The following description is not new to a lot of people, but I am new at this ditch light thing, so go easy on me. I have some Atlas Dash 8-40CW's that have ditch lights in them. I bought 2 of the Digitrax decoders (DN163A0) and was reading the instructions but could not find out what wire on the ditch light board goes where? on the Decoder board. These engines have a ditch light board from the factory that is in the front nose of the chassis and it has 4 wires (red,orange,blue & black that run up to the stock mother board and solder on separate pads. My question is, does anybody know what color wires on the ditch light board goes to what pad on the decoder board? Or is there a tutorial on the web somewhere that I can look at? Thanks, gene maddox
Gene, I used a NCE which has all 4 pads on the front of the board. It is an AN12A0 or a N12A0. Atlas has a 16 page manual with most of the data in it. CV-122, 184, CV-123, 188. Bob. I did not use the Digitrax because all the function pads ate at the other