I like thing to have lights in them! It just brings the railway to life for me.
I added some bulbs to my coaches some time back but I was always a bit upset that they didn't run very long on the rechargable batteries I had. Reading articles on here about LI ION batteries and other technologies persuaded me it was time to experiment!
I had an 2 old LI POs rescued from a scraped broken pad pc, these were rated at 1000 Mah (you can pick these up and ebay brand new for under £5)
The problem was how to handle the charging and discharging for the battery. you must never over charge or over flatten these types of battery.
The answer came in the from of this little jobby on ebay,
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/NEW-Li-ion-Li ... 754885070?
It safely handles charging via a USB connector and shuts of the power out when the batter is exhausted. even better is that its tiny and very cheap!
So I removed the battery holders from under my coach and added the LiPo and charge circuit, it fits between the wheels so the USB conector is below the buffer at one end.
I added a little black paint to disguise things and put it on charge!
It has a red led whilst charging and goes green when fully charged.
In order to be able to switch of the lights I added off center contacts to my removeable roof, put the roof on one way around and the lights are lit, the other way and they are off! simples!
And how well does it work? Well, I used 6V bulbs because I wanted a nice glow and not to dazzle my 16mm passengers, with 2 bulbs it lit for over 5 hours with a charge time of 1.5 hours and I don't need any special charger, any phone charger can be used.
