Add Headlamp to 60 Trolley

It should be easy to use a flat-top LED to add lighting to each end without having to mess with lenses.  Just drill out to fit a 5mm flat top LED and glue it in.

Thanks, I see that they're available.  I'm a bit of a novice on this, I imagine I have to attach something to the power connection to provide this light DC power, right?

  I suspect the easiest way is to just wire them from track power with a resistor.  If you wire two LED's back to back in opposite polarity, one resistor to track power to one side and the other side to frame ground, you'll have both LED's lit all the time.

I think it would also be possible to wire them to the reversing slide and have directional lighting, but I'd have to look at the innards to be sure I had that right.

I ordered some 5mm LEDs and the corresponding resistors from Amazon.  I carefully drilled out the headlamp impressions on each side.  It turns out that the inside of it was almost exactly 5mm,  I could insert the LED into the hole, and there was still the headlamp 'holder' on the outside so it was a perfect fit.  I wired one of the leads of each LED to the appropriate contact for the reversing slide, and grounded the other.  It actually looks good, although because of the lights/wires being connected to the body, taking it apart for maintenance will be a little harder, but acceptable.

From start to finish, it only took an hour or so.

The only issue is that the LED is way brighter than the inside incandescent bulb, but luckily I have a bayonet LED replacement bulb on order so that should help.

Thanks John.

Looked like a success.  I put a connector in line with any shell wiring so that I can completely separate the shell from the chassis for maintenance.  You might also looks a warm-white or amber LED's for the next project, they typically look better for the time period of a trolley.

So you would wire the LED contacts to a male end of a connector, and then wire the female end of the connector to the trolley's electrical connections?  I'm not so good at this stuff, what type of connector would you recommend?

If you have some extra LED+resistor combos, you could take a spare resistor and use 2 resistors instead of one.  This would knock down the headlight brightness possibly making it commensurate to the interior light.  If that's not enough dimming use 3 resistors instead of 1. 

Connectors are fine but since you have frosted windows with no direct view of "unsightly" interior wiring, you could just make the wiring longer to make it easier to separate the shell from the chassis.  Buying just 1 pair of connectors can be disproportionately expensive if this is your only application.  IMO of course....

Yeah, I have plenty of resistors, and you're right, you can't see any of the extra wiring because of the frosted windows.  I will definitely see if I can do that.  Thank you.

After some more trial and error, I got something I'm happy with.  As per @gunrunnerjohn, I ordered some warm-white LEDs from Amazon.  While I was waiting for them, I tried wiring multiple resistors in line as per @stan2004 to the bright white LEDs, and that seemed to help.  I had 470 Ohm resistors, and I used 3.  I bought some 3000 Ohm resistors, and that looked much better, but still too white for me.  When the warm-white LEDs finally came (long story), I initially tried it with the 3000 Ohms, and the light was too dull.  I ended up going back to a single 470 ohm with the warm-whites, and liked it.

Also, I changed out the internal bulb for the trolley with a frosted LED bayonet base, and that was better too.

Looks good, for models of older equipment warm is the way to go. Glad to see you solved things to your satisfaction

I went back to this project to add a small LED bulb on the inside, since the existing bulb only really lights half the unit IMO.  I like it a lot, but I really like a lot of lights (of the proper color temperature).

Now, what I want to do is since I have directional headlights working, can I put in a directional tail light?  So when the trolley is going forward, the light is white, but when it changes direction the light turns red.  Is there an LED light that could do that in a 5mm form factor?

@texgeekboy posted:

... Is there an LED light that could do that in a 5mm form factor?

Search for "bicolor red white 5mm LED"

FWIW, I've found for some reason that most of the red/white LED's are vary fragile, probably because they're widely different voltages and/or the Chinese don't know how to combine those two colors.  I've had success putting a bright red LED right behind the white one and letting the light shine through the white LED body.

@texgeekboy posted:

... I wired one of the leads of each LED to the appropriate contact for the reversing slide, and grounded the other.  ...

This directed to GRJ.  I am not familiar with the #60 Trolley.  Is it "just" a bridge-rectifier, driving a cross-wired DPDT bumper activated slide switch, driving a DC can motor?

If I understand what the OP did, his LED cathodes are connected to "ground" meaning the metal chassis?  In other words the outer-rail/wheel pickup as opposed to the DC- output of the bridge. 

I like your idea of the red LED...much easier to find.

I don't know how he wired the lights, but since he has directional lights, just wire the red LED to operate with the opposite side white headlight.

Thanks for the replies, @gunrunnerjohn and @stan2004,  Doing a search on what Stan suggested I found an article named something like 'why are red and white bicolor LEDs so hard to find.  I've connected one lead of the LED to the switched power (one for each), and the other to the ground used by the existing bulb.

I actually just coated around the white LEDs with liquid tape to eliminate light coming back into the trolley.  So just glue the red LED to the back of the white LED?  That doesn't sound so hard.

See this 5 year old OGR thread where GRJ discusses a DIY red-white bicolor LED!  I demo'd the concept of "backlighting" a 5mm clear lens LED in photo above.  In my case I used a tiny surface mount LED but these are very hard to work with.  I think in your case a 3mm Red LED might be easier to mount behind the existing 5mm White LED.

Note what GRJ says about how to wire it in.  I believe you can simply run wires along the walls of the frame just the length of the trolley...so you don't need to add additional "long" wires (per your comment about separating the frame from the chassis) from the chassis and slide switch.

@stan2004,

Thanks a lot!  Actually, since I wrote that first bit about running wires, I've become more skilled with wires and soldering.  Just 2 days ago, I ripped my old stuff out of the trolley and put in a more elegant solution.

Yeah, I'm going with Red LEDs glued to the back of the White LEDs.  If that doesn't work, I'll rip it out and just stick with the whites.

Well, I got it working.  I just nestled a 3mm red LED behind the 5mm white LED, taped them tight so as to prevent red light shining through to the inside, wired them up, and here it is.

I can rest easier tonight knowing I've made my trolley line safer for the little people.

Looks good, and simple.  Also, the other good news is, those LED's are much less likely to crap out than the red/white ones.

Updating a sort of old thread with new info.  With help from many on OGR, I realized it wasn't that hard to do blinking LEDs.  I bought some 3mm red blinking LEDs from the big online retailer and rectifiers for LEDs from Evans Designs.  I tore out the old light assemblies, used a 5mm flat top warm white LED, and nestled the blinking red LED with the rectifier behind it, doing it of course for both ends.  I discovered that while Evans does send out the rectifiers fully assembled, the position of it close to the switching mechanism in the trolley frame put a lot of stress on it, so it eventually broke.  I put additional shrink tubing on a new rectifier to strengthen it.  That, plus grinding down some bits on the trolley frame and the trolley body, along with some grease on the wires, made that problem go away.  I did that on two trolleys.  One of them had a one piece bumper, and that did not need any modification to the frame or body since the part that holds down the contact for the reversing control is so much smaller.

The lights are directional.