Working Loco Lamps

No-Nonsense advice and the best in tools and equipment from modelling experts

Showrooms & Office:

3/13 Lionel St. Naval Base

WA 6165 AUSTRALIA

Phone +61 8 9437 2470

Fax +61 8 9437 2471

sales@DCCconcepts.com

Time Zone GMT + 8hrs

A DCCconcepts exclusive!

Perfectly to Scale, (even the handle)

Fully working and very, very easy to install

Steam Era Loco Lamps in soft white and Red

AND…

2 Colour soft white and red Guards Van Lamps

We have created these lamps based on measurements taken from actual prototype BR/LMS lamps and we have done our very best to ensure that they are as accurate as we can make them, easy to install and reliable in use.

The prototype on which we based our lamp is shown here:

About our lamps:

Our working Loco / Guards van lamps are as close to accurate 4mm scale as possible, and they are available in white, red and red+white.

You will find in each pack 6 lamps and a selection of resistors. All lamps are made from carbon filled polycarbonate which is very strong, Will not react with glues or paints and prevents excessive light bleed.

The lamp handle is made from ultra fine springy wire to keep it scale size and it has been hinged to ensure it will not be easy to damage. This hinging of the handle also makes it easy to place the lamp in the hands of a scale-sized guard or loco crew, to make a wonderful “working lamp” scene in loco depot or at a station somewhere….

The Lamp itself:

Being made of a carbon filled material, all lamps are black as supplied, and this is in fact correct for MR/LMS and earlier BR lamps.. however if you DO want white lamps, they are easily painted if you desire, and we cover the best and easiest way to do this in our downloadable installation sheet.

(Our one request here is please NOT hard white! As you can see from the lamp in the picture above, white is a very subjective term when it comes to a working oil lamp that darkened from its own heat and was of course always outside in a very mucky atmosphere, so if you must paint them white, Unless it’s a crack passenger service or a “preserved” loco, please make it “off white” followed by a dry brushing of muck and grime to make it a very appropriate colour!

We’re very proud of the accuracy and quality of these lamps—here are a couple of cruelly large blow up images of them, one taken from a photograph of actual lamps packaged ready for sale, the other of a red lamp lit alongside a standard pencil!

The Illumination:

Each lamp is fitted with our new micro NANO-LEDs and wired with the finest wire we could reasonably use… slightly smaller than 0.1mm in diameter… so small in fact that it can be visible yet unseen if carefully placed and painted to match the background.

Installation does not require any serious work on your locomotives!

Because the wire is so small, it needs only the tiniest of holes and even the 4 fine enamel-insulated wires of our dual colour red/white side/guards van lamp will fit easily into a nearly invisible hole made by the smallest drill we could find (#80 or 0.3mm).

Our lamps can easily be installed for use on AC, DC or DCC layouts, and for AC/DC use, especially in a guards van with limited pickup potential, we highly recommend our DCCconcepts flicker free for a constant light with zero flicker on AC, DC or DCC layouts.

Details of Flickerfree can be found Here

The Installation:

This is simplicity itself. We have covered it in detail in our down-loadable instruction sheet, however its as simple as drilling one tiny hole, routing the wires, adding an appropriate value resistor and connecting the lamp to an accessory function on a DCC locomotive or to a “flickerfree” for constant lighting in AC or DC powered locos or rolling stock. We appreciate that its not possible to identify positive and negative easily when enameled wire is used, so we have made the positive wire of our lamps slightly longer in every case. Please note that while tohe poarity of an LED must be correct for it to work, wiring it backwards will not harm it. However, do not be tempted to connect your lamp to power without a resistor inline with one lead - it will be damaged immediately and we cannot warrant blown LEDs.

Click HERE for complete lamp installation instructions

Lamp intensity and colour:

Even though these lamps were oil powered, they were surprisingly white in reality, as the interior of the lamp had a reflector and the glass was a freznel lenz which greatly concentrated the limited power of the lamps wick and created quite a focused beam, making it brighter than you might expect from the front, with very little side spread to the light.

We have used a sunny white type LED in the lamp, and included several different resistor values in the pack, as some who will want to use these lamps will be modelling a more modern line with lamps converted to electricity… and others will want the slightly less bright lamp of the steam era.

If you wish to slightly increase the “yellowness of the lamp light, this is easily achieved by adding a drop of appropriately coloured dye, inkjet printer ink or yellow paint to some gloss varnish and placing a drop into the lamp from underneath so it will coat the entire LED and interior lamp lens.

We find that a resistor of 50k ohms plus a dimming of the lamp via a decoder CV gives the intensity we like, but that is just our choice… Feel free to experiment here - Colour and intensity are a personal thing so we leave it to you to choose for yourself.

Buying DCCconcepts 4mm scale lamps

The Lamps are available in packs of SIX lamps. The range includes White locomotive lamps, Red locomotive/rear of train lamps and two-colour Red plus White lamps for side or guards van lamps.

The pack contents are indicated by the Aura surrounding the lamp on the front of the pack: Red for red lamps, White for white, and half red, half white for the two-colour red/white lamps.

So... what is in a pack of our Lamps?

Each Pack includes the following:

* 6 Lamps, illuminated with NANOlight LEDs and ready to install

* 18 Resistors (6 each of three different values to give different light levels)

Quality.

Every single lamp we make is checked for quality and pre-tested before it is approved for packaging. Additionally, we do a second random test of each lot processed, so we are certain that every lamp you buy will work properly if installed correctly.

DCCconcepts Working 4mm scale loco lamps