Passenger Car Drum Heads

[randgust]

One of the slickest I've seen is the stock drumhead that's on the Kato El Capitan cars - it's constant and wheel pickup driven and it looks great.

the circuit board is on the Kato USA part list as 928059 - on of those parts that you kind of have to fall over.    I'm relocating mine to a different car but it's certainly a nice feature and appears to be LED.

http://ogrforum.ogaugerr.com/fileSendAction/fcType/0/fcOid/41694217496014143/filePointer/41835028679455474/fodoid/41835028679455467/imageType/LARGE/inlineImage/true/Kato_El_Capitan_f_taillight.jpg

As they have a couple different drumheads, the insert must be removable, too.

[nkalanaga]

I have no idea when they were first used, probably on the first electrically lit train...

The GN probably had them by 1929, as pictures of the Oriental Limited at the opening of the new Cascade Tunnel show look like that one was lighted.

[nickelplate759]

The National Railroad Museum web site (here: http://www.nationalrrmuseum.org/explore/exhibits/the-bauer-drumhead-collection/ )
claims "The first drumhead was displayed on the Northern Pacific’s North Coast Limited in the early 1900s" but doesn't site any sources.

George

[peteski]

Tomar has been making drum-heads even long before I was a model railroader.  Here is an N scale one I installed (over 25 years ago) on my Con-Cor N&W observation car. 

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The drum-head body is diecast metal (pewter?).  Tomar included a nano-size 1.5V axial-leads light bulb which fits inside it I drilled a small hole on the bottom side of the drum-head to pass the wires through.  The actual sign appears to be a snippet of a 35mm slide film (the old Kodachrome  )  Which I had to trim to size and glue to the front of the drum-head.  I actually thought it was pretty clever they way they photographed signs then used the film for the actual sign.   Because this drum-head is fairly thin, it can be installed on a railing of an open deck of an observation car.

[Lemosteam]

@peteski do you have a view from the side?

[peteski]

@peteski do you have a view from the side?

I don't have a photo of the side. I would have to dig out the car and take a photo. But it is just a simple 5-sided box with the transparency on the front of it.  It is about 3/32" thick.  It is painted maroon to match the car.

[Lemosteam]

Thanks Pete, it was the thickness I was after!

[nickelplate759]

Here's one I did years ago.  I note that the rear platform has skootched up a bit, but you can see the thickness of the Tomar drumhead attached to the railing.

One drawback to these - they look very dark (this one looks almost black) when they aren't on.
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George

[peteski]

Thanks Pete, it was the thickness I was after!

Please don't take that thickness as a truly-scaled drum-head. I suspect that Tomar made them thick enough to accommodate the smallest light bulb available (not to scale).  With todays small LEDs you could make it thinner.

[nkalanaga]

Peteski:  I have one that I'm sure is older than that on my ConCor Empire Builder obs.  Not being an electronic genius, and not having today's fancy electronics, it's powered by a AAA battery in the preceding Pullman car.

Modeling the BN, that obs doesn't see much use, as they didn't go to Amtrak.

[Lemosteam]

The design above is about 2mm thick but could be just a bit thinner.

[randgust]

Well, this turned out to be rocket surgery (see my other thread on projects you wish you'd thought about more before you pulled out the saw) but in the end it looks good even if the carnage inside two Kato cars is indescribable.

The engineering on this from Kato is so impressive.   It's a stand-alone door casting with a translucent insert in it for the drumhead, and a fiber-optic for the red tail light.  That feeds into a light box about 15' long with an LED board inside of it (lots of room in a bilevel, not so much in a regular coach) and that runs of track power with 8x8 pickup.   Like all things Kato, there's clips and snaps and interlocking parts and wow engineering that nobody ever sees unless you're crazy enough to try this.  The Budd door alone is four parts - clear glass, door casting, drumhead insert, and red fiber-optic insert.

On the original Kato hilevel coach there's a mysterious door on the bottom of the car that looks like Kato designed it to be run off of watch batteries instead of track power, put a bottom hinged door in for easy access to the batteries, and then abandoned the battery idea and went to track power, leaving the tooling and mystery door behind.

