DCC and lighting

Model Railroader Layouts and layout building
1

I will be purchasing the Walthers Santa Fe passenger set and I want to add the Walthers lighting kits to the passenger cars. I run on DCC and was wonering if you need to add resistors or make any other modifications to the lighting kits if you run on DCC. Does anyone have experience with this?

2

If the lighting kits use 12V lamps (most do) you will have no problems. As an added bonus, they will stay on at constant brightness no matter what the train is doing.

3

Thanks for the response. Unfortuantely, the info in the Walthers catalog does not specify the voltage of the lights, which is why I made the original post.

4

Most DCC systems put 14 volts continuous on the track, which will shorten the life of 12 volt bulbs. If the bulbs begin to flicker because of dirty track, or a derailment, this will further shorten their life. It would be safest to put a resistor in the line to the bulbs to limit these current surges. Something in the range of 10 to 100 Ohms, 1/4 Watt resistors, should suffice. I don’t know the specifications of the bulbs you are planning to use, but I have used 12-volt fluorescent bulbs that clip into a fuse holder inside passenger coaches with 33 Ohm resistors in the line. And if you want to really get fancy, you can wire passenger coach lights to unused function wires on your locomotive’s decoder to turn coach lites on and off on the fly.

5

If you are not sure of the voltage of the bulbs, you can test easilly if you still have a reliable DC power pack and a voltage meter. Set the power pack to 1 or 1 1/2 volts and tryt he bulbs. Increase the voltage by steps until the bulbs give a good but not overly bright glow. That’s your safe voltage. Now try resistors as suggested above to bring the bulb to that intensity at 14 volts.

6

Lenz makes a decoder to control lighting in passenger cars.
Mark

7

Since he’s buying a Walthers car set and a Walthers lighting set, I think that no modification of the lighting is required. They’re already designed to run on both DC and DCC systems without having to add resistors. Unless I’m mistaken…