DCC Lighting For An Atlas Yellowbox C425

As time passes, Atlas/Kato Yellowbox HO locos are moving steadily into the "vintage" category, but prices for them are slowly climbing on eBay, to the point that there's less and less advantage to them as opposed to Bachmann or Roundhouse locos. For that matter, it might even be a better idea to get current top-of-the-line locos from Rapdio or ScaleTrains rather than load up a collection with "good enough" 40-year-old models.

Still, I found a Yellowbox C&NW C425 at a pretty good price on an eBay auction on which there were no other bidders, so I bit. I converted it to DCC with a Digitrax DH165A0 decoder. One issue with Yellowbox locos is they were equipped with a single incandescent bulb that fed two light bars going to front and rear headlights. In some cases, I've simply replaced the incandescent bulb with a single LED mounted in the same location, but the headlight brightness, never good with the incandescent bulb in the first place, isn't really satisfactory.

I decided to try a solution I found on the web, trimming about 3/8" from the rear of both light bars and milling a recess in the end with a Dremel into which I could CA an LED. This could allow a brighter headlight as well as directional headlight control. Here's the result:

The downside is that with the LEDs attached to the light bars, which are in turn attached to the body, the leads from the decoder to the LED need to be pretty long to allow assembly of the body to the chassis and subsequent removal for maintenance. This in turn makes it fussy to stuff the leads into the hood during assembly and keep them from, for instance, rubbing on the flywheels. It took me several tries to get this right.

In fact, while I don't believe the leads are interfering with the drive now, the loco, while it runs smoothly like an Atlas Yellowbox, has become a little noisier. The leads may now be transmitting sound frmo the motor/decoder to the hood, the acoustics may be otherwise affected, or the loco may just need lube -- it was in mint condition, but 35 years old. Anyhow, here is the result:

It's a lot of work for a loco that's now in the "vintage but good enough: category, so I'm not sure if I'll repeat this.