Illuminating!

Took delivery yesterday of these working lamps.
Sold as street gas lamps on "Wish" you get 5 of them for £10 including shipping.
The only drawback is that they are LED and need a power supply of 3 Volts maximum!
All the rest of the working lights on my layout are filament bulb types wired to run off 16V ac. So, I set about making a really simple power supply to power these lamps from my 16V ac supply.
I wired 4 of the lamps in series so now needed a 12V dc supply.
I used a single diode to give half wave rectification, a small smoothing capacitor to eliminate any flicker, and a 1K ohm resistor in series with the lamps. this gave me a measured 11.5V across the lamps, Just shy of the recommended working voltage. They are seen on test in the picture. I left them running for over an hour and the series resistor never got warm The current consumption is about 10mA.
If you follow this idea and use all 5 lamps in series you can dispense with the IK ohm resistor or replace it with a low value one of say 100 ohms.
All I have to do now is paint the lamp posts chocolate and cream and install them on the platform.

SHOCK! HORROR!

SHOCK HORROR!
What's this!
A Tractor (Class 37) in Railfreight livery on PenYbontfawr!
Don't panic! it will change soon!
I purchased this old Hornby model (Against all advice) from the Cradley Heath Model Railway club sales dept at a bargain price, sold as not working.
On investigation it turns out that the previous owner had fitted a Hornby Zero1 decoder, hence it would not run on DC.
A quick snip of three wires and a bit of botch up wiring soon proved that it did in fact run.
I've already added extra pick ups to the non motor bogie and that has made a distinct improvement in slow speed running on PenYbontfawr.
Sometime in the future it will feature on my workbench where it will be "Done up" a bit with some Shawplan bits and will be resprayed into the very early all green livery making it more suitable for my era of interest, Late 50's early 60's.
Class 37's have always been a feature of the former Cambrian lines even up to the present day.