Model Railroading > Lighting question...

I've got an HO scale Walthers Superliner train that has lit rear marker lights added to it. I used a pair of Miniatronics red LEDs with 470 ohm resistors soldered to the power contacts for what would normally be the contacts for the car interior lighting kit which I'm not using. The effect looks great except for the inevitable yet very momentary flickering that occurs over those few dirty spots along the rail.

I want to add something to hold the power over those dead spots. I see TCS and Soundtraxx both make keep alive style additions to their sound decoder lineups. Can these items be used independently? Just wired directly inline with my LED/resistor setup? Or do I need to install a DCC decoder as well? I don't really care to have the ability to turn them on and off, I just want to stop the flickering. I thought I could just stick the right size capacitor in there, but I was told that wouldn't work... And yeah yeah, just clean the track, right...

Mr. MRL

What I do in this situation is built a simple/cheap lighting circuit your DCC 14V AC track power into a bridge rectifier you now have 14V DC this goes to a 16v capacitor (more uf the better, uf is the capacity) use this to power your resistors/LEDs and you have a cheap easy circuit that results in no flicker, (you can take it off the track and depending on now big of a capacitor you have it will stay lit for a while)

Robby: we have some Walthers Super Liner lighting kits under the layout where the boxes of sale stuff is under Malabar yard. I am sure you could use one of them to light your markers. Also you left your controller at the club last week. It is where I put controllers that I find that people have left there.

      S.S.K.

There was an article in RMC about this recently.

Doug Wetherhold
Macungie, PA

Check these out. They are geared toward lighting for passenger equip. and caboose.

http://www.sbs4dcc.com/dcdcclightpowersupply.html

Posted from Android

Hookdragkick Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Check these out. They are geared toward lighting
> for passenger equip. and caboose.
>
> http://www.sbs4dcc.com/dcdcclightpowersupply.html
>
> Posted from Android

I think that little anti-flicker capacitor module is just the circuit I'm looking for. Woo!

Mr. MRL