Lighting Contol with Broadway Limited Locomotives

[Coupe633]

I have a number of Broadway Limited Blueline and Paragon locomotives, have installed the LM3S and have programed the locomotives with the appropriate sounds and they seem to run beautifully but I am having trouble with controlling the LED lighting.

Let me start with the Blueline series which are very easy installs with an 8 pin connection using a TCS T-1" harness. Soldering in the brown wires from the 6 pin harness to the speakers is not hard at all and everything snaps in just fine. I don't seem to have any control of the LED lights. I have several steam locomotives that have one headlight and one light on the tender so this shouldn't be complicated. All I want to be able to do is turn ON/OFF the headlight and possibly the tender light. I may be looking at this incorrectly but since the Blueline models have the 8 pin connection ports, everything (except the sound) will go through the Broadway Limited board and then out to the LED's. Am I falsely expecting the Broadway Limited boards to handle the output of the lighting effects from the LM3s modules or do I need to connect the LEDs directly to the wires white, yellow, blue for neutral, and green (9 pin) and splice in a resistor of course and completely bypass the stock board from Broadway Limited?

The Paragon models are a bit more complicated but then not so much. Understanding that I need to remove the Paragon decoder (and selling them on ebay) I would need to directly connect the output wires from the LM3s to the each LED with a resistor. I would appreciate any comments on this to help me understand this and it will make installation much easier on the other brands of locomotives I plan to convert.

[G8B4Life]

I used to have a spreadsheet/table of what connected to what on BLI boards, I'll have to see if I can find it but for the Blueline make sure the 8 pin plug on the harness is orientated correctly in the socket, ie pin 1 pin 1. From rusty memory the 8 pin DCC plug and socket is unfortunately "reversible" in that if you have it the wrong way around (pin 1 to pin 8 ) the model will run but the lights don't work. I think the easiest way to check that was if the model ran in reverse instead of forwards when you had forward selected then the plug was in the wrong way around, so if you have to change the direction on the LM in the LM settings to get it to run the correct direction then it's a good bet that the plug is in the wrong way.

If that's not it if I can find that spreadsheet/table maybe that will shed some light.

- Tim

[G8B4Life]

Well I found the table, not at the original location but where someone had re-posted it. I don't know how useful it will be. From my understanding the entries on the left side are the details of the tender plug, the entries in the table being the plugs on the motherboard.


Click for bigger image. Found at Model Railroad Hobbyist: https://model-railroad-hobbyist.com/node/26278

- Tim