# lighting for USA coaches



## tom h (Jan 2, 2008)

I have some older USA coaches, they have little light bulbs and markers that light up, they have a switch on the bottom to use marker or lights, there are 2 of them inside, have it all apart, they do work with 9 volt battery, but they were set up to p/u power from track, very dull, not very bright at all, is there another way with led lights to maybe make it a little brighter, now remember I am electronically challenged, is there something with led strips and can hook up directly to battery? 

Hopefully get some different ideas, and please keep them simple.

Tom H


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## NavyTech (Aug 2, 2008)

I would replace all the lights with LED's it is easy to do and they last forever. They are always the same brightness.









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## chuck n (Jan 2, 2008)

I am by no means an electronic guy!! But wouldn't it be better to wire the LEDs parallel, across the two wires, rather than series, along a single string. Each LED drops the voltage a little bit. Years ago I soldered some in a line, and it didn't work. As I recal,l 20 years late, each LED down the string got dimmer until the last ones didn't light. It could also be that none of them lit. Soldering them across two wires did work.


Chuck


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## Michael Glavin (Jan 2, 2009)

Massoth, LGB, Dallee and others offer strip LED kits for the purpose as noted above. All Electronics has some reasonably priced LED strips that can be cut to length with coupling and terminating hardware that I purchased for some passenger car lighting projects I'll get to some day...

Or it really is as simple as pictured above, albeit there are some considerations for the power source. Series wiring is preferable in this circumstance; this allows all the LED’s to consume equal current delivering like brightness if you will.

Something to consider is the white or warm white LED’s, older passenger cars were equipped with lights that we can emulate with “WARM WHITE” LED’s.

Battery power is viable constant power source IMO; some use a single battery per car while others use a central battery with each car being plugged into the latter.

It’s certainly plausible to power the lighting from the track with great results, with some caveats. This works very well for DCC power equipped layouts which offers constant power to the rails. There are lots of ancillary devices to supplement the power supply for rail powered lighting such as batteries, capacitors and the like.

All Electronics link:
http://www.allelectronics.com/make-a-store/category/340/LEDs/1.html

Click on the link below for helpful LED info
http://www.kpsec.freeuk.com/components/led.htm

Michael


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