Hello,
I will show my little crafting projects I did with my Märklin railway models.

!CAUTION! All these modifications with electrolytic capacitors are for pure digital usage only. Analog usage is not allowed with these modifications or You should add a switch to switch off the capacitor for analog usage and/or use 63V capacitors! !CAUTION!

Starting with my latest LED illumination of my double stack waggons:

For the illumination of my passenger waggons, I use LED stripes, as they can be bought very cheap from Taiwan or China directly by Amazon or eBay. For this project, I used cold white coloured LED stripes. They look quite modern in this waggon.

To illuminate not only the seat areas but also the entry area of each waggon, I split the stripes for the upper deck into 3 parts. One with 3 LEDs for each entry area and one with 9 LEDs for the upper deck seats area. The lower deck is illuminated with one stripe of 6 LEDs.



Here, You can see, that I connected the three parts of the stripes with a short cable, to go around the middle stirrup.



The lower deck stripe is connected to the upper deck stripe with a small self made connector:



And this is, how it looks finally:



First test with a 9V battery and not completely closed:



Now, I connect the power coupler:



The power coupler of both ends are connected with a red wire:



To buffer the energy, I use here two 470µF elko (electrolytical capacitors), the bridge rectifier is mounted on the elko together with the charge resistor and the dropping resistor:



Here again a little plug connector:



The package with the elkon the bridge rectifier and the resisitors is placed here, where it can't be seen from outside:





And this is how it looks like:









These are two possible circuit diagrams. I have chosen the second version:



R1 = 100 Ohm
R2 = 1.65kOhm
C = 2 x 470µF = 940µF
Bridge Rectifier: SMD DF 005

Regards,
Moritz

Edited by user 06 August 2014 13:19:39(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Moritz,

My apologies if I am asking a questions you have already answered but I cannot see it anywhere.

Who's LED lighting stripes do you use, do you have a recommended supplier?
And how do you secure them to the inside of the coach roof, glue or double-sided sticky tape?
You seem to be using the standard earthing clips from Marklin to trasnfer the earth to the wheels?
How do you transfer current from one coach to the next, or is each coach wired with its own slider?

BR