Atlas/Kato GP7 LED headlights
Many years ago Atlas sold a variety of locomotives in the so-called “Yellow Boxes”. A number of these were made by Kato for Atlas, and have proven to be some of the best running locomotives of all time. They are still worth picking up at swap meets. In this series there were two numbers for Canadian Pacific in the block lettering scheme, and many of us have acquired these over the years. They of course need to be converted to DCC, but fortunately a number of the DCC vendors make drop-in boards that snap on to the mounting points perfectly. The lighting, however, is another story.
The original design used a single incandescent bulb sitting up above the motor, so that the light would shine in both directions through clear plastic light guides, and out the end headlights and number boards. With DCC, we can now control each light independently, so we need two LEDs. The first photo shows the new DCC decoder mounted, but still with the original light guides in the shell.
