Garden Railway Forum

Hi Greg,
I know what you mean..
When installing decoders, I tended to set them to two chuffs per revolution. - Wrong, but to my mind, it sounded more realistic.
Let's face it, a wheel revolution, is a matter of inches, so if you set the correct number of chuffs, at anything other than a crawl, you are not able to discern the individual chuffs anyway..
It just sounds a mess.

Phil.P

Agreed.
My father has a gauge 1 loco that sounds like a machine gun when running at maximum scale speed.

I decided it needed a rear headlight. After a couple of attempts, I settled on a simple circular type made from a bit of 20mm electrical conduit. For the ‘kerosene’ lamp I took one of the tea-lights I bought long a go – it has a yellow, flickering LED with a flame shaped, frosted surround sleeve. So I took the LED out and glued it into the circular tube.
I didn’t even make a ‘glass’ front for it – I’m claiming it is just a reflector box for a removable lamp that the fireman puts in for night running.


and you can see a video of it running, over on the Videos topic …
https://gardenrails.org/viewtopic.php?f ... 73#p167773

When I saw the lamp in the video, I thought it looked just like a hurricane lamp. Clever!

Rik

The lamp looks good.
I've used some of those flickering candles in the past but they never seem to last very long before they pack up.

philipy wrote: ↑Fri Mar 11, 2022 9:44 am The lamp looks good.
I've used some of those flickering candles in the past but they never seem to last very long before they pack up.

The problem is that in these cheap candles they do not have a resistor.
I have put one of them in an old tinplate level crossing that was intended to be lit by a candle.
With the correct resistor the LED has been working for several years now.

That's really effective Greg, and as Rik said, it makes for a convincing hurricane lamp!

Just to continue the hurricane lamp theme.

While browsing in a craft shop with my wife many years ago, I noticed some tear drop shaped beads that looked just the right size for the glass chimney of a hurricane lamp.

So I made a whole bunch of them – one with the elec leads coming in from the base, for a lamp standing on a table, and one where the leads are be at the top for a hanging lamp.. Here’s the process.
I ground the tops and bottom off the beads and drilled a hole in the base to take a LED.

Then I superglued some round tube on the top and bottom. For the top lead version, I bent the LED leads out and up.
For the table type, the leads come out the bottom and 2 pieces of wire form the ‘handles’.

Here’s the final result with a warm white LED running at 2mA.

I plan to put one of them in the cab of the Heisler, ‘soon’. Since the cab lifts off I have to figure out a plug system for the connections.

Another change of plan.
I had planned to hang the hurricane lamp from the cab roof, and since the cab lifts off for access to batteries, I would have needed a plug/socket.
But with a bit of lateral thinking I decided to attach the lamp to a ‘pipe’ in the cab floor. At window height the pipe is not visible. So no plug needed.
Here it is without the cab. (I will paint the brass pipe black).
And with the cab in place and lamp ON. It is on all the time and takes 4mA.
The fireman now also has an axe!

Looks really bright on 4mA...

Rik

Lovely detailing