Tip: LED Lighting for the 3098 Locomotive and 4392 Coach Set Date: , ,

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1 Hi All, Over the past few months I have been working at a steady pace to install LED lighting in my passenger coaches. The coach lighting must have LED lights to reduce power consumption on the layout and be digitally controlled. The 4392 Passenger coach set 40 Years of Barden-Württemberg makes a nice train when combined with the 3098 BR38 locomotive. Below you can see the finished results. The coaches aren t designed to allow coach lights to be used as there isn t any provision to mount a collector shoe and a ground (masse) contact so I decided to use the Märklin lighting kit (yellow LEDS for a softer light for earlier eras) and power the LED light strips via 2 pole Märklin conducting couplers (see details page 3) and power the coaches via a relay in the locomotive. This side view shows the couplers mounted with the lights on. Above, the red arrows show the solder pad locations to solder the wires from the couplers. I used a small amount of hot melt glue to stop the lighting strip sliding through the white mounts. 1

2 Underneath the coach I held the wires together with a small length of heat shrink (yellow arrows). The wires where threaded through a small hole under each axle. Here I have shown two coaches with the room lights turned off and used a small lamp to illuminate the foreground. For the male coupler left, I orientated the plastic hooks in the down position and for the female coupler right, the plastic hooks were orientated in the up position. It is important to be consistent so that the coaches can be coupled together in any order. The couplers work well and are easy to couple and uncouple. Opinion Time Märklin should include these couplers in the catalogue as lighting accessories with a lower price. These 2 pole couplers should replace all single electrical couplings as there is less chance of damage when coupling the coaches together. 2

3 Märklin 2 Pole Electrical Couplings The Male Connector is The Female Connector is E E The price for each connector at the time of this article was 5.87 Each connector comes wired with 10cm length of wire and a 2 pin connector at the other end (see red circle). The connectors clip apart and the wires which are quite stiff can be exchanged for more flexible wire at the length you require. Locomotive The 3098 locomotive was converted to digital some time ago using a LokPilot V3 decoder. At that time I only put a LED light for the front lights and didn t use the available AUX1 and AUX2 functions. After deciding to use the locomotive to pull the 4392 coaches it seemed like a good time to use AUX1 for a cabin light and AUX2 to switch a relay which in turn controlled the coach lights via the 2 pole couplers. While I had the locomotive apart I decided to add fibre optic lights in the tender as well as the relay. The fibre optic lights have been removed see pages 6-7 and

4 Tender Details Warning: - The tender shell is held on by four lugs that clip on to the chassis. These lugs are very stiff and the body shell is difficult to remove. It is very easy to break the lugs. I had to use superglue to repair one lug. Above left you can see the relay (12V) which I recovered from an old microwave oven. The relay is quite large so it was easier to fit into the tender as well as the fibre optic rear lights with the LED off. The yellow arrow shows the location for a small slot to allow the wires to enter the tender. The 5 required wires that come from the locomotive are the AUX2 (purple) wire, +pole (blue)wire, rear light (yellow) wire, ground (black) wire and the centre rail (red) wire. Above right you can see one warm white LED (3mm) switched on and glued into the light pipe. There is a 1k resistor mounted on a small Vero board glued to the side of the relay used for current limiting. I used 1mm fibre optic for the rear lights. See article Enhancing Old Locomotives By Adding Tail Lights for other ideas and further details. Under the tender I put a blob of hot melt glue on the locomotive tender coupling pivot (yellow arrow) to prevent the tender from coming away from the locomotive. I removed the metal coupler and replaced it with a spare coupler pocket held with the existing screw. The female coupling socket was glued into the coupling pocket as one of the securing lugs broke and for the price of 5.87 I wasn t going to waste an otherwise good coupler. The wires from the coupler where threaded through and existing hole and one wire connected to the relay contact and the other connected to ground (masse). Once I had tested the relay and LED light functioned I replaced the tender body ensuring the wires from the tender covered with heat shrink remained in the entry slot of the tender. 4

