, guess I should ask there.
Check on the freerails.com forum
It has been done but I lost my notes on the site. I am running the oringinal Train Engineer now and love it, got introduced to it at a club, in fact this is old club stuff from when they upgraded to the newer Train Engineer, now the club has gone DCC but dead rail always appealed to me more so I don't need their newer stuff.
cacole Are you talking G-scale here, or using the Crest system for something smaller -- if G-scale you might get a better response by posting to the Garden Railways magazine Battery Power / Radio Control / Live Steam forum. http://cs.trains.com/grw/f/4.aspx Unfortunately, the forum software doesn't allow the posting of a live link from one site to another, even though I've tried to do so with Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Mozilla Firefox when running Windows, and Firefox with Linux Mint, so you'll have to do a copy and paste with your browser.
Are you talking G-scale here, or using the Crest system for something smaller -- if G-scale you might get a better response by posting to the Garden Railways magazine Battery Power / Radio Control / Live Steam forum.
http://cs.trains.com/grw/f/4.aspx
Unfortunately, the forum software doesn't allow the posting of a live link from one site to another, even though I've tried to do so with Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Mozilla Firefox when running Windows, and Firefox with Linux Mint, so you'll have to do a copy and paste with your browser.
The Crest 55000 was a 75 MHz version of the original Train Engineer that was sold with onboard recievers suitable in size for HO.
It was introduced by Aristo around 1999 and only produced for about 5 years.
It was the first attempt to market direct radio to the HO market.
Crest just recently announced a beta version of their newest Train Engineer Revolution with HO size onboard recievers, so they are continuing to explore the HO market and continue to develope an HO direct radio product.
They have also expanded the Revolution line to include base station recievers like the original Train Engineer along with onboard recievers for O thru G scale.
So their current product line would easily replace their older product in an application such as the way I use it with eight thorittles and eight base station recievers.
The new Revolution system includes built in sound systems.
As to the idea of going dead rail in HO, Crest has not offered any products yet, and I don't have any thoughts on the idea, but I'm sure it can be done.
Sheldon
Edit: NM...
I have a couple of CRE-55000 now and some extra receivers. At first I will power them with track power but later would like to go dead rail. Anyone have a wiring scamatic and best practices for doing the conversion. Should I just start with 9v batterys and then go lipo's or?