Several years ago at Allentown First Frost, I came upon a whole box of these unique brass lamps. Some industrious model railroader a long time ago soldered these together from pipes and bits. Something about the effort in doing this appealed to me, so I bought the box with the intention of rebuilding them for use on my own layout.
You've heard this part before: I put the box on a shelf in my train room and basically forgot about them. Doing some reorganization a few weeks ago, I came upon them again. Looking through the box, I had a sudden idea of what I wanted to do with them... bring them into the 21st century with some LED bulbs and light up my under-the-big-table Marx layout!
First, the crumbling cloth wiring and rusted out old lightbulb sockets had to go. The industrious inventor had potted incandescent bulb sockets into the tops of the lights with some kind of terra cotta colored insulative epoxy. Prying out the sockets wasn't too hard (the old epoxy shattered with a couple blows of a hammer and chisel), but extracting the ancient wiring was a long and drawn out process. After several evenings of work over the course of a week, I had managed to salvage all but 3 of the lamps. That gave me enough for my purposes.
I know folks rant and rave about that vintage "patina", but these are going on a tinplate layout so they ought to shine. I gave all of the fixtures a quick polishing to take off the worst of the corrosion.
Combing the lighting section at the local hardware store, I came upon these small 1" diameter landscaping bulbs. They're 12V LED lights, providing comparable lighting to a 25W incandescent bulb for only 3W of actual power (that's not much more than your typical E10 socket train bulb). Plenty of light for my layout without requiring a funny power supply or heavy gauge wire. Most importantly, they fit inside most of the fixtures.
A regular G4 type socket wouldn't fit these handmade lights, so to mount the new bulbs, I devised my own solution. I came up with a press-fit insulator 3D printed from ABS filament. The insulator has slots in it so I can solder hookup wire to the prongs and then wrap the wires around for strain relief. This keeps the prongs of the LED bulb from shorting on the inside of the light housing and when you pull the wires up through the lamp's base, it centers the bulb.
Being an O Gauge model railroader, of course I have easy access to a 12VAC power supply-- the 14V output on the back of my KW. Measures about 12.8VAC unloaded, which is just about right for these LED bulbs.
Here's a tip I picked up from the cool old dude who stocks the electrical aisle at the local Home Depot: there's a significant discount on these bulbs if you buy 6 at once. For a couple bucks apiece in bulk, these LED bulbs are quite nifty.
Amidst a very hectic weekend, I found some time this afternoon to install the fixtures on my new Marx layout. I drilled holes in the table, inserted the protruding bases of the lights and ran bus wires to and from my control panel, splicing the fixture leads in with wire nuts. Seven landscaping bulbs provide plenty of lighting for the mainline. I just need to come up with a solution for the display shelves now!
