Bridge diorama

I recently dismantled a Märklin train layout which included some metal Märklin 7163 and 7161 bridges. The quality of these products from the 1960s is amazing, each bridge section is stamped from metal parts and has the Märklin M-track integrated into each section. I decided to make a diorama for my son to provide a way for him to display some of his trains, as well as show off the beautiful metal bridges.

I had some very warped 7064 bridge piers that were designed to support the bridges, so I decided to use those which still had a usable faces.

There were also some old analog signals and I decided to update one of the signals with LEDs, and drive it with a RemoteSign ESP. See here for how I convert signals to use LEDs

I had some pine planks which had been part of a bed for 40 years and decided to use them as a base, layering them so as to create a small valley.

I screwed the planks together and fastened the bridge piers in place.

The piers seem to have shrunk over the decades and needed to have the space between their lugs made wider to get the tracks to fit.

I smoothed out the slopes with drywall joint compound and added some dried chunks to look like rocks.

I added additional planks at the ends and raised the roadbed so that it was at the same level as the bridge.

I decided to add a small Blockstelle at one end which would house the small RemoteSign ESP controller, the classic Faller B-121. I made a hole in the top plank at the Blockstelle end and fastened it down with two screws that can be removed if wires need to be accessed later.

Installed the electronics...

Gave the valley a base coat of green and brown acrylic paint.

Added some vegetation

Added some EnviroTex Lite resin left over from my lake.

In order to get the epoxy water off the edges and clean up the sides of the diorama, I ran both edges through my table saw!

Added vegetation

Just in case he wants to sit an illuminated train on the bridge one day I wired up one track and threaded the wires into place.

Underside of one of the bridges:

I had some actual Märklin 7299 M-track screws!

There seems to be two versions of 7299, flat and Phillips, I used the newer Phillips ones.

I added some details such as a distance marker and added some ballast:

I then added my son's set Märklin 42751 and his BR 86 from Märklin set 29536

The signal and light in the Blockstelle are powered by a single USB cable. The signal goes green (Hp1) for 2 minutes and then goes back to red (Hp0) for 5 minutes continuously. They can be controlled over wi-fi too.

Converting an old Märklin signal to LEDs

Märklin produced a broad selection of color light signals and provided spare light bulbs for them for many years. I like to run signal LED lights instead of incandescent for a few reasons (power consumption, heat, longevity, ability to control brightness using pulse width modulation, and 3V).

Here is how I converted some old Märklin signals to use LEDs.

First, I remove the base, and unscrew the safety cage.

and and separate the channel that holds the wires from the rest of the pole by levering it away using the holes in the mast...

... resulting is these parts.

Then I separate these parts, discarding the small contact strips.

The holes in the housing are just the right size for 3mm LEDs. The appropriate color LEDs can be pushed in from behind.

Since I control my signals using a RemoteSign ESP, and they typically switch the positive side, I connect one wire to be the common negative for the LEDs in the signal head. The negative side of each LED is the side with the small flat edge on the rim of the LED. I insert the LEDs so that these negative sides can all connect together. All the positive sides must get their own wire, each uninsulated from all others. I use Kapton insulation to keep them electrically isolated from each other.

I make sure to leave room for the screw that hold the signal head together. I solder an appropriate color wire to each light (here a two aspect signal):

I solder a brown onto all the negative sides.

I push the wires back into the mast and thread them out the side of the mast above the lower screw hole.

I then solder a 220 Ohm resistor to each of the positive wires. (200 Ohms is appropriate when supplying the signal with 3.3V and produces a brightness that is not too bright.)

Once soldered I slide the heat shrink tubing down over the exposed connection and heat it with the hilt of the soldering iron.

I then test the signal by connecting +3.3V to the color wires and the negative to the brown wire.

 

Once I know all the aspects work, it can be installed on the layout!

Bookshop

At the other end of the row of Vollmer houses that has the Butcher shop at one end, there is a bookshop (bookstore, Buchhandel). I designed some interior furniture to take advantage of the large windows.

The building is a mirror of the butcher shop so I was able to reuse the parts I had designed to even out the interior walls with the window frame, etc.

I designed a desk with cash register

and some bookcases filled with books of random sizes.

I spent some time painting the books!

I embedded four white LEDs in the ceiling to provide good lighting in the shop.

and added some lights for the rooms above too...

Using LEDs in buildings

LEDs are now the standard method of adding lights all over the layout, including buildings.

They are small, cheap, and don't get hot, making them ideal in modelling. There are a few things to consider when using them within a building. Here is my list of items to keep in mind:

1. Make sure the light cannot leak out through joints in the building or even directly through the walls or roof. Nothing looks more unrealistic than a glowing house. You may have to add a paper mask inside, or between the light and the roof and walls. Test in a dark room.
2. Don't make the light too bright. Modern LEDs can be very bright. LEDs are usually run at about 20mA and this may be way too bright for a building. You may want to design your electrical circuits so that the LEDs run between 5mA and 12mA.
   
   I usually recommend a 12V DC bus to power all your lighting. This lets you power up to four white LEDs in series in each circuit at around 10mA with the following resistor values:
   
   1 LED, use a 1000 Ohm resistor
   2 LEDs, use a 680 Ohm resistor
   3 LEDs, use a 390 Ohm resistor
   4 LEDs, use a 120 Ohm resistor
   See this page for all the details on the electrical side of things.
   
