MTH Amtrak Superliner LED Upgrade in Pictures

Nice, I have 11 cars I need to do yet. The incandescent bulbs trip the breaker on my 180 bricks when I run smoke 

Yep, I have eight of these, and I'll be doing them all. 

Here's the before and after shots.

Before, 4 bulbs on top, two on the bottom.

After, 24 LED's on top, 15 on the bottom.  The lighting is very even all the way across.  I see one little thing I'd like to fix.  The stairway from the lower level isn't really lit, I'll have to stick an LED above it to illuminate it.  Should be a very easy fix.

They look good 

That stairwell is a lawsuit waiting to happen!!

Nice job, as usual, GRJ!

Looking excellent; thanks for the step-by-step "how to", including the connectors.

How many "passengers" will each car receive?

I'll have to light the starway, can't feed the lawyers too much, they get greedy!

I'll probably give them a few downstairs and 15-20 upstairs.  The full dome I have will probably get more.

GRJ,  I did mine last year with your LED module regulators.   They truly reduced the voltage drop on my double tracked overhead layout.  I have four Superliners and six other Amtak passenger cars.  Also, I just installed four analog lights from those passenger cars in a Burger King model I'm working on for the table layout.

Hopefully, you can see that these modules can be adjusted for intensity.  The second pic may show this variation better.

The very far from finished Burger doodle, lit with those leftover Amtrak passenger car lights.

Jerry

Very nice John! They make a big difference. 

great post for reference on your product! The trouble with this is once I started, it seems there's no end! I still have more to do. I quit when I got to some G scale cabooses and never did the conversion of those, and the rest of the fleet of cars.

I have a bunch of cars I haven't done, I just want to use these next weekend, so I figured I better get cracking!   I figure if I don't use my product, people may start to doubt it's a good idea.

Looking good, John.  I still have 5 UP passenger cars to convert yet. 3 of them are vista domes which take a little longer to do due to the 2 levels.  I also have 7 ARR passenger cars I would like to convert.   I’ll need to buy another roll of LEDs and a few more of the regulator modules.   I had put the recently purchased  2 ARR cars on the track to see if they had LED lighting.  They still had incandescent bulbs which produced an orange light.

Larry

Some of the dome cars are tricky, I end up using #30 wirewrap wire in either black, white, or clear to sneak up to the dome to drive the lights.  In extreme cases, I have at least four different small LED strip segments, all wired with the fine wire to get the job done.  As it happens, other than the fact that there's no place to run the track power under the floor, these SuperLiner cars are very easy.  I had a K-Line dome car with no place to put lights on the dome, so I did floor lighting on that one, it actually worked out really nice.

In all cases, I try to install the lighting so that you can completely separate the various parts of the car for maintenance, it really drives me nuts when I open a passenger car and I have spaghetti wiring stringing between the parts!  

I also get the same reaction when I open an upgraded locomotive and the shell is wired permanently to the chassis.  What in the world were the people thinking???

Looks great. This is inspiring me to get cracking on LED passenger car conversions. I have a several sets that I've been waiting to do.

Some cars are very easy, lots of the MTH Premier cars are really easy.  Others, like many K-Line cars, are a giant PITA.  However, once you've been around the block a few times, they tend to fall into place.   I find the MTH Railking cars to be more difficult than the Premier cars, many of the RK cars cut corners on how they were wired.

gunrunnerjohn posted:

Some cars are very easy, lots of the MTH Premier cars are really easy.  Others, like many K-Line cars, are a giant PITA.  However, once you've been around the block a few times, they tend to fall into place.   I find the MTH Railking cars to be more difficult than the Premier cars, many of the RK cars cut corners on how they were wired.

John,

I've 3-4 sets of the old Lionel 027-style passenger cars that I want to convert. To be exact, they are modern remakes in the conventional classics series. I pulled the roofs off and it looks like they should be fairly easy to do.

Btw, I am probably going to pick up a handful of your conversion kits from Henning's.  

Most cars are easy to do, there are just some "stinkers" in the crowd.

John,

Just to be clear before I start, is the pair of red/black wires on the bottom right of the first photo spliced to the track pickup roller and to the connector that mates with the mating connector shown in the second photo.?

A little hard to see clearly in photo 1.

Thanks,

joe

John, Great Post of "How To" LED lighting, one comment, the 1st photo of the chassis in the upper right the (2) white connectors are laying on top of each other, which it took me a second zoomed in look to see clearly, if they were seperated in the picture may have been clearer separation. Also I know you have listed where to buy the MTH (2mm JST-PH) connectors male and female, and the Molex 2.5 connectors, I just can't seem to find where I stashed the info in my memory banks, could you post this info again

Thanks Dean 

I found the female connector at Allied Electronics. It's a Molex part no. 22-03-5025 at $0.06 each.  Can't seem to find the Molex male complementary connector though. Any help appreciated.   Joe