5 Tender Electrical Coupling Change After running the 3098 locomotive with the 4392 coach set for some time I decided that I would like the locomotive to be more versatile and be able to pull trains with standard close couplers as well as trains that required controlled light functions. I decided to have the electrical coupling removable by adding single rolled IC pins to the wires as shown above. On the tender I soldered two rolled IC pins as sockets to a small Vero board. The socket PCB was then glued to the tender with gel super glue. The wires that originally went direct to the coupler were now soldered to the new socket arrangement. The reason for the single pin plugs on the coupler wires is to be able to thread the wires under the axles as there isn t enough space for a two pin plug. The coupler can be changed for a standard close coupler if required in less than 1 minute. 5

6 Tender Rear Lights Replace Fibre Optic Lights After the success of adding a LED in the raised top lantern on the tender of my 3085 ( ), 3316 (25004) and 3082 (41 334) locomotives I have decided to upgrade all tender locomotives that have raised top lanterns to have a warm white LED. Instead of repeating myself in this document on the techniques used please refer to article Enhancing Old Locomotives By Adding Tail Lights pages Warning: - You undertake the following modifications at your own risk. Mechanical modifications will be required to add the extra LED lights. Once I had installed the LED in the top lantern it was obvious that the fibre optic maker lights in this case needed to be upgraded to LEDs because the light levels were not even due the mechanical constraints in the tender and this required an offset of the LED placement for the fibre optics shown so one light was brighter than the other. Tender Rear Lights with 3x LEDs You will notice the top lantern LED is horizontal and the two lower marker lights are at odd angles. This problem was caused by the wires that support the LEDs going through the existing single hole for the removed fibre optic and for the top lantern the wires each have 0.3mm hole which provides better LED support. I didn t want to use glue in case I had to replace the LEDs for some reason in the future. This photo tells the story The lower right lantern is painted silver. The lower left lantern is painted silver with LED fitted. The top lantern is complete with LED and lens. The 0603 white LED had a blue tinge so I used Tamiya Clear Yellow X-24 acrylic paint to warm the LED light colour. 6

7 Drilling Holes The LED light size hole is 2.0mm, counter bored with 2.5mm drill just deep enough for the lens. For the top lantern I drilled 2x 0.3mm holes for the wires to exit the back of the light. At the back of the lantern on the outside of the tender there is a supporting rib and I was able to drill 0.3mm holes on either side next to the water filling hatch at approximately 60 in a downwards direction which allowed the wires to enter the inside of the tender. Tender Internal Wiring All the 0.25mm enamelled copper wires from the LEDs were routed and soldered to a Vero board interconnection panel as shown. The fine wires were held in place with black electrical tape. I used ESU wire for the flexible connection. The blue wire is the +Pole, the black wire is for the top light and the grey wire is for the two lower lights wired in series. Both resistors are 12k for the LED current limiting. At the red arrow the resistors are linked and the yellow wire for the rear lights is connected here. 7

8 Fibre Optic Tender Rear Lights Removed Left photo all lights are off. Middle photo cabin and rear lights are on. Right photo shows a different angle of view where the cabin can be seen and the rear tender lights are on. Cabin Light Photo below shows a side view of locomotive with cabin light on. Please note cabin brightness CV was set to the lowest value = 1 8

9 Cabin Light A 1.5mm hole was drilled into the locomotive shell for the cabin light wires. After the wires were threaded through the hole I soldered a PLCC2 warm white LED to the wires. I used a small plastic sheet to act as an insulator by gluing it to the bottom of the LED then gluing it to the cabin roof with hot melt glue. On the other end of the wires I soldered a rolled IC socket (2 pins) to be used as a plug which allows for the body shell to be removed for servicing. I used heat shrink around the plug and wires. The above two photos show the general layout of the locomotive. The red arrow shows the rolled IC Socket (2 pins) in series with the green wire is a 1k resistor for the cabin light current limiting resistor. The orange arrow shows a 3mm warm white LED that is mounted in a 2 pin rolled IC socket hot melt glued into the original light bulb recess. 9

10 Locomotive Front Lights Front lights on. Underneath the locomotive I mounted the 1k current limiting resistor on Vero board and hot melt glued it into position as shown. Wiring Diagram Locomotive +Plus F0f 1k Front Lights LokPilot V3 Decoder F0r 12k 12k Rear Lights 2 Pole Coupling Aux1 1k Cabin Lights Aux2 Coach Lights Well lit coaches just scream out to be populated, so I guess I ll have to start painting little Preiser figures. As always enjoy your model trains. 10