Since the last entry, I've made some progress on Vi Trains Class 37 428. After fitting the Craftsman Class 37/40 brass etched windscreen frames, I've turned my attention to the noses and lighting. The factory fitted lighting is reasonable  for the time the model was designed, although the taillights where always poor on DC, unless running at speed. Therefore I decided to attempt to build some better lights using LEDs.

Firstly, to prevent light bleed, rather than painting the inside of the nose with black paint to improve the lightfastness of the plastic, I lined the nose with thick aluminium cooking foil.

The next step was to make some lighting. For the tail lights I thought to use a red 1.8mm lighthouse LED, 1mm fiberoptic, heat shrink tube. The idea is to feed the light via the fiberoptic for each tail light from the LED:-

 Bending the fibreoptic allows the LED to mount centrally, so the assembled tail light unit looks like this:-

And this is what is look like when fitted into the nose:-

The overall effect is quite acceptable when powered by a 3V CR2032 battery:-

The next problem was sorting out the marker lights and high intensity headlight. To do this I decided to use for the marker lights two 1.8mm warm white lighthouse LEDs and for the high intensity headlight a 1.8mm white blue lighthouse LED. These fit nicely (which forgot to photo!), with a piece of copper clad strip board to solder these to:-

 Once the copper clad strip was cut to size the LEDs where soldered in place:-

I've yet to work out the wiring for how to power these. Not sure whether to have the high intensity light as separately switchable? I'd like to really keep the model so it can be run on DC and DCC. All something to puzzle out for a future part to this project. 

As the photos show I've also finished off the cab windscreen window frames with some filler, and railmatch white primer, then finally some railmatch 2202 Warning panel yellow (84-03) and Tamiya XF1 flat black:-

The paint edge need tidying up, and the orange contrail strip needs reinstating, but another step forward, until next time . . .