EFE Rail launches N gauge Class 17 and Mermaids

[rogerzilla 161]

SYP Class 17 D8594 turned up today. Terrible prototype but really stylish model!  Will run later.

[BusDriverMan 34]

I received mine yesterday - D8606, BFYE, weathered, and very pleasing!

 

It's my first loco with a Next18 socket and I haven't ordered a decoder yet. Was wondering if anyone can advise how many LEDs are used for the head and tail lights and can they be individually switched? By the look of the exploded diagram there's two LEDs under the nose at each end - one for the headcode box and one for the tail lights. I'd like to be able to control all four LEDs explicitly from four decoder functions - is that possible?

 

Tail lights switched on when the loco's not running light is a particular annoyance of mine. Another is having both tail lights on at once - until the late 80s the only train that did that were the Edinburgh-Glasgow push-pulls and trains carrying the head of state. Looking at the diagram, the tail lights operate with a lightpipe from a single LED, so turning one of them off would be a permanent operation by removing part of one lightpipe - has anyone done this?

 

Finally has anyone customised the headcode panel and retained the lighting? Applying Rule 1 - in the alternate universe my layout is set in, by a quirk of fate, these designs turned out to be reliable and became the standard Type 1 loco. So I'd rather like to give it a domino headcode and TOPS markings for that post-1977 look

Edited Friday at 09:06 by BusDriverMan