Adding extra pickups to ringfield locos

[ColinB]

I converted my Hornby ringfield based A4 Sir Niget Gresley. I bought the new motor housing that has pickups instead of using the axles on the tender and a uprated motor cover, which has pickups as well. Once I had done the conversion and added a DCC socket and added insulated wheels to replace the uninsulated ones (you need to do this as the chassis now connects to the ringfield gears side of the motor). I noticed that because of the traction tyres, that really having pickups on both sets of wheels on the tender doesn't do much, the model doesn't run much better as the traction tyres are a brilliant insulator. I suspect there is more to be gained by making the loco pickup on both tracks and using a 2 way connector between loco and tender. Has anybody else done this conversion? I wondering to not bother with pickups on the gear side of the motor as with the pickups it means changing the uninsulated wheels to insulated ones, which are getting difficult to find.

[walkingthedog]

I added a pickup to the non driven centre wheel as that didn't have a tyre. As long as both sides of the loco have pickups it should be OK. Bachmann didn't used to have any pickups on the tenders and they worked fine. No longer own any tender drive locos. 

[The Doc]

I've done a modification like this before.  You can add copper or phosphor-bronze pick-ups to the loco driving wheels, but make sure that they are only lightly touching the wheels since these are not actually driven and need to rotate freely.  You can also add pick-ups to the "Cartazzi" truck wheels (the pony truck behind the driving wheels).  If these pick-ups press a bit too hard against the pony wheels they may not rotate very freely, but this is much less visible than driving wheels not rotating!  I hard wired the extra pick-ups from loco to tender, so the loco and tender are permanently connected.