A Test of Electrak Clean II Rail Cleaning Car

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Electrak Review

by Don Fiehmann

One of the major causes of electronic and electrical problems is poor connections. Boy, we sure know this is true with model railroading with the wheel and rail contact problems. We are all too familiar with this problem and have learned to become “table thumpers”. We end up doing a lot of rail cleaning that seem to take up a lot time that could be used running trains. The time honored way of cleaning rails is with either a chemical or some type of abrasive material. Some chemicals can leave a residue on the rails and abrasives can leave scratched on the rails that collect dust and oil. Even though these methods may clean the rails but do not address the problem electrically.

The Electrak II Clean is installed in a dummy Athearn F7B.

Over the years there has been a number of ideas using a higher voltage to breakdown the crud and oxides on the rails. One was a charged capacitor and a push-button. When a train stopped you operated the push-button and release the charge through the rails to the locomotive. This would hopefully breakdown the curd on the rails until you ran into the next bad spot. Modern solid state electronics now has a new way of implementing this idea and automating the process. Minatronics has released a new product called the Electrak Clean II Electronic Track Cleaner. This rail cleaner car is build into a dummy Athearn F7B. At the present time HO is the only scale offered. But it will also work on On30 track. The unit has a power on/off switch on the top along with a green LED for power on indication. An internal 9 volt battery supplies the power to a small circuit board mounted on the inside top of the body shell. (There is a version of this car planned for use with DCC that will use track power instead of the battery.) Since there is nothing dragging on the rails the F7B rolls over the rails with little to no resistance. Couplers are the magnetic knuckle type.

Circuit board mounted in top of the shell.

The circuit board uses a switching power supply to convert the 9 volts dc to over 200 volts ac. Before you get concerned about the high voltage, the output is at a safe low current level. This voltage is applied to the rails through one of the trucks. The wheels on the F7 are made with a bright finish and not blacken wheels.

Power on/off switch and LED

The high voltage on the rails is effectively shorted out as long as there is conduction over the rails. The low current on the rails is used to sense a dirty or poor areas of conduction on the rails. When resistance is sensed due to poor conduction the voltage rises rapidly. The high voltage between the rails and wheels is used to break down the crud and oxides on the rails. The path of the current/voltage from the F7B is through the trucks to another set of wheels through the motor or circuits and then back to the F7B. As long as the resistance of this path is low the voltage stays low. When the path runs into a high resistance the voltage goes high.

To check out the operation of this car I put it on a short piece of track and connected an oscilloscope to the rails. With only the F7B on the track the output voltage was over 200 volts ac. When on the output had a cycle rate of approximately 10 milliseconds on and 10 milliseconds off. When on the power was a frequency of over 200 kilohertz. With another locomotive on the tracks the voltage dropped to just a few volts. With a decoder equipped locomotive the voltage dropped to less then 10 volts. In my collection of rail I found an old piece of brass flex track. It was not the cleanest piece of track! Without adding power to the rails and the cleaning car turned on then I moved the two locomotives over the section of rail by hand. Each time a dirty section was encountered the voltage would spike up then return to the low voltage.

Next was a mainline test. The F7B was coupled up the an F7A that was under DCC control. First I ran the pair back and forth over a section of track many times. Then I wiped my finger across the rails. There was still the black stuff that rubbed off the rails. Then I wiped off a section of rail that had not been used in the test. I still got black substance on my finger. But, there was a difference between the two. The rails where the F7B was used rub off my finger easily. The untreated rails did not rub off as easily. I figured the curd and oxide in the test treated area had been broken up and converted to crispy critters. What was left in the treated areas was more like a dust than the oily black substance on the untreated areas.

It takes many passes to breakup the substance on the rails. The F7B does not have anything other than the wheels on the rails so it rolls freely. After the foreign matter on the rails is broken down it should be cleaned off. After many passes over the mainline I adding a track cleaning car behind the F7B to clean the broken down materials off the rails. There are a number of rail cleaning cars available that could be used to clean up after the Electrak Clean II has done it’s job. I did a test pulling a Centerline track cleaning car with a dry roller. The black material that rubbed off the rails on to the pad was more like the dry dust than the normal oily stuff that comes off the rails. For a final cleanup I use is the Tony’s Trains Exchange model CMX HO. This car has a tank for chemicals that drip on a pad that slides along the rails. The pad that slides on the rails requires more pull over the rails but does an excellent clean up job.

After cleaning the rails I ran a couple of trains around the layout. It was smooth sailing, or maybe that should be smooth running. At slow speeds there was no stalling.

Smooth Wheels are used on the F7B.

Once the rails are treated the wheels of the F7B will have some of the material left on them. To clean the F7B wheels I found an old toothbrush was all that was needed. A drop or two of rail cleaning fluid helped the cleanup. Since the wheels are not powered it is easy to put the toothbrush on one wheel while you roll the other wheel with your finger.

A while back there was a number of modelers on the Internet writing about their setup for track cleaning. I was surprised to find that the number that had made up a track cleaning train of more than one cleaning car. Guess I’m not the only one running more than one cleaning car in a train. Now with the Electrak Clean II car have changed my track cleaning procedure. I first run the Electrak Clean II to break down the stuff on the rails. After that the CMX HO cleaning car is used to finish off the job.