@JohnActon posted:I don't see that anyone has addressd your mention of rolling stock with incandescent bulbs. A word of caution the extra heat in some plastic bodied cars can melt the roof above the lamp. The most common bulb that Lionel used in conventional control was 14v so you may consider switching to 18 or 20v bulbs or adding a diode to the center rail pickup. The smoking caboose is also at risk. The constant 18v will generate enough heat in the smoke unit to melt the roof. There are several remedies a simple diode on the center rail pickup is about the easiest. I am rather allergic to smoke made by heating glycerine and polypropylene glycol which is the primary way model trains produce smoke so I generally turn my smoke units off though when doing TMCC upgrades I always upgrade the locomotive smoke to a fan powered unit with a regulator. This would be a bit of overkill on a caboose and I have used the diode on some of my cabooses and cheap chinese voltage regulators which I bought on eBay on others. I know that some like the look of incandescent bulbs over any color you can achieve with leds and if you are in this camp you will need to play around with different bulb voltages diodes and heat shelds above the bulb in your plastic bodied rolling stock. I am in the led camp and use various combinations of warm and cold tone leds and cheap chinese regulators as well as different ways to tent leds to adjust the color. There have been many discussions on the forum with drawings and schematics on converting to leds so I will let you do a search for these discussions rather than try to cover every method people have come up with here. One other caution when using strings of led lamps or diodes you must be carefull to switch the anode and cathode of your diode or leds from car to car to minimize DC offset. This gets addressed in some of the discussions on upgrading to leds. So search the forum and read up. j
Thanks for the response, John! I never considered actual heat damage by bulb while running at 18 volts! I have a newer Lionel smoking caboose -- wonder if the roof could melt on that? Also, I wonder what year MTH and others changed their passenger cars to LED? Is there an easy way to determine what passenger cars use LED versus incandescent? At 18 volts, is there a risk I could melt the roofs of passenger cars? What about searchlight cars and rotary snowplows? I will take your advice and read up....
Mike
