Hi everyone,

it was time to look at the Brawa trolley bus and see the potential outcome to convert it to digital. at first I thought the motor was AC and one previous attempt to run it under digital failed and a new motor was ordered. I have 2 of these Brawa trolley buses and they were purchased back in the 80's , 1 with a trailer and the other articulated.
I've bought enough masts and wires and the whole section should cover about 10 m either way with a loop on both sides.
the second attempt to get it running I've connected the motor to an AC transformer and soon realized the motor was getting hot and finally the penny dropped, it's a DC motor which had a rectifier attached to it although the new motor came with out it. this discovery made it very easy to convert it to digital and the process started, some initial incentives to recreate the indicator lights front and rear and I've designed a mechanism which at first looked and worked fine but in practice was not reliable because the linkage of the prime mover and the linkage on the trailer did not move sideways in the same angle, with other words the trailer's axle didn't move sideways hardly at all.
this left me with no option but manually operate it via Aux functions which I now prefer anyhow.

installing the lights front and rear and the interior lights was somewhat easy, just had to find the right led fittings and on a couple occasions had to re drill the hole size.
the end result is we have now headlights, interior lights which are activated va F0 forwards,F0 backwards are activating the brake lights and Aux 1 and 2 operate the indicator lights and in a situation such as an emergency the emergency lights can be used by turning Aux 1 and aux 2 on. the Brawa trolleybus will have a sound decoder and hopefully a power pack will fit into as well.
I think the power pack is essential as there is not an adequate power supply when going through the overhead turnouts and the bus has to have a minimum speed to be able to go past it without stalling (no power

the bus itself runs well although one seem to be noisier than the other one but I will see how I can program them by using the ESU lokprogrammer and the decoder I've installed is a version 4, the motor settings has a Bühler motor assignment so I have to double check whether or not the setting has been implemented or whether the motor gears make the extra noise.

Paul, thanks, yes they are and should be on every layout, it wasn't cheap in the days when they came out but it was this era a trolley bus was as popular as ever. the conversion was relatively easy with no hick ups except I only found out last week the motors are actually DC and this was a relieve, just took the converter off and the rest is like converting any analog loco to digital. there is enough room to pack everything in and in the next 2 weeks, when my shipment of sound decoders come I'll try to add one of them and see if a power pack fits in as well. today I've started isolating the overhead wires so I can add a brake and acceleration module to it and this will enable me to slow down the bus, stop and than accelerate to its programmed speed, the overhead turnouts are not the greatest design but than it was designed for an analog bus with plenty of speed and hopefully the power pack fits inside and this will solve the problem for the bus to stall at the turnout point.

will report back how I get on.

John