Crafting CPR’s ‘Sandford Fleming’ Theatre Car in N Scale

[craigolio1]

That's a great idea, harvesting from old cables. 

If you are bundling a couple of strands together on one LED, use thin wire (magnet wire or a single strand of speaker wire) to wrap them together.  Then one bundled, heat the ends all at once.  This will polish the ends and they will sort of blend together.  If you do them individually and then bundle the, the little mush room shapes on the end of each fiber will prevent them being pulled together and the LED might be less intense on the outside fibers.

Craig

[Dwight in Toronto]

I’m relieved to say that two replacement ESU digital light strips were finally delivered.  I sent the faulty ones back on December 12, so roughly 6 weeks turnaround.  USPS tracking revealed 30 individual stops/waypoints, the majority of them being hops, skips and jumps up and down California.

I’ve resumed the task of fitting one of the light boards into the coach, and should have a few final updates and pics over the next few days.

[Dwight in Toronto]

Here is an ESU digital light strip, shortened in length so as to fit within the N scale coach.  The section with the last five LED’s had to be zipped off with my Dremel:




At the right end of the pic is a small connector that plugs into a receptacle in the coach, which conveys track power to the strip decoder.  This enables me to remove the strip if required.

The left side of the pic shows the four 0402 LED’s that will illuminate the lamps along the top edge of the rear fascia.  The two outer-most LED’s are for the right & left marker lamps, while the two inner LED’s are for the rear spot/flood lights.  On the inside rear of the coach itself, the black-painted styrene tubes into which the four LED’s will be inserted are visible.  The fibre optic material at the bottom of the photo is what I’m thinking of using for the back-up/reverse lamps that are on each side of the rear coupler.

The next photo is a close-up of the LED connections to the light strip.  The device comes with two red 3mm LED’s already soldered to the end of the board as directional rear lights.  I removed those, soldered the white 0402’s in their place, and configured the decoder so that the markers will be lit whenever the loco headlight is on, irrespective of loco direction. 




There is one spare AUX output on the board, and I used this to power the floodlamp LED’s.  You can see a small pc strip with a single 1.8K smd resistor CA’d to the side of the board, and a blue +ve jumper wire.  I’ll use function mapping so that the spot lights can simply be toggled on or off.

There are two remaining solder pads, which are intended to accomodate an additional LED for forward illumination in cab applications.  I’m thinking of using this output for a white LED that would illuminate the optic fibres for the rear right & left backup lamps, which would come on only when the loco is reversing.

Here’s hoping that the preceding drivel makes some sense!

[BCR 570]

Great work here, Dwight!  I will have to look into one of those light strips for my official car on my museum train.

Tim

[Dwight in Toronto]

Having installed the ESU digital light strip, I’m nearing the end of this build. 

Here’s a pic showing the rear marker lamps illuminated.  By putting the coach in consist with the locomotive, these lamps come on whenever the loco headlight is on.  It’s too bad that my iPad camera doesn’t do a better job of capturing the distinct red and green lenses - the effect is much nicer to the naked eye:




Next, here’s the two floodlights/spotlights lit up.  These are just toggled on & off via F6:




Finally, here’s a photo showing the interior coach lighting:




Note that the interior lights are arranged in three individually controllable banks.  F3 illuminates 3 led’s in the tiered seating area, F4 lights up two more in the mid section, and F5 toggles a single led in the front end of the coach (which gives the impression that a washroom light, say, has been turned on).  Alternatively, F2 toggles all three banks on and off simultaneously.  Playing around with the three arrangements is more fun and interesting than I thought it would be.

The strip decoder has numerous special effects to choose from, such as gradual glow-up to simulate a generator coming on, slow dimming on shutdown, and various incandescent and fluorescent effects.  I thought it rather funny that several options incorporate various flickering patterns … modelers go to great lengths with capacitors and whatnot to eliminate coach lamp flickering, and here we are, able to add it right back in with a bit of programming!

On that note, I have to say that I’m very impressed that my model has absolutely no flicker whatsoever.  The light strip includes a small amount of capacitance, and there are two sets of solder pads should someone wish to add either an ESU powerkeeper or an additional capacitor, but in my case neither one is needed.

I’ll try to put together a short video clip to better demonstrate the lighting features.