Passenger car lighting

How would you like to improve them? Do they flicker, or are they too dim, or too bright? Or...? Lots of solutions are available, but we need to know what you want to accomplish, or overcome.

It’s O scale. It’s supposed to flicker

@yardtrain posted:

It’s O scale. It’s supposed to flicker

Not on my railroad!

Did I miss something? Is flickering the issue? There's an easy fix.

Yes they flicker, actually off more than on

Hi Whit,  from the Lionel supplements, it shows that these cars have the 9551-80 operating coupler trucks, but I can't tell if they both have  pickup rollers for the center rails.

update, a quick  search of the internet shows that only one of the trucks have a pick-up, so that is the reason for the flicker, if power is coming from both trucks, then the power would come from two sources.  It looks like you could add another pickup roller to each car, the pickup usually just snap in.  OGR had an article a few years ago that showed someone basically wiring all of the cars together.

I have run a wire from each car to the adjacent cars that way every car has two or three pickups to eliminate blinking as Brewman 1973 suggested from an OGR article.

I did this 30 plus years ago.  The small flexible wires are connected with wire nuts inside the car and the Lionel 2400 series cars roofs are easy to remove.  I drilled small holes in the car bulkheads but one can drill holes in the car bottoms for the wires.

I leave the 3 or 4 car strings together and grab the cars ends, two car per hand to move from layout to train shelves or vice-versa.

Easier, cheaper and quicker than adding a second pickup on each car.

Charlie

Thank you all for the reply. I like the idea of adding a second pick-up, seems easy without changing the set much from its original design.

Again thank you

Check how the ground wire is attached. Many times Lionel will attach it to a C clip that doesn’t fit tight on the mating stud. Tightening that will help. I’ve had to do that on some cars.