Interiors in Dome cars?

I have installed some figures in a K-Line Golden State Vista Dome car in the upper area and used H.O. scale figures as O scale is too large because there is very little room in the top-side of the vista dome car. 

Lee Fritz

Several years back I installed a floor, seats, figures, and lighting in a Williams dome car.  It looked kinda' silly with just an open space.  The seats are wood, the figures are the cheap Chinese ones, and the lighting is the standard 12V strip lighting.  I used really fine #30 black wire to run down from the dome so the wiring was out of sight.

hey john, looks great.  I plan at some point in winter to convert my southern pacific daylights to similar.  and my blue comet cars!  im going to paint in the seats and floor a different color.

The strip lighting......  did you modify any circuits to run DCS? voltage through TIU? would I need capacitors and resistors extra to the strip?

thanks

Chris

Thanks, this was one of my earlier lighting projects.  When I got to the dome car in the set, having no floor and just looking down inside the car seemed pretty lame.  Also, the lighting would have been odd going all the way up into the dome without a separate level. 

The floor is just heavy black cardboard stock.  I just cut the seats out of a piece of trim and stained them.  It was somewhat of a quick hack, but it didn't look bad when it was all done.

The circuit I use for all my LED lighting is very similar to my lighting modules that I developed, I was just hand-wiring them back then.  The only addition to the current lighting module is an adjustment pot for the output current for intensity control.  I always put the 22uh choke in for DCS compatibility in any lighting installation.

Thanks for the replies.  The only thing worse than looking inside a dome and seeing nothing but the frame, is looking inside a dome and seeing tables and chairs without people.

I'm going to give John's interior dome lighting a shot.  A simpler solution, from an assembly standpoint, is to buy the dome LED lighting part that Lionel offers for $12 IIRC.

What's the Lionel one look like?  I don't think I've seen that. 

As far as my lighting, since I was doing the lower part of the car, all it took was tapping off the power and running it up to the three LED's in the dome.  The LED strips are self-stick, and I just ran the wires down.

John, on your advice, I bought a bag of people, they may be about 1/56 or so scale, but they really do look good inside my atlas trainman 60 footers.  Are these still available to your knowledge? 

John....that really looks great.  I see that you said the seats are made from wood...  Did you cut this from some sort of "L" stock or did you glue two pieces together to make the seat?

Alan

And here's another from Lionel:

 http://www.lionel.com/Customer...8e-a86a-4d63e75dd184

I happened to have some trim pieces that were shaped like that from a woodworking project, they seemed the right size for seats, so I just chopped them up on a bandsaw.

Carl, the light bars you posted sure look like they have incandescent lamps, not LED's.  I don't think Lionel was using LED's in these cars.

Figures:

The ones from eBay, direct from a number of Chinese sellers, in the 1:75 scale size seem to fit reasonably well in the K-line 21" cars, I've not tried to shoehorn them in the MTH cars (yet). These are cheap, but depending upon the seller the paint colors used might not be usable right out of the package.

Lighting:

Having followed John's wiring set-up, I converted several passenger cars to LED (no domes yet), but the difference in both energy use and light quality is amazing.

It is slightly more work, less now that Henning's Trains is offering a plug-n-play solution, but well worth it.

Interior:

Had not thought about painting the seating, great idea! Something easy to do that will give the cars a more accurate look and feel.

At one point I saw some model airplane canopy tint, and considered giving that a try as the prototypes often appear to have a blue or green tint, something to double back on. 

I'll post some photos when I return home in a few weeks.

Good luck,

Jason

I don't see many seated people on eBay any more, and they've all gotten considerably more expensive.

John, thanks for the clarification; I didn't realize how poor my vision has become and it's time for a bigger monitor!!!

Time to get those cataracts done!