A Walthers toy

[faraway]

*** W A R N I N G ***
The bulbs shipped by Walthers in the DC locomotive become far to hot running with DCC! The roof of one engine is damaged after 30 minutes switching. The head light was not dimmed. I dimmed the head light on another engine down to 150 out of 255 and the roof became still very hot. I assume they are specified for 12V only and that might be already critical.
I will rework the engines to LED. A good opportunity to add the rear light too.

[faraway]

After the little disaster of the melting shell new optical units with LED have been build.
They are essentially the same as the bulb units. A 1.5kOhm resistor has been added to the PCB and I did this time polish the ends of the optical fibers. That improved the brightness remarkable.
A small modification is to paint the lamp hole silver and fill it with Micro Kristal Klear to get nicer lamps when they are switched off. It will take several layers to fill the hole. Have to wait some time until it sets.





Last step are the rear lights. Walthers did the correct holes and a piece of transparent plastic. My only job is to glue LED right in front of the holes. The LED wires got a shape like frog legs and held in place by two piece of styrene glued to the third piece of styrene covering the old winter hatch hole in the roof.



A last remark. The Walthers axis are at the wide side of the NMRA standard S 4.2 K= 0.603 + 0.002. My Atlas #6 turnouts prefer more narrow axis. The trucks can be opened very easy and the wheel distance should be adjust.

[Brakie]

Reinhard,For a cheap jeep they're quite nice and I won't call them a toy by any means just because they are Trainline..

Yours look fantastic! .

Great job on dressing these jeeps up.

Did you know by a little filing those shells will fit Athearns old BB GP7 drive?

[faraway]

... Did you know by a little filing those shells will fit Athearns old BB GP7 drive?

Thank you for the kind words.
I am sorry. I did join the US model railroad to late for the very famous Athearn BB.