Loco Lighting Specifics

Locomotive lighting for all prototypes

Some of this information is also part of our description of our DCCconcepts installation services and general lighting advice, however it is also of interest to those of you looking for specific direct advice via the navigation bar, so it bears repeating here in context with other information that may be of help.

UK style lighting: Until the end of steam, the only lamps carried by UK prototype loco’s were the small lamps placed on buffer beams and smoke box which doubled as “markers” to also indicate train classification.

They were NOT used as “headlamps” as English railways saw no need for them—by law, all English railways are fenced everywhere for their full operating length!

These small lamps are best represented by DCCconcepts 0.8mm LED’s inset into the lamps, and powered at a very low level.

Here are a couple of images of this, using 0.8mm “prototype white” LED’s on DCC power using a 12,000ohm resistor to make the loco lamps very dull in order to properly represent an oil powered lamp. The real thing is shown on the right!

Please note that lamps were rarely a clean white, and on some railways they were in fact black in colour - there is nothing screams “toy” more than a loco with a couple of bright white lamps on the buffer beam… please try to be subtle with colour!

As a much easier and still very realistic option, we now have a new LED that is almost the perfect size for a UK loco lamp…. This is the DCCconcepts 1.8mm “Microdot” LED which has recently been released in an appropriate “prototype white”. A few file strokes and a very convincing lamp is created! Many of the UK lamps on images in this website use these LEDs…. Like this example:

One of the problems of modelling UK steam loco lamps is that they were used as a form of “train describer”. With their layout changing position depending on the type of train being hauled. This chart shows what I mean...