Joe,
The car roofs look nice. I have been wanting to do this for a long time as I agree with you about the black. I would be interested to know how you did the snow on the roofs? Was any texturing involved?
Hi Jim. I just painted the roofs with a matte acrylic white paint. No texturing, but I did end up applying 4 coats of paint to get the coverage and look that I wanted. It wasn't hard to do, but it was a bit time consuming. It's best to remove the roofs before painting. I'm really pleased with the results.
To the original posters question about adding a snow effect to the locomotive and tender, I really never considered that. I guess I just like the locomotive and tender the way they are without any snow effect added.
FYI I just used some white acrylic paint I purchased at Walmart for 50 cents:
Your match of the snowy rooftops is great. I appreciate you didn't "texture" the snow since the snowy roofs on the Bluetooth set aren't textured either so it's a really nice match. Did you use an airbrush or regular brush to do the roofs?
Also, will you share with us how you accomplished both the firebox glow and the green marker lights? Did you use led kits, etc. What size led's, how are they physically installed and wired to work with bluetooth? Interior photos of engine shell showing installation would be terrific if available.
Btw, can't tell from picture but can I correctly assume you didn't redo the P.E. name lettering?
Thanks Kenn. I just used regular artist brushes of various sizes to hand paint the passenger car roofs. No airbrushing.
I have the 10th anniversary PE locomotive without bluetooth. With the recent firmware update to the universal remote, I can now control my PE locomotive with the universal remote. But there is no bluetooth or iphone app control. (I'm anxiously awaiting Lionel to release a Lionchief Plus PE Berkshire locomotive with bluetooth, etc. I would definitely buy one if Lionel offered that as an upgrade option.)
I didn't change the PE lettering above the windows of the passenger cars. I know in the movie the lettering is below the windows, and the newer Lionel PE passenger cars have the lettering below the windows which is more true to the movie... but the lettering above the windows really looks fine to me. I have no plans to make any changes there.
For the observation car red tail light, I purchased the following on ebay, although you could just as easily order separate components:
For the passenger car LED lighting, I used these LED lighting regulators from Hennings:
I used the following LED strip lights to attach to the roofs of the passenger cars. (Be sure to get warm white LED lights with the 2700K rating if you want soft yellow lighting.):
I used these connectors, so I could connect/disconnect the roof assembly to the passenger car as needed.
Here is a view inside a passenger car with the LED regulator (lower left) and lighting strip in place. There are plastic "nubs" I needed to cut away with a hobby knife from the black roof assembly, so the LED strip would lay flat:
For the locomotive headlight, this is the ultra bright LED I used:
For the locomotive headlight and marker lights, I left the existing lenses in place, and just placed individual LED's behind the lenses. Behind the marker lights I just used regular 5mm white LED lights, which light up the green lenses so the light appears green.
Here is a view inside the locomotive, with the headlight and marker light LEDs in place. It was a bit tricky building that assembly and putting it in place. There is a separate circuit board shown with the current limiting resistors for the LEDs. I also used some black liquid electrical tape to seal some gaps around the front of the boiler where light was leaking through:
For the flickering firebox lighting I purchased my own components, but followed the general instructions and idea here from ebay:
Since that firebox lighting kit from ebay was out of stock, I purchased my own components. This is the flickering LED light I used for the firebox:
Here is the back of the inside of the locomotive with the flickering firebox LED in place:
Here is a look at the circuit board I put in place (lower left) to control the firebox LED:
At one point I was thinking about replacing the mechanical smoke unit with a fan driven smoke unit, but for a mechanical smoke unit it really puffs out smoke pretty well, and puffs out perfect circles of smoke which is pretty cool to watch.
All in all I'm really pleased with these changes to my PE set.
I should mention that I've been lurking on this board for the past year, and found a lot of helpful information on prior posts which really helped me with this project. So I should take a minute to thank all those that have posted on related topics previously, which really helped me.
