Gunrunner John's Lighting Kit = COOL have 1 Q

Well... that's a good question.

Powering the observation car, or any dome cars, will take some manual manipulation and soldering.  There are many varieties of the observation car lighting, so it would be really difficult to anticipate them all. Some have incandescent lighting, some have LED's, and some have a mixture.

Perhaps if you post verify what kind of lighting it has and post some pictures, we can figure it out for you.  I've never done these cars, so I don't have specific details of how to accomplish that lighting.

Think about leaving them attached to the existing power supply.

I suggested that in my email to him, I was going to post that here.

Great Minds Think Alike?

As GRJ says, lighting up "specialty" cars like the PE observation car will take some manual manipulation and soldering.  Here's one idea that may be so obvious that no one else has mentioned it.  The LED strips are simply a collection of white LEDs.  For the most part, you can simply replace an LED on the strip with another white LED on extension wires to reach special locations such as marker assemblies, drumhead fixtures, deck lights, whatever.

So here's an LED strip where I removed several of the surface mounted white LEDs and attached wires to the solder-pads going to various types of white LEDs.  No fussing with resistors, wattages, capacitors, etc. etc.  One of the "external" LEDs is from the strip itself with wires to extend it off the strip.  This allows you to convert the LEDs intended for illumination into specific function LEDs such as marker, head/tail-light, dome, drumhead, etc..

I realize this is not a PE Observation car, but here's a caboose where a surface mount white LED on wires is powered from the LED strip and by GRJ's lighting board.  The LED goes into an un-lit marker assembly with 2 red lenses.  Let there be light!

Note that many styles of white LEDs can be purchased pre-wired on eBay or from model railroad suppliers.  In other words, the difficult soldering (attaching wires to the tiny LEDs without destroying them) is done for you.

Clever idea Stan.  Note that this only works with white LED's that run at roughly the same voltage as the ones on the strip.  If you try to do this with red or green ones, you'll run into issues.

Where did you get that nice marker for the caboose?

Right.  I hope I was clear that this applies for (most) white LEDs but wise of you to explicitly point this out.

Being the cheap-skate that I am, it's home-brew using styrene square rod and sheet from the LHS.  But the part you'll like is the red lenses - these are cut-off domes from red LEDs .  So raw materials were maybe 10 cents per assembly.  It's suitable for "Railking" as opposed to the detailed after-market brass stuff which is suitable for "Premier" cars but costs a fortune (IMHO). So one may ask why not just use red LEDs in the first place?  Well, two red LEDs would not fit in anything close to a 2-lens side/rear O-gauge marker assembly.  Plus, for dual-color (red-green) marker assemblies, this allows a single white LED to light up both lenses.

Nice kit and thanks for sharing. As Han Solo stated " I got an idea." That new light set up might work in some observer cars that I was think of changing over to led.  Thanks again for sharing. I will share back when I get to that project and show the results early next year.

Kris

I resorted to an even easier solution, thanks to feedback from John!  I left the OEM board in the car, removed the bulbs/sockets and taped John's board right on top of it.  The 4 marker lights at the end of the observation car are incandescent bulbs and they still receive the power they require from the OEM board.  Of course the end lights flicker occasionally while the interior lights maintain constant illumination, but I can live with it.

This is a great kit and John was very helpful.  If anyone is considering purchasing this kit I strongly recommend it!

That's pretty slick Stan, that option never entered my mind!  I figured you bought them somewhere, very nice home-rolled solution.

Another option, if you are faced with this issue, is to simply wire three white LED's in series with a 150 ohm resistor and connect them to the end of the strip.  Electrically, it's the same as what Stan did, just a different physical appearance.  This might be used if you didn't want to lose any lighting positions.

Slightly more "thinking" is involved, but you can series string colored LED's the same way and just adjust the series resistor for the correct balance of illumination.