?? Rule 17 & v1.51

Does the engine actually have this feature?

"Rule 17 lighting" is the ability to dim the headlight without turning it off. It refers to Rule 17 in most prototypical North American rulebooks, which basically requires that the engineers of passing oncoming trains dim their headlights as they approach so as not to blind each other.

 

I looked at the manual and do not see the Rule 17 lighting feature.

There is a post a few pages back titled Legacy Lighting Menus. Look there.

 

Here. 

Thanks for the replies gentleman.   Sadly it did not occur to me that my engine did not have the Rule 17 feature.  Marker lights, strobe lights etc.,  not working made more sense to me since they are physically not there.  I assumed implementation of Rule 17 was just a software/firmware adjustment.  Live and learn.

 

And the chart you posted Marty was just what I was looking for.  In my mind v1.5 is "brand new" since I just got my first Lionel engine (at the Red Carpet sale) and the Legacy 990 a week ago.  I should have searched better.  I certainly have a lot to learn about Lionel.

In addition, you can sometimes enable features that are there but not enabled using the LSU program, worth a look.

Thanks gunnerj -  This morning I modded a blue module per your excellent instructions and using Method #2 all went well.   Looked at train data with LSU and while I was able to add two sets of buttons to a different screen (I added ditch lights and Rule 17),  that did not invoke the Rule 17 feature.  Nonetheless nice to have those icons on the "main?" screen. 

 

In looking at the feature details on the Lionel site I see that the engine I purchased only has the following:

 

• Directional lighting, including LED headlights and operating marker lights
• Illuminated number boards
• Illuminated cab interior
  
  No mention of Ditch lights - so, are marker lights aka ditch lights?   If not where/what are marker lights on a diesel? 
  
  Also too bad v1.51 does not allow ON/OFF of the number boards.  Guess I am a little spoiled by MTH RK Imperial products.
  
  Sorry for the dumb questions.....but as I used to tell my students "There is no such thing as a dumb question, only dumb mistakes."

My old saying is: There's no such thing as a dumb question, only dumb answers.

 

I suspect that for many, including a couple of my early Legacy locomotives, that they have tied the lights to a limited number of outputs.  I have a pair of the Legacy Contrail SD-80's, and when you MU them, the lights don't work properly for any trailing units.  The problem is, they tied the directional markers to the headlight operation, and the MU configuration changes the headlight behavior over the simple forward and reverse operation.

 

In another thread here, I detailed a little module I built to add Rule-17 lighting and motion controlled cab lights to a TMCC upgrade I did on a Williams scale GG-1.  That's another way to go to expand the functionality of the lighting.  I'm also working on an Arduino project to decode the TMCC data stream and have more controls available.  Sadly, this won't do anything for Legacy, as Lionel has not seen fit to release the Legacy command structure.