Afternoon all. An idea has entered into my head and figured I’d post it up here for vetting.
I’ve got a set of N scale Con-Cor passenger cards - sleeper, coach, diner, obs, baggage. My layout’s 4’sx8’ running off a DCC Zephyr system. What I’d like to do is retrofit lighting in the passenger cars. I figure this can be done with some white LEDs, a function-only DCC decoder and some way of picking up current from the rails. It’s my understanding the decoder will convert the rail AC to straight DC, at which point I can step it down with the right resistors. I think it’d be fairly neat to be able to turn lights on and off individually in the cars, so it’d create some visual variety. It’d also keep the cars from being lit while just sitting on a storage siding.
Thoughts? Crazy? Doable? The thing I’m hanging up on right now is where to get a good truck that can feed power into the car, since they’re not designed for it.
My thought is expensive. You already have 16 volts ac on the rails so if you put pickups like Tomar shoes on the baggage car you could put a bridge rectifier in the baggage car and run wires to all the cars and do the same thing without the cost of the decoder. Putting micro connectors between the cars would allow you to take a car out of service if needed.
Why not just use your rail power like said above and then use as many diodes in parallel as you need lights for? Once you have all of the diodes hooked up in parallel install in a series dropping resistor to drop current to the diodes.
I think that is what ndbprr is talking about, being that is what a bridge rectifier is (4 diodes )
LEDs are nice, they run cool and don’t use a lot of power. However, they are very directional, like headlight beams. They don’t “fill the room” with light like an incandescent bulb. Also, the ones you want are probably the yellow-gold color, which are more expensive.
Incandescents can be run directly off the AC, but I’d suggest using a resistor to cut down the voltage and prolong bulb life, or use bulbs rated higher than the voltage running on your tracks. You’ll definitely need current-limiting resistors for LEDs.
If you have a “starter” DCC system without much power, be aware that lighting a whole passenger train will take a lot of that power. Incandescents will be worse than LEDs in that regard.
An option you might want to consider is to provide a siding where you can turn off the track power. One little SPST switch is a lot cheaper than a trainful of lighting decoders.
I found a super bright white LED light bar of 12 LEDs that operates on 12 Volts, from a company in Saint Louis called Super Bright LEDs (http://www.superbrightleds.com) and put one into a Bachmann Spectrum HO scale passenger car that had a burned out light. They illuminate the car with a fluorescent look, but it still suffers from flicker if a wheel or track gets dirty, and there’s little room to add capacitors without them becoming visible through the windows…
The new Con-Cor Burlington Zephyr has a unique system of interconnecting the cars with a small electrical plug that carries current for the lights, and every truck on the Zephyr picks up power for the lights, so the flicker is reduced significantly. It’s just too bad they didn’t do that with electrical pickup for the motor.
I don’t think the Super Bright LEDs light bar would fit into N scale even if you cut off only one section of 3 LEDs.
