Railway design, construction, and gardening

I been having a major problem with MTH's rail wipers. I been removing them and adding Aristo's wheel brushes.

I started to work on my MTH Challenger. I noticed a lot of sparking from the rail wipers. I found wheel brushes on two sets of drivers on both trucks. When I checked the brushes with a"OHM" meter. I seen the brushes were not contacting the wheels.

I removed the brush holder and brushes. I found the brushes were to tight of fit in the brush mounts. I had to reduce the diameter of the carbon brush. I also had to shim the spring. The brush holder is made so I could not remove the spring. I wanted to replace the spring with one from a ball point pen.

The best thing is if you can get good enough pickup, is to do without the wipers entirely.

But if you saw a lot of sparking, then they were handling (or trying to handle) a lot of current.

I remove all of mine from my USAT stuff, they have similar problems with the springs, and the wiper hanging up.

Regards, Greg

The reason I seen sparking. The wheel brushes were not making contact with the wheels.

Electricity would flow through the wheels and the rail wipers would not spark.

I am mounting brushes on all wheels and interconnecting the driving trucks.