Model Railroading > Ditch lights w Athearn rtr

I have a question, Have any one hooked up ditch lights to a Athearn rtr model with the dcc plug in? If so did you keep the DCC plug in and did you solder the wires for ditchlights to the corresponding outputs? I'm curious thinking about doing this and wanted to know if i could add ditchlights without having to remove the board and hardwire it. any suggestion would be appreciated

If I remember, I removed the board and purchased a decoder from Digitrax that fits the Athearn and there were solder pads for the functions needed for ditch lights.

I have installed ditchlights on Athearn's AC4400's and used a Lenz Gold decoder with JST harness so that I could use the plug.

One ditchlight bulb is wired direct to the Athearn green wire and the other one to the Athearn purple wire. Each bulb is a Miniatronics 1.5V 30ma with a 390 ohm resistor in line with each. The remaining wire on each goes back to blue. It is fairly simple to do.

I also recommend that you set the bulbs where they are going to go first before wiring them up. On my AC4400's I removed the dorky looking end mounted things completely and put top mounted lights on the locomotive like they should be. I used Details West ditchlight housings and slid the bulbs in from the bottom. Some drilling in the model is necessary for the wires.

Rio Grande Fan
Denver, CO

Thanks I appreciate the information