I’ve just received my Lionel 24xx carriages back, following a long-delayed job to fit LED strips in place of the lightbulbs. Much as I liked them, the brittle wiring was causing increasing problems with internal shorts, and they wouldn’t stay coupled (they have coil-type couplers) which I attributed to voltage fluctuations through the pickups.
I formed the idea to run a wire between them, to equalise the current and stop the flickering at the same time. This has developed into fitting LED strips and a stay-alive capacitor into each carriage; now they are evenly lit with a soft light along their length (they previously had two bulbs, one each end, each powered by one pickup) and stay lit for a short while when current stops. It has also apparently cured the coupler problems, presumably by damping current spikes and fluctuations and as an extra bonus, improved loco control (especially slow running), presumably by the same mechanism.
I set up a consist I wouldn’t have got away with before, a brass Williams USRA Pacific plus the three coaches. This is a smooth, powerful hauler but suffers from a hair-trigger reverser, which was sometimes triggered by the following coaches (especially over switches). Now it just growls round, hauling these (never particularly free-running) carriages smoothly.
It wasn’t a cheap job but I’d certainly recommend it.
