Improving the Lionel Phantom Locomotive

I'm still looking for maybe one more passenger car, that would round out the set.

Looks good John, 

Great results so far, John.  It has me thinking that I should have installed 2 motors in the MPC RDC I equipped with TMCC.  Never too late though.

Was the LED light show they put on the sides of modern diesels considered for the windows? 

Bruce

Thanks guys.

I guess two motors are always better than one, especially if the one is in the front of the locomotive!

Was the LED light show they put on the sides of modern diesels considered for the windows?

Not sure exactly what you're asking.

John

Beautiful. Every think of putting in some El Wire and Led and running it on the layout with the indoor lights off?

Great Job John!  Makes me want to purchase one just to upgrade.  Man we have some talent on this forum!

My apologies for being vague, John.   I was wondering if maybe you had considered putting the choreographed LED lighting found on modern diesel sides inside the car windows?  I figured if anyone could do it, it would be you.

Bruce

I did get some EL wire, I'm looking at putting some on the sides in place of the wire trim, perhaps triggered by the horn.

I'm still looking for ideas on how to "dress up" the passenger cars.

The Harry Potter demonizer effect may look cool flashing in one car. Alien experiments

I'm thinking more along the lines of smoothly varying lighting and some colors.  I have yet to address the cars.  I was thinking that one of them may have a LED ladder effect the length of the car going back and forth...

 I was at John's home to pick up some coach cars which he converted to led lighting. He ran his phantom locomotive for me. His upgrades on it surely takes it to another level. I loved the sounds and the performance. Sort of gave me chills. I almost heard Orson Wells reporting the Martian invasion! John does excellent work. He has amazing knowledge and talent.

                                  Fred                                     

John and don't forget to add the aliens like Jim Policastro did on his RR.

Thanks Fred, I hope the cars are still lit.

I do want to find some aliens for my coaches, I think that's a great idea.  I'm still working on what I'll do to it.

A slow changing "electronic color wheel" with a few sets of multi-color leds at the windows?

  I don't really like the dome cars as much as the regular "pods".

 I think they should be something "more". Sharing a lighting style with the loco, and alternating over the train length, like they are carrying the "pods" between them. 

 Try a dual or tri, synchronized chase. Or even better, opposed direction chase lights.(carnivals, sign co's, and...the Jupiter 2 know this Instant anti gravity.)

 Are the domes solid black? If you can, I think the just inside the domes, maybe go with the opposing chase. Ie, two strings running close together, or sections in an led line, in opposite directions. And a third string somewhere below the "color change" windows doing whatever.

But even on half the cars, that's a lot of work, and I think if you could just accent light areas of the gap around the trucks & belly (with red or purple?) it would make it "pop".

An easy enough experiment.. but we are normally try to prevent the light bleed .

The upper halves of the pods are actually attractive, I think it might be "missing action" down low.

I had some colored LED's just held under the trucks on the locomotive to see what that would look like, it might be cool to have a blue halo effect all around all the cars and locomotive, that would be somewhat spooky.

Dear John

I love what you have done to it. I can not wait to see what the finished product will look like. You have given inspiration to purchase my own Phantom and built it as Time Machine with 1980's theme. Unfortunately I have three problems.

1) Server cases of too many project and not enough time to complete them all.

2) Space the final frontier (ran out space to store and place stuff) Need a new house.

3) A server case of funds are low disease. Have to pay off some bills and then see if we can move forward with this project.

I can not wait to see what you do with the EL Wire.  Can you suggest some reading material about El Wire.

The reason my Phantom project is going so slowly is because of too many projects.

I have a big house, but that hasn't stopped the train stuff from filling all available space!  I need to have a big sale...

I got the idea for the EL wire from this thread, and I found a place with Google to buy some bare EL wire and I just got some driver modules for it.  I'm currently just getting connection wires on all the pieces of EL wire so I can fool around and see what they look like in daylight and darkness.  It's $1/ft, so when I pick some colors, I'll order a few feet of the choices.  I just got a bunch of 2 foot sections in all the colors they offered.

ELwirePros is where I got the EL wire, they have a bunch of information.

Wow 2.2mm is pretty thin!.

