Red Märklin tipper cars 4513

I am learning how to do airbrush work and decided to try my hand at weathering some rolling stock. I decided to alter the red Märklin 4513 tipper cars that I have as I have always found their red color horribly unprototypical. Their toy-like appearance also mean I am not likely to mess up any high value rolling stock with my experiments.

Here are the 6 cars in their original red:

Märklin LED interior lights 73400

I was pleased to see that Märklin announced LED interior lighting so I ordered some sets and today I got around to trying them out.

Each light strip is a 10cm circuit board and they can be connected together or cut in half, allowing any length in increments of 5cm to be created.

In each 73400 box you get a 10cm strip, two plastic clips and two pieces of double sided foam padding plus a generic set of instructions.

Speed calibration of ICE 3 (37783)

Today my 37783 set arrived and I thought I would report on its speeds.

The max speed setting in the motorized car was factory set to the maximum speed.

My software calibration measured the following  scale speeds

speed step   forwards  backwards
 1              19km/h     18km/h
 5+            138km/h    158km/h
10             318km/h    208km/h
14             319km/h

I decided that it was way too fast for my layout and decided to reduce the speed by reducing the max speed pot by a 180° turn. (My longest straight track that is visible is only 2,5m long)

This shows the calibrated speeds of my ICE 3 train after reducing the max speed setting with a 180° turn of the speed pot.
It seems that the intermediate speed steps are not all that significant - and are often the same as the non intermediate speed.
All speeds measured with acceleration off.

As you can see the speeds increase pretty much linearly with the speed step.