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Yes you can and should! Instead of soldering use 1/8" or metric equivalent, female spade lugs. Every section of FT has a male spade connection you can push a feed wire lug onto.

6 minutes to Howard was the slogan back then. The Skokie line was the only part of the system built for high speed as it was sawed off from the defunct C&NS line. Prior to SOAC they spend months smoothing out the roadbed and grinding down the tracks.

Others have suggested these were built from tooling used on a later order of NYC subway cars. I remember them as being rather silent.

Depends on the brand and model of switch. The common ground return on Lionel layouts is the outer rail which is connected to the U terminal of the transformer. All Lionel switches will pull their operating power from the center rail of the track they are connected to. But what if you want to switch them when there is no track power or run them a a higher voltage so they will switch faster? Lionel 022, O-gage, switches have an optional plug you can use to override track power. On a KW you can power them by connecting the A terminal to the track and the B terminal to the power plug. That way you can adjust the B power to the switches separately.

There is no voltage or current flow between taps because they are both positive in relation to U. For example if one control is set for +10 and another +20 it's easy to think that there is 10v between the two. So if a train parks across a 10v and 20v block that's a hard short. But that fails to take into account U, outside rail is ground. The electron flow is through the path of least resistance. In the example I describe, electrons will flow from the lowest tap, in this case 10v, through the motor or a light bulb, to ground. Electron flow will not travel from +20 to +10 to reach ground. That's too many hops and there is an easier path to travel. One of these days I will demonstrate with a new video. Until then Lionel physics rule. :)

The Skokie Swift, now called the yellow line, operated 3rd rail for about half it's length switching to overhead wire catenary west of Crawford where grade separation ended. Skokie cars and SOAC were equipped win pantographs for running on that segment. About 20 years ago the Overhead wire was removed and the entire line was converted to 3rd rail although the classic overhead support towers remain.

@@areizman that meat any 6000 Series plus anything else lying around at that time 🤔….interesting. That only makes me like the line that much more.

@@AC34D Although a couple of 6k cars had trolley poles installed for Evanston service, for Skokie, they modified their Cousins, 1-50 cars with a homemade trolley/pantographs. They also applied them to the four 5,000 series articulated units from the late 1940s. Later they ordered a special set of 3200 cars equipped with pantographs and retired the older fleet. Some of those cars have been preserved and can be ridden at museums. But alas, no more overhead wire on the CTA.

I find 14 gauge stranded easier to work with. Tap splices do not play as well with solid wire.

Wirenuts require you to strip and cut the wires and wrap and tape them. it's very ugly. Tap splices are much cleaner. If your track is tightly fitted you can get by with attaching feed wires every 4 to 5'.

Yes, l solder 18 gauge feed wires directly to the track. The power bus lines are 14 gauge stranded THN house wiring. I tap into them at about 4-5' intervals with 18-14 tap splices. Every block is protected with a 7A circuit breaker.

Taradine was a more formal Telecom engineering company I partnered with after Bally closed their dedicated pinball division and transferred its operations to midway.

The line was built to be the Skokie Valley route of the North Shore Interurban line. Chicago Rapid transit was given the local franchise to provide local transit service to Dempster with in-between stops. In 1948 the CTA discontinued all service to Dempster and the North Shore abandoned all service in 1963. Left without service the village of Skokie petitioned the government to fund restoration of the line with non stop service to Dempster . It was deemed an experiment to see if high speed transit to the suburbs would be a success and indeed it was. CTA looked into purchasing the line through Cook county but funding was only secured for the Dempster Howard shuttle. All the old CRT in-between stations were demolished although the Oakton station was rebuilt a few years ago. The 4 miles or so of overhead wire was torn down earlier in the century. The cost of maintaining centenary was getting expensive and because there was so little of it it was decided to convert the entire line to 3rd rail. For more information see here: www.chicago-l.org/operations/lines/yellow.html As for the SOAC cars, they were a one off experiment for a few weeks. The cars were too large for the CTA to operate and were a limited test for future needs. See here for more info. www.chicago-l.org/trains/roster/SOAC.html

@@areizman thx much for info. If you streetview or satellite are, you see patches of track beyong Demster. that was used in the 1948 Skokie valley film

@@dmann3042000 Yes, the right-of-way north of Dempster still exists to this day. After abandonment The NW railroad purchased the line from Dempster north to Lake Cook and operated it in freight service until the 1980s when it was decommissioned. RTA put a hold on the line in case they ever wanted to extend the yellow line north. Today the ROW north of Dempster remains as nature slowly reclaims it. North of Lake Cook is now part of the North Shore trail and you can bike it to Wisconsin.

I used a wolverine 8mm movie scanner to scan the original film. The early version of the Wolverine had a slightly higher frame rate. I have since upgraded to a Wolverine pro which scans and creates output files at a corrected frame rate. I guess this film was scanned with the older model.

Thanks. Different times, the engineers seen smoking are all dead now of cancer. Lost my still pics but found this S8mm movie a few months ago and scanned it for posterity.

Nope! Just looked at them today 5/27/2019 in Maine @ the Seashore Trolley Museum.

Wilfred nah maybe they were moved from colorado

They are currently at Seashore Trolley Museum. Their home base previously was Pueblo. There is a nice writeup of the cars on the Chicago-L.org site. www.chicago-l.org/trains/roster/SOAC.html

@@user-hhp8 no maybe, they were. They've been at Seashore for quite some time now.

The bigger longer mainline trains are running slow, relatively speaking. This is a toy train layout after all.

Rosin core solder will not work in this application. The track metal dissipates heat quickly and the rosin contained in the solder will evaporate before it can transfer heat to the track. Use acid free solder, commonly available.

@@areizman It won't rust if you use a glue gun and cover the solder joint with glue.

Not sure what that is but these cars were built by St. Louis car in the early 70s one of their last projects.

@@areizman The R44/R46s are NYCT Subway cars for our B-Division (the BMT/IND Lines). The SOAC is in fact built upon extra R44 shells from St. Louis Car and thus shares the same body as the 70s era NYCT cars apart from the cab ends. It also explains why these cars have wider bodies and are 75 ft. in length in comparison to the arguably lighter standard CTA stock.

Because of the physical size of these cars they were limited to the Skokie line which was salvaged from the old North Shore interrurban. The wider car width required modifications to the platform's with drop edges so they could accommodate Soac and ordinary L cars. Only one track, #1, into Howard was modified for the cars to bearth at. Riders waiting for skokie trains were invited to cross over to the opposite platform for the ride to Dempster. The cars then reversed and traveled back on track 1 about a half mile where they were manually switched over to track 2 by a switch crew keeping warm in a temporary hut.

Wait, they teach soldering in Junior high?? Not in my district. Most shop classes have been dumbed down here. Anyway, the joint is rock solid. I have used this solder and flux technique on my layouts for over 30 years and never had a joint failure. You may have a point about the acid flux. These days one should look for acid free.

16 is a good wire size. That's lamp cord gauge. I prefer 14 because it is more commonly available and comes in 10 colors.

Yes they are. There are ways to mitigate the sound but I built this part before I had that experience.

Replacement rollers and pins are very common. Just search eBay for KW rollers or Lionel KW and sort lowest to highest.

Thank You

Sarah Jardine alas, this is the last time. We are downsizing and have begun dismantling the layout.