You could stack those for a vertical chase

Let us know when you have the sale, there be a  will bidding war going on with your trains stuff.

The hardest part of selling stuff is digging it all out and sorting it.  I really have to do some thinning of the herd.

Hi John

Yes I know it is very hard to first to thin herd and then go about selling the stuff. I  rented a few tables at one of the shows to sell some of my stuff. A lot of work getting everything together and trying to sell it.

Hi John

I have two question for you

First do you have an exploded diagram of the phantom?

Second what chassis would Phantom also fit on?

Here's one, but it's pricey.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-Li...;hash=item4d2e0df7a2

I attached the pages for the Phantom from the Lionel Supplements.

AFAIK, there is no chassis that the Phantom shell would fit, at least none that I'm aware of.  It's a different shape than most locomotives.  Also, you'd have to transplant the sideframes for the trucks, not to mention having the exact spacing of the trucks so they'd fit.  If you want to do a retrofit, my recommendation is to use the Phantom chassis and build on that, much easier to do.

That's the Phantom III series, silver instead of gray.  I want them to match.   I have a search for Phantom on eBay, so I see all the stuff that's posted there, so far no joy with any Phantom I cars.

I've missed this from the beginning, but got caught up.  I've never seen the train.

Nice work, nice train!

Thanks.   I have some more stuff to do, I got my EL wire and I'm looking at how I can add some Pizazz to the consist.  I also want to do some creative lighting effects in the passenger cars.

Thank you John.

I understand your point in regards to the chassis, I was under the impression that it would be a swap out but this is not the case.

John if you see a Phantom engine that need a little TLC and some elbow grease drop me any e-mail. I have an idea for a theme engine and I would like to use the Phantom as the engine that pulls all the cars. Color of Phantom does not matter price does.

Very Nice Work John!   Keep us informed of the EL wire aspect, I tried this on the Vision GEVO loco and it caused TMCC signal issues, so we fell back to LEDs.  Curious how your implementation works out.

Interesting issue Jon, I was wondering about that myself.  I may put it on the baggage car to keep it away from the TMCC signal if it causes an issue with the TMCC.  The EL wire stuff was pretty cheap, so I figured it was worth a shot.

I'll bet the EL Wire version of the GEVO looked pretty neat, too bad it was a problem!

That certainly looks like the same chassis as the Phantom.  I had the GP-9 chassis, and it was different, but the motor and mount were fine, and that's all I needed. 

Thank you gentleman.

I thought I'd better post a link to this incase you hadn't caught it embedded in the show us your aliens thread.

There are some cool lighting ideas in these videos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZyGjnx7P3A -HO scale, made first

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7DiCba5KSk his follow up

 And I forget, have the EVO chases lights been referenced? I saw a good video of a pair doubleheaded on site somewhere(?), one of green,& one of red, and thought "that's it".

The HO guy is WAY out there, that was some cool stuff he did!  Suffice to say I doubt I'm going to match that.

Weird locos, but sort of mesmerizing to watch.  Definitely different, and cool!

John,

You need to bring them on club night again and we can turn the basement lights off :-)

I need to get it working first.

Well, I think Jon was right about the EMI issues.  I just connected up a couple of the EL wires to a power module and positioned them about where they'd be with the shell on.  It really seems to screw up the TMCC operation.  It would run very erratically, and I once it just took off at full speed!   It would sometimes stop and then I couldn't talk to it at all.  Pulling the power from the EL power driver fixed everything.

I'm going to have to see if those will work a bit farther from the TMCC boards and antenna.

John,

Supposedly EL wire will run fine on pure sine wave power at 120VAC, 50-2000 Hz. It gets dimmer at lower frequencies but lasts longer. At one time, I was actually considering a small transformer running as a step up transformer being fed either from switched 60Hz track voltage or a small audio amp IC at a higher frequency. That has implications for insulation & safety and will weigh more, but it shouldn't make any RF noise. I haven't tried any of this.

Jim

Well, it's about as dim as I would want it now, so making it dimmer probably isn't a good thing.  I haven't totally given up, but since it wasn't like "shooting fish in a barrel", I'm going to put it off while I work on some other stuff.