Oh, wise and all knowing Marklin User community gurus. Perhaps you can help me with this small challenge. I have a consist of DRG Schurzenwagen including the Mitropa dining and sleeping cars. Love the cars, bought them back in 2000 and installed 73150 lighting kits. The 73150 is dim lighting that blinks off and on as the cars roll along. Recently I added Marklin LED lighting to a different consist of passenger cars and LOVE the look and the steady lighting. The difference in running and lighting characteristics makes me want to move my Schurzwagens over to LED lighting. Now comes the challenge, how to do so with little work and a minimum of cost. The pick-up shoe and axle wipers on the old 73150s both end in a male pin and fit into female pockets on each end of the lighting strip. I want to toss out the old lighting strips and add in the Marklin LED strips but use the same wiring I currently have (pick-up shoes and grounding strips). The Marklin LED strips have a series of female pockets on one end and male spikes on the other. How do I change either the end of the ground spring or the pickup shoe to a female? What I really want to avoid is moving away from Marklin to using ESU boards and soldering the hell out everything. One solder point I can handle, multiple solder points are really beyond my modest electrical skills.

Thanks for the advice!

Sounds simple enough to me.

Remove the male plug from the end of the coach where the Märklin led board has a male pin. Then solder the wire to the relevant pin on the board. One solder joint, done.
Or to avoid soldering, the new pick up shoes and contact strips should be one male and one female.

Hi
I first had a rectifier bridge between the slider/conducting couplers, then the PLUS is connected to a capacitor. Last, the DC voltage runs through a resistor to limit the brightness (1 kOhm to 5,6 kOhms
Here is an example of illumination of a German caboose (Begleitwagen) using SMD (Surface-Mounted-Devide) full bridge rectifiers
Wiring using enaled wire


The result gives this

All using ultra-small pre-wired LEDs all purchased on Internet (very cheap)
Cheers
Jean