Original door on end of coach had to be cut out and replaced with the hilevel door, and the interior was savaged to make room for the original Kato light box.    I'll be replacing the El Capitan insert with the Amtrak arrow one.  But that red tail light, yeah, that's slick.   I thought I'd probably have to put a capacitor in there for anti-flicker but a) seems to work OK without it,   b) no room left anyway.    I also have a Rapido easy-peasy in there for car interior lighting.



This is just one more of those things from Kato you think 'why don't they sell this as a separate kit?' as it's probably way closer to scale than any other drumhead concept I've seen and really works well.  Yeah, I know the answer, because they are Kato.  You can't buy the hilevel car with the drumhead in it separately, and you can't buy the door/window/ separately although the insert and the circuit board are there.

[peteski]

On the original Kato hilevel coach there's a mysterious door on the bottom of the car that looks like Kato designed it to be run off of watch batteries instead of track power, put a bottom hinged door in for easy access to the batteries, and then abandoned the battery idea and went to track power, leaving the tooling and mystery door behind.

LOL!  No batteries!  That "door" is most likely for a function-only DCC decoder. Kato did that on several European models too.  That way you could turn the ligth on and off remotely.

Original door on end of coach had to be cut out and replaced with the hilevel door, and the interior was savaged to make room for the original Kato light box.    I'll be replacing the El Capitan insert with the Amtrak arrow one.  But that red tail light, yeah, that's slick.   I thought I'd probably have to put a capacitor in there for anti-flicker but a) seems to work OK without it,   b) no room left anyway.    I also have a Rapido easy-peasy in there for car interior lighting.

That gave me a chuckle - you use track power for the drum head, but batteries for the interior ligths?  Interesting.

This is just one more of those things from Kato you think 'why don't they sell this as a separate kit?' as it's probably way closer to scale than any other drumhead concept I've seen and really works well.  Yeah, I know the answer, because they are Kato.  You can't buy the hilevel car with the drumhead in it separately, and you can't buy the door/window/ separately although the insert and the circuit board are there.

I think your post answered that question - can you imagine a modeler having to do lots of hacking of their model just to install those large drum head "guts".  I think most would rather install a Tomar-style drum head.

[randgust]

I'd originally done the entire train in Kato interior lights and gotten darn frustrated with the flickering.  So then I converted the entire train to Rapido easy-peasy lights, very happy.

So THEN I decide to do the drumhead and marker relocation program.   The Kato LED board uses track power.  Looking back, if I knew how much I'd have to hack up the standard coach to fit the board, I probably would have just put a standard LED in there.

I always want the markers on but I only want the interior lights on demand, so it still makes sense to me to do them independently.  I also thought I would have to add a capacitor to minimize the flicker, so far, don't need it.

[randgust]

OK, I kinda doubt anybody else will attempt this as even I would have done it differently looking back, but here it is:

1)  the conventional Kato Budd coach - with the Kato LED board (shortened), the entire rear lounge hacked out, and the wires running from the light jumper wipers down the aisle to power the board.   I did wires because I 'thought' I might put a capacitor in the other lounge end.



2) Closeup of fitting the board around the coach seats.   This was the surprise, I thought it would work mounted a lot further back and it didn't.



The cool part of this is the door design - it's genius.  The light box doesn't have to be that wide, and if you used a normal LED instead of the Kato board most of my installation problems wouldn't exist.    But like I said, you can't get that door in the parts listing, only the board, and the drumhead inserts (Amtrak arrow or El Capitan).   I also discovered by accident that you could likely easily scrape or rub off either one deliberately.

3)  Here's the hacked out El Capitan door, clips, and light box modified to fit over the LED circuit board.   Lots of trimming and fitting.



4)  Flip-over of how the El Cap light box with the marker fiber-optic fits (with the door) into the rear end of the coach.



5)  And...finally... the El Cap door assembly as visible from the rear of the regular coach.