Fitting Cab Lights Into A Farish Class 60

[EWS60008]

Hello everyone,

 

I am planning to retrofit some cab lights into my Farish Class 60's as I would like to have some "night" operations on my layout and I intend to use LED lights which are the same colour similar to that Dapol use for their light bars that can be fitted in their carriages and units. However I am stuck because I cannot find any wiring diagrams for the lighting on the Farish Class 60's .

 

So any advice on this would be welcome .

 

Cheers

Ash

[russellwar]

Logic says to me to connect them to the white LED. Then you would have the cab light on in direction of travel. Can't help with the circuit I'm afraid but please post pics as if it works I may be tempted to do the same

[Edwin_m]

Somewhere on the PCB is a series resistor to limit the current for the LED. By measuring the resistance from the decoder terminal I decided it was 1.5k on the class 66 and probably the same on this one too.

 

If you connect a LED in series with the existing then the headlight will be dimmer and (under DC operation) will not light up until a higher speed. Short of trying it out, it is difficult to tell whether this would be tolerable.

 

If in parallel then this effect will be less, but unless the two LEDs are perfectly matched then there is a risk that one of them will fail. As you don't know the characteristics of the existing LED it will be hard to match it to a new one, but you might be able to check the voltage across it when lit and see if the same voltage appears across the new LED when lit from a battery via a resistor.

 

With DCC you could run a wire from the yellow or white, or a spare function, via a resistor of about 1.5k, to the negative new LED and from the positive back to the blue. This would make the existing and the new LEDs independent of each other. You could try the same thing with DC by wiring to the solder pad but I don't know if this would work.

 

Anyway aren't the cab lights supposed to be off when driving?

[EWS60008]

Coming to think about it. I believe they are meant to be off when driving but as I have got used to my Hornby OO gauge HST's having working cab lights and the Bachy 37's too. It looks spectacular for night operations which was why I was going to fit cab lights into my Farish 60's originally .

Logic says to me to connect them to the white LED. Then you would have the cab light on in direction of travel. Can't help with the circuit I'm afraid but please post pics as if it works I may be tempted to do the same

I will certainly post pics if my cab light experiment works .