   One can also place a pulse width dimmer on the 12V bus so that you can dim all the lights at once, but it will act on all of them which is not very useful. If you want to vary the brightness one can also control the maximum brightness of individual LEDs by running them from a RemoteSign ESP at 3.3V and a 120 Ohm resistor. Once the building is complete, you can then experiment with the brightness to determine the best value.
3. Place the light where it would normally be inside the building. Typically, lights are placed overhead in each room, so placing them on the underside of the ceiling is a much better choice than placing it on the floor. When the lights are placed high up, the light coming out of the windows falls down to the ground in a natural way and adds much more realism.
   
   
   
4. Pay some attention to the color of the light. Use cool white LEDs for rooms that would likely be lit using fluorescent lighting. Use warm white for spaces that are likely lit using incandescent lighting, but be aware that many LEDs sold as 'warm white' are more like yellow. I sometimes add a bit of yellow acrylic paint to a cool white LED to give it a warmer color.
5. Take care with lighting effects. These days there are numerous products that will create special lighting effects such as the flickering start of a fluorescent light, welding, fades, etc. (For example RemoteSign ESP). If you are using startup sequences, take care not to connect all the lights in the building to the same output that creates the effect. I once saw a video of a train station where the lights of every platform all flickered into life in perfect unison, which spoiled the whole effect of having some lights flicker on startup.
6. Some lights are on all the time. Don't feel it is necessary to be able to switch every light on and off, or have them going on and off at random times. Places such as station platforms are typically lit from dusk to dawn, so a single switched circuit can handle all those lights together. Other spaces such as station buildings and offices are lit all day, so those can all be powered by a circuit that does not have independent switching. Lighting that is not too bright can also be unnoticeable during the day, and can simpley be left on all the time. See farm lighting experiment.
7. Not all rooms are lit at the same time. Depending on the type of building, you may want to mask some windows off to simulate rooms that have their lights off. Consider which windows would be part of a single room though, you don't want to make it look like each room only has one window.
8. If the windows of your building are clear, illuminating the room will enable the interior to be seen. This then suggests you should also add appropriate interior details.
   
   
   
   If you don't want to add interior details, then consider adding curtains or some window decoration so that the light shines through, but we can't see in.
   
   
   
   
   
   
9. Think of where the wires will run. You don't want thick wires to create shadows or large visible 'pipes' if one can see through the windows. Wires can be collected into small tubes (E.g. a straw) or carefully glued into a corner of the room. You can now buy the small surface mount LEDs already soldered onto 'Litzen' wires which are thin as hair.
10. It is best to include the LEDs when you build the kit. Access is better, and one can drill holes for wiring, add masks, etc.

Changing Intellibox firmware

The Uhlenbrock Intellibox is a groundbreaking device that came out in the 1990s. Not only does it support three different track protocols (Motorola, DCC, Selectrix) at the same time, it also supports LocoNet and the IC2 bus, s88 sensor input and Märklin boosters. It provided two speed controllers too.

It was also upgradable, so when Uhlenbrock made improvements we could load updated firmware.

When I got my Intellibox it had version 1.203 installed. I found it incredibly stable and bug free. I read about updates over the years but never felt compelled to make any changes, since all the updates did not affect how I used my Intellibox. 

Recently I managed to short my Intellibox and I substituted another one I had obtained a few years ago in case of such a situation. This second device was running version 1.55 which is the latest version that was available for free. I was having some problems and I was not sure if the problems I was seeing were due to the newer version. I therefore decided to see if I could downgrade it to 1.203 to answer that question.

I had saved some of the update programs over the years but have never used any of them. The older update programs required us to create a bootable floppy disk, which would start the computer up in DOS, precluding anything else from running in the background. This is because the firmware update could not be interrupted in any way or the update would fail. I found one old PC with a floppy drive, but it does not have a serial port, so I could not use that to load the firmware.

Later, Uhlenbrock also released a CD image that could be burned onto a bootable CD. This CD created a RAM drive and copied the 1.55 update file into the RAM drive. This ensures that the program could read the file without any interruptions. 

I tried to modify the ISO image file to add the older firmware files and I made numerous CDs but the files copied to RAM only included the 1_55.IB file, never the additional files I was trying to add. Once booted, I was also not able to switch to another CD to access and copy additional files. So I eventually gave up trying to make a bootable CD.

I had also downloaded a more up to date Windows program from the Uhlenbrock site that is used to update to version 2.0 called IBUpgrade. I installed that and selected the 1_203.IB firmware file but it declared that to be an invalid file.

I wrote to Uhlenbrock asking if they could perhaps create a CD image with all the free versions so we could select the firmware version. After numerous mails they directed me to use their windows update program at https://uhlenbrock.de/de_DE/service/download/software/I0011930-001.htm and they also sent the firmware files I was interested in.

Of course I said I had already tried that and at that stage they said, I am using IBUpgrade and I should be using IBUpdate. See the difference?   They have two programs that look identical, and only differ from each other in names that are synonyms of each other! Update vs. Upgrade.

So, I uninstalled IBUpgrade and downloaded and installed IBUpdate. I was able to select the 1_203.IB firmware file and start the process.

Finally I could load different firmware versions and test to see if the older version made any difference.

It did not make any difference. As soon as I connect a Märklin booster and switch track power on, the s88 bus gets filled with garbage data. You can read about that saga here.