I bought quite a few of these street lights from ebay. They are brand new and are 12 volt lights. Someone at the train club I visited said to power them with a 9 volt adapter because they wouldn’t get too hot and would last longer.The adapter has a white line on one wire and the other is plain. Which do you think is positive? If any of you have ever added lights of any kind to your layout, please tell me how difficult the wireing was, Thanks.
Froggy,
Are the bulbs LED’s or incandescent bulbs? If they’re LED’s, the polarity will matter. If they’re incandescents, polarity makes no difference at all.
The polarity is apparently not standardized across all manufacturers of wall warts, so your best bet for checking polarity is to simply use a volt meter.
Wiring lights isn’t terribly difficult, just time-consuming. I’d strongly recommend using an accessory buss line around your layout to hook the lights to…it’ll make it a lot easier to track down problems.
All my lights are on an accessory power supply. If you have LED lights then a larger ohm resistor is needed. (I usually use between 400-700 ohms resistors per LED) but I use mostly incandecent bulbs and instead of using 9 volts, i’ll install a 10 - 15 ohm resistor so that they won’t burn up if someone accidently turns up the throttle. I can usually get about 15 lights on one old MRC powerpack before it gets overloaded. I have 7 stand alone power packs that control my lighting, signalling system, and tortoise machines. I never use the track power source to run auxilary equipment.
They may be a little yellowish on 9 volts, but they won’t get hot and they’ll last much longer. I always run my incandescent lamps at less than their rated voltage for these reasons. The white stripe normally indicates the positive wire, but as another poster has said, incandescent lamps don’t care about polarity. As for difficulty, not difficult, just tedious. You’ll need to drill a hole to drop the wires down through and glue down the bases. As someone recommended, you should run a pair of wires around under the layout where the street lamps will go and connect them to these wires. One end of these wires then connects to your adapter. You can buy rolls of wire at Radio Shack or you can use lamp cord (the kind of wire table lamps use) or you can buy doorbell or intercom wire at any hardware store. I would recommend using a 2-position terminal strip to join the lamp wires to the main wires so that you don’t rip out a lamp if you snag the wires underneath. If you’re not into soldering, use what’s called barrier strips. They have pairs of screws joined together with a little wall between the pairs. Fasten the incoming and outgoing main wires to the screws on one side of the terminal strip and fasten the lamp wires to the other side. Hope this helps
I agree with running the bulbs at below their rated voltage. After all, you are looking for the impression of street lighting here. You don’t need ultra-bright lamps to help stamp out crime.
How many of these do you have? They will probably draw around 30 milliamps each, so check the rating of that wall-wart. Many are below half an amp, so you may only get 10 or 12 to work before you start overloading the power supply.
Test them all before you install them. It’s a lot easier to do on your bench, and much less work if you don’t have to figure out why a lamp isn’t working and then replace it.
What guage wire should I buy to install block signals and street lights? The interior diameter of the brass tubes for the block signals is so small as is the wire that you have to solder to the LEDs. So, Im guessing I need to get some very fine wire to hook up these electrical accesories. Do I need to solder these connections of can “super glue” work? Is a terminal block also a good investment? Thanks for your advice!
As for the soldering the easiest way to do it is to tin both wires, put one against the other and touch them with the iron. The wire will heat up fast and there will be enough solder on the wires to do the trick.
Good luck
Bob
I’m planning on building one of those low-voltage power supply units from the Spookshow webpage, it looks dirt simple & can take quite a few lamps. I’ll let you know how it all goes.
Buy? You buy wire? How odd. Surely you have an old parallel port printer cable in the junk box somewhere. If not just ask around for one, and you will get plenty of them.
LION clips off the plugs, slits the jacket and rescues the wires. The older cables had 25 nicely colored wires in them, the newer ones have 25 pairs of much finer wire. LION knows not the AWG of these wires, him cares not, they are good enough for hooking up lights and relays.
They will not do for track power but for most other applications, sure thing. LION even uses the finest of these wires inside of his trains. Him uses a draw-bar to link six cars together, this gives him 24 wheel pickup. Another pair of wires handles the on-board lighting circuits so that the geese (passengers) will have light when the train is stopped.
Yes, Yes! Solder the wires. LION has gone through a whole pound of solder this year alone. You can get 100’ of the finest shrink tubing insulation for about $12 at All Electronics. Slip about 5/8" onto one end of the wire, make the connection, cover the joint with the shrinker, and use the soldering iron to shrink it into place. Don’t leave home without it.
ROAR
BroadwayLion!
I have struggled with how to put this politely.
Those of us who buy wire are not odd! We are regular model railroaders! And, yes, I would suspect that we regularly make use of recycled wire from whatever rescources we have.
Sometimes the slight condescending tone of your comments takes away from the value of your advice.
Just my [2c] worth.
Dave
[tup][:-^]