One thing I noticed in images of the AM Superliners was the hollow marker light openings on the car ends just screaming for a pair of LED’s to fulfill their purpose. Having picked up an AM Superliner set at the last S-Fest, I decided to unleash such a fiendish plan. I chose the sleeper for this project.
Lift off the roof, install LED’s and reassemble. Easy-peasy, right?
Wrong…
Well the actual installation of the LED’s wasn’t difficult, removing the roof was a BEAR.
The roof is held down using a method pioneered by Rivarrossi back in the 1960’s: Roof and window molded as a single piece and held down by molded on clips that snap into the floor. The AM heavyweights use the same method. I’ve removed dozens of roofs that use this method both in HO and S with no problem.
The openings for the clips on AM cars have always been tight and a couple of quick swipes with an X-acto knife provide more clearance. However, to do this, I had to remove the trucks to get some fightin’ room. As I removed the truck screws, I heard the nuts and lighting board plop and rattle inside the car.
So, I was now committed.
Usually by placing a thin styrene strip between the clips and floor plus a little wiggling, pop goes the roof.
Not so with the Superliners… The roof assembly is an extremely tight fit, complicated by the taller window material for this extra height car.
Had I known it would wind up to be such an epic battle to get the roof off, I would have just gone with some MV lenses for the markers and called it a day.
Oh well, in for a penny…
Using a dizzying array of razor blades, metal straight edges, wood and plastic wedges and my most gently prying screwdriver, over three days (working on and off) of grunting, groaning, colorful language and frustration the roof finally came off. Wound up chipping off a corner of the roof that I was able to glue back on with only a small crack visible. Also, there’s now a few minor dings here and there that I’ll have to live with.
When all was said and done, I wound up with a pair of trucks, lighting board, car body, smoke colored window/roof assembly, miscellaneous hardware and a paper diffuser laid out on my highly organized workbench.
With the roof off it was time to concentrate on the job at hand. First, I decided that I didn’t want to just rely on the truck screws to provide the circuit to power to the lighting board. Wires were soldered to the pickups and the half-moon cutout to allow for wire flexing on the truck was done with a Dremel sanding drum. Holes were drilled in the floor behind the bolsters for a pass through.
The lighting board was modified with some connectors from my scrap box in order to make contact with the printed circuit underneath. The pickup and LED wires will plug into these.
I used two “tower” LED’s for the markers, rectangular LED’s with a 2mm diameter extension pipe. While these have clear bodies, they have a red element. The marker openings on the car are a tad too small, so they were reamed out so the LED’s would be a snug fit. The LED’s were covered with heat shrink tubing and black paint to prevent red light from “glowing” into the car. I’ve used 1K ohm resistors in the past for current limiting LED’s with no problem and did so again. The AM lighting board has a bridge rectifier on it, so the markers will be lit regardless of train direction.
Now it’s all a matter of soldering all this stuff together, plugging it in and running a final test.
One last matter to attend to, a portion of the end of the window glazing on one end the roof casting has to be removed in order to clear the LED’s. The center was left intact for the end door’s window.
Before snapping the roof back on, I put a little dab of RTV on the LED’s just to make sure they don’t come out, even though they are a pretty tight fit. So, snap the roof back (a LOT easier than taking it off…
) on and press into service.
Just like the real thing.
Rusty
