I bought a Red & Silver Sante Fe set awile back from an antique store with three silver passenger cars, a regular passenger, a dome and a sorta caboose deal. I’d like to add lights to them, as I run them behind the Blue Comet I have. I have added caboose lights with a small tab of metal brushing the middle rail and using the car as a ground, but these are mostly plastic. I also worry a regular bulb might get a bit hot. Anyone out there have a good solution for this? Thanks to all that respond, Jake
I re-fitted my passenger cars with the small twinkle lights (Christmas lights). The are cheap and a string of 50 or so means you have lots of spares. Works great for houses, buildings, etc. too.
Different size strings have different voltage bulbs (ie a 20 string would be around 10 volts per bulb, whereas a 50 string would be around 2 - 3 volts per bulb, which my pop sooner). Use a volt-ohm meter (or digital meter) to measure the resistance to make sure all the bulbs are equal in all of the passenger cars.
Hope this helps.
Look in the train magazines. I recently saw an add for a LED light strip just for passenger cars. It would be minimal heat and should provide plenty of light.
Dennis
One or two number 53 lamps in parallel should do for those cars. Just keep them in the middle of the space between the walls and the floor and ceiling.
I don’t see what use a resistance measurement would be. In any case, the cold resistance of a lamp is an order of magnitude lower than when it is lit. A string with 20 lamps would use 6-volt lamps (in America). (Divide 120 volts by the number of lamps in the string.) A problem with Christmas-tree lamps is that they are designed to short out when they burn out, to keep the rest of the string lit. When the string includes dozens of lamps, this has a negligible effect on the remaining lamps. But when you are using only a few, the other lamps’ voltage will go up substantially, causing them to fail quickly.
Are the # 53’s the same as headlamps for say a 1666? Also, are the Christmas lights DC? Will transformers light them? Thanks again, Jake
Number 53s are G-3.5 (spherical 7/16-inch) miniature-bayonet-based lamps rated at 14.4 volts and 120 milliamperes. They are very common in Lionel trains and would be a likely candidate for a headlight; but I don’t know specifically about the 1666. You could also use the 1445, which is rated both at 14.4 volts (135 milliamperes) and 18 volts (150 milliamperes); but it would be a little hotter.
The original 2400 cars used two number 51s in series (7.5 volts, 220 milliamperes). This is virtually equivalent to two 53s in parallel.
Hey, another place that not too many people think about is the local NAPA or other automotive parts store. A lot of these places have a large assortment of 12vdc bulbs as well as some meant for imports that can be 14.5vdc or even 18vdc, possibly even some older 6vdc bulbs. While you are poking around in the store, they probably have sockets to fit most of these bulbs, most are a twist lock, but some do have a screw base. I bought a large bag of twist lock sockets at the local flea market and went to the local auto parts store and bought bulbs to fit. I have used the sockets in locos and plastic passenger cars, and they were cheap!
Typically a pack of two bulbs at the auto parts dealer is about 95 cents and a socket might run about $2, still fairly cheap. The flea market, especially one that has someone with surplus electronic stuff on hand is the best place to use your imagination and get cheap stuff. Keep in mind things like trailer connectors and such that give you 2,4,6 &7 pins and sockets that are keyed for various connections on the railroad.
Don L
Oshawa, where we build the Silverado, the best truck in North America
Thanks guys for the help on this one, Jake
Jake, I forgot to answer your last question. Incandescent lamps work pretty much the same on AC or DC. (LEDs are another matter.)
Regular bulbs don’t care if they get alternating or direct current, they will generally create more heat when powered with AC, but with careful placement small bulbs are good to go either way.
Don
Don, I have never heard that AC operation produces more heat. Do you have a reference or an argument that you could post? I can see that there might be some possibility of this (or its converse) if the filament’s temperature excursions are significant during the AC cycle; but I have always assumed that for most lamps the temperature was reasonably constant during the 1/120th of a second of the power cycle.
You hit the nail on the head. It is an insignificant difference and usually cannot be detected. Todays materials used for the filiments last longer and burn more consistently than very old bulbs. I think that in 40 or 50 year old lamps you might detect a small difference running them on AC or DC, but not so with newer materials. The following explains the theory:
DC vs. AC operation
As tungsten atoms evaporate from the filament, a very small percentage of them are ionized by the small amounts of short-wave ultraviolet light being radiated by the filament, the electric field around the filament, or by free electrons that escape from the filament by thermionic emission. These tungsten ions are positively charged, and tend to leave the positive end of the filament and are attracted to the negative end of the filament. The result is that light bulbs operated on DC have this specific mechanism that would cause uneven filament evaporation.
This mechanism is generally not significant, although it has been reported that light bulbs sometimes have a slight, measurable decrease in lifetime from DC operation as opposed to AC operation.
In a few cases, AC operation may shorten the life of the bulb, but this is rare. In rare cases, AC may cause the filament to vibrate enough to significantly shorten its life. In a few other rare cases involving very thin filaments, the filament temperature varies significantly throughout each AC cycle, and the peak filament temperature is significantly higher than the average filament temperature.
Ordinarily, one should expect a light bulb’s life expectancy to be roughly equal for DC and AC.
This is courtesy of:
The Great Internet Light Bulb Book, Part I### Incandescent including halogen light bulbs
Copyright (C) 1996, 2000, 2005, 2006 Donald L. Klipstein (Jr) (don@misty.com)
Freely distributing copie