Building Subway Signals : A Photo Essay

Model Railroader Layouts and layout building
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It is well known that the LION is cheap, and so will not go out and buy ready made signals. Not that there are many ready made signals for a subway system. And as we all know 9 plus miles of subway requires lots and lots of signals. What is a LION to do?

  1. Him uses 3/16" square stock, and drills three 1/8" holes to accommodate the LEDs.

  1. Him paints the signal-to-be with a black magic marker. It is too small a job to bother with a paint brush yet.

  1. Him installs the LEDs. The ones I obtained from All Electronics have a bit of a flange on them which I trimmed off with a motor tool.

  1. Him solders the anodes (or cathodes?–no matter) together and these will be connected to system ground via a 1000Ω 1/8 watt resistor.

  1. Him wires with four thin conductors [actually, the LION strips them out of old parallel printer cables–the older ones have 25 conductors, and the newer ones have 25 pair of conductors.]

  1. Him drills a hole next to the ROW, inserts the signals, and then paints the wires and the back of the LEDs black. The yellow pin next to the running rail is supposed to represent the tripper, but is far too large. In the end the LION simply bend a nail at a 90 degree angle and painted it yellow. A left over Kdee coupler box glued between the rails represents the actuator housing for the tripper.

The signal may be a touch over-sized but it is the best I can do and still use LEDs. The lamps are a little further apart vertically than what is prototypical, but to bring them closer would destroy the piece of woo

2

“The signal may be a touch over-sized but it is the best I can do and still use LEDs. The lamps are a little further apart vertically than what is prototypical, but to bring them closer would destroy the piece of wood.”

If you used styrene, you should be able to get the LEDs much closer together vertically than with wood (of course, with brass stock, you could really get them close, but it would be more of a pain to drill. Aluminum stock maybe? Any in that size? The plus w/ brass is you could solder the anodes (negatives) to the metal bar and use that as your conductor (anode remains separate wires as before) - works great if your cathode is at ground potential so you don’t get a shock (not my idea, using the metal frame as a conductor has been around for ages)