Showing the front daylight running lights on

(For night running, the headlight below the unit's number is used instead)

Showing the side of the yellow painted area at the front of the car

and the 2 piece doors.

Both of these need cosmetic modifications to the original Hornby model

The rail below the windscreens also needs to be painted black.

Showing the mods required

1.5mm diameter holes were drilled through the painted headlights and rear lights on the power car light housings. A 0.8mm drill was used to open up (near) rectangular apertures corresponding to the forward marker lights. (With a hole penetrating through the aperture rear wall for the wires to pass through.

Holes drilled and marker light LEDs glued in place. When the glue is dry, the plastics will be tidied up & painted black.

"prototype white" pre-wired chip LED "Nanolights" were then glued in place to form working front marker lights.  The collateral damage created when making the holes was then made good and the light housings received a coat of satin finish black paint.

Short lengths of 1.5mm clear plastic light pipe were cut and filed to provide flat surfaces at each end. The light pipes were then placed in the holes, with the front surface flush. Daylight white and signal red Nanolights were then glued to the rear surface of the light pipes, and also secured to the rear of the light housing plastics.

Rear lights fired up for the first time (using a bench PSU). Note the red leakage into the adjacent headlights.

Showing the light housings and LEDs from above (rear lights still on).

Thin black painted plasticard guard plates are required between the rear ends of the light pipes to prevent light leaking into the adjacent pipe.

Light leakage fixed!

Forward day running lights

Forward night running lights

Wires are routed down the rear of the light housing supports to the chassis floor and glued in place below the channels cut in the seating moulding for this purpose:

Channels cut in the underside of the seating moulding to allow the lights wiring to pass along the top of the chassis

Series resistors, diodes and wiring (in line with the circuit diagram) all glued in place

Further plastic was removed from the underside of the seat moulding to clear the wiring below, until it could be properly seated on the chassis. A thin plasticard sheet was glued over the slots above the motor & additional side facing seats and a luggage rack were fabricated for this area.

The top side of the moulding was painted pale grey overall.  The seats were then painted matt dark blue and a driver plus a few passengers were glued in place.

Multi-way miniature connectors are used to connect the LokSound V4 and TCS FL4 decoders to the chassis wiring. The diagram below shows the planned arrangement:

First the hazard warning lights:

The real hazard lights
Two holes for the LED leads	LED leads through the holes and body superglued in place
A quick test	Fill the holes and paint the LED body with matt grey (Needs a bit more work)
The real 142 hazard light

 

Next modifying the old four piece doors to become the newer two piece doors:

"Before"....... The trailer car showing the original 4 piece doors

 

"After"........Unwanted verticals removed with a Stanley knife. Just needs a bit of smoothing and a drop of white paint

 

Where will the decoders and upper body parts and lighting fit?:

Looking up into the roof of the upper body.....a rough plan of the proposed component locations

The big ESU LokSound V4 decoder fits in the roof at the rear of the car. The TCS FL4 function decoder is glued inside the central raised roof area. Three LEDs beam downwards to illuminate the passenger seating areas and the flicker-free circuit powering these is distributed across the roof, with a capacitor inside the toilet. The cab light beams down into the driver's zone. The interconnections with the chassis, fit beside the capacitor inside the screened off toilet area.

Not quite as tidy as the diagram, but wiring is in progress......

Now is a good time to try out the LokSound decoder.  I don't want to have to extract it from its location in the roof once its fixed in place.... so I need to verify that its working OK first.

Power Car chassis hooked up to the trailer car to provide more reliable rail contact

Serious Motor Control Problem:

The first revelation was an unstable BEMF control loop. With the original Howes values, the loco wobbled on the first speed step & went off like a rocket on the second step. It then came back under control at approx 1/4 speed. I expected a few issues with the very small Hornby 142 motor, which must have a very low inertia, but I've never come across behaviour quite like this! After carefully ploughing through a structured sequence of adjustments of the Motor control CV variables, I eventually got it under control and behaving across the speed range. There may be other combinations that achieve this result, but the CVs I ended up with are as follows: (Motor control CVs are in the orange cells of the table below.)

Unimpressive Speaker performance:

The next issue was the sound quality..... With the DCC Supplies 20x40mm enclosure speaker, the results are disappointing. I'm going to look again at the possibility of using a replacement unsealed ESU 20x40 type 50334 speaker. I've used this speaker successfully on several other locos, so hopefully it will add a bit of quality here.

The speaker has to be mounted a little below the chassis floor level to keep the rear of the magnet clear of the seat moulding. I've sealed the speaker to the chassis underside and I hope the upper body will give enough isolation between the sound pressure waves from the front and the back of the speaker.

Where there's a will, there's a way!

Now, when the glue/sealant around the periphery of the speaker sets, I'll give it a try ..........  Significantly louder and a bit more bass.  I'll have to wait til I can get the upper body refitted for the full effect, but its certainly an improvement.

It all fits back together again OK!

1) LokSound V4 with Howes Sound Files:

A few changes to get the function buttons in the right order for a station stop and to free up buttons in the 0-12 range for the FL4 & LokPilot FX controlled lights:

Detailed CV change action:

A few tweaks to the sound levels:  

2) TCS FL4

3) Trailer Car LokPilot FX

1) With the trailer car re-assembled, the lighting all works as planned...... except that the rear lights are on the bright side and there is some light leakage between the adjacent headlights and rear lights.

I'm going to try using black paint, applied to the side of the light-pipe formed by the rear light lens. Just in the area near the LEDs, where the two light-pipes run close together. I expect the paint to reduce the light level through the rear light lens, but this would actually be beneficial.

..........Success!  Light pollution problem solved ..... and as expected, a slight drop in light level from the rear lights.

2) The capacitor and connector hidden in the toilet compartment can be seen through the frosting of the window.  0.25mm white plasticard immediately behind the window solves that problem!

3) A few flecks of dust were left on the inside of the windows.... these will be removed before final re-assembly.

Final Trailer Car Completion:

1) The modified doors need careful painting to avoid white paint getting on to the door glazing. Paper slid between the frame and the glazing, while the paint job is done, provides a fix!

2) The rear dividing line between the yellow warning area and the side blue is corrected. Also, the rail below the windscreens is painted black.... Both in line with the photographic evidence.

3) A more realistic (dummy) BSI coupler is made from layers of plasticard, painted black and fitted in place of Hornby's moulded attempt on the chassis end-plate.

These final updates are also applied to the power car, which also receives black paint on the visible speaker surround.

New BSI coupler fabricated from layers of plasticard.