R3289TTS Class 37 Adding Directional Lighting

[GeeBee]

I recently purchased my first TTS sound locomotive and I’m impressed with the sounds it produces for such an inexpensive item, but I was a little perturbed by the fact that it doesn’t have directional head and tail lighting.

I have modified completely non DCC locomotives in the past, adding lighting and power control (although I haven’t fitted sound modules yet) and I’m thinking about modifying my new purchase to add directional lighting. I was wondering whether anyone had taken one of these loco’s apart yet? More specifically whether there are any connections to the decoder that would allow me to add a lighting modification? 

Any advice greatly appreciated.

[96RAF]

For the money TTS models are very good value as is and adding lighting would push the price up, defeating the object of the range. Where would you stop - diesels with all their day/night running configuarations or steam which really is a different ball game with all the lamp positions possible for train movements.

 

Back to fitting lights - The simplest but more expensive way is to buy a bespoke after market lighting kit like those from Express Models, or you can make your own up much cheaper buying the leds and resistors from places like Maplins or other electronics specialists.

 

A bit of vero-strip board can be used to mount the leds if necessary and to bring all the connections together then you just need to wire these up to the 4 inner pins on the existing decoder socket in your loco. The motor and track connections are used by the outer corner pins.

 

I would advise you to unplug the decoder whilst soldering just in case of damaging it.

 

The wire connections to the standard 8 pin socket are well documented. The blue wire provides power to the lights, the white wire provides switching for the foward lights configuration, the yellow wire switching for the reverse lighting configuration and the green wire switching for the Aux function (F18 on steamers, F25 on diesels). The basic lighting circuit is shown in the TTS user manual/leaflet including where to put the resistors.

 

It has been noted on some forums that the directional logic on early TTS decoders is reversed,so you may want to take this into consideration by cross checking when making your connections.

 

To keep the loco correct in case a decoder change is needed I have wired the socket as standard colour code and swapped the white and yellow decoder wires at the decoder plug - a bit fiddly but do-able.

[Chrissaf]

GB, This topic has also been the subject of previous posts:

https://www.hornby.com/forum/hornby-class-37-tts-now-fitted-with-directional-lighting/?p=1

 

https://www.hornby.com/forum/class-37-tts-/?p=1

[GeeBee]

Thanks for the replies and links. I'm quite competent at fitting the LED's and soldering resistors, I just wasn't sure whether the decoders were a cut down version without the opportunity of adding lighting.

[96RAF]

The decoder is a sort of cut-down/added onto R8249 with a piggy back sound module (based on a good look comparison with a x10 magnifier).

The main lighting difference is it only has white/yellow and green function wires switching power from the blue wire. There is no purple flying lead for F2.

So all you can have is F0 controlling directional lighting along with F18 (steamer TTS) or F25 (diesel TTS) auxiliary function which can be cab lights, flashing beacon, smoke unit (you'll be lucky on 100mA), etc -whatever you connect to it.

Look at the decoder socket and you will see the inner 4 pins are not wired yet, ready for you to finish the job.