Here's another shot of the station under moonlight, this time with a short train in the up platform:

The coaches are two Bachmann Collett coaches in BR maroon, which I recently managed to pick up from Lendons of Llanishen. The lights are provided by the "yellow" coach lighting strips made by ESU:

http://www.esu.eu/en/products/interior-lighting-sets/

These are very easy to use and can be cut down to suit the length of the coach, and they work equally well on both DC and DCC, with a constant brightness on both, although obviously only staying lit on DCC when the train is stopped. The Bachmann Colletts are typical of their earlier coaches in being quite easy to dismantle and reassemble, with fairly straightforward clip fits, so they're a good candidate for a first lighting conversion. Considering they're getting on for 30 years old, these models really hold up, I feel, with only the recessed glazing letting them down slightly.

I glued the lighting strips directly onto the underside of the roofs, only needing to trim down the height of the compartment partitions to get a fit. This was a simple job with a rotary saw in a power tool. Incidentally, I discovered that these rotary saws are also excellent for trimming down knuckles. Well, at least I was wearing eye protection...

To arrange pickups, I used the pre-wired wheelsets from DCC Concepts:

http://www.dccconcepts.com/catalogue/j/dccconcepts-wheels-and-wheelsets

These wheelsets are a drop-in substition for the Bachmann ones, but there are a couple of things to be aware of. The first is that the flanges are substantially finer, so they won't cope with rough trackwork. If you've already got stock running on Gibsons and Ultrascales, you shouldn't have any problems, but it's something to consider. The second is that, in my view, the wheels shift very easily on the axles. I had to reset the back to backs of most of my wheelsets after inserting them into the bogie, and one wheel remained loose enough that it needed a little Loctite retainer to hold gauge. The advantages, though, in terms of friction-free pickup, are well worth the minor complications. I used PCB pads to complete the circuits from the bogies to the ESU lighting units. Due to the design of the Bachmann underframe, I had to route some of this wiring back up through the passenger compartments, but it's not visible when the model is re-assembled.

Each wheelset only picks up from one side, and I arranged my bogies such that two wheelsets of the same "polarity" were on each bogie. However, at the expense of more wiring, it might be better to alternate the wheels on each bogie, since this should eliminate any residual flicker due to occasional tracking issues - that said, they work well enough in my simpler installation.

While I had the coaches on the workbench, I fitted MJT GWR-style corridor connectors, and decided to add a Keen systems close-coupling unit between the two coaches, ensuring that the corridor connectors remain in contact. While both coaches ran reliably beforehand, adding the Keen units - and presumably the connectors, which alter the buffing forces acting on each coach - I then had to spend the rest of the afternoon getting them to stay on the track at all! All this turned out to be due to a combination of out of gauge wheelsets and insufficent free-action in the Keen units as I'd installed them. Once resolved, though, the coaches ran well again, but it did take some frustrating work to get back to where I was before I tried to be clever.

Regading the Keen units, they work well, in my experience, once set up and tweaked, but they do look rather ugly, although admittedly no worse than tension locks. However, whereas my main-line trains can be close-coupled using rigid drawbars, my branch trains have to negotiate a nasty reverse curve in the fiddle yard, so the Keens seem to be the best compromise. Once you've close-coupled some stock and got used to the sight of corridor connectors being in constant contact, as well as the train moving as a fixed unit, there's no going back...

So - each coach took about a day to do, including painting the interior and adding the figures, and while admittedly some of that was spent on extra touches like the corridor connectors, there's no way I could contemplate adding lights to more than a small number of coaches. In addition, the ESU lighting strips are not cheap, and there's also the wheelsets to consider - oh, and the figures. All in all, then, it's good that Hornby are to add lighting to some of their coaches at what seem like very reasonable prices.

Cheers and thanks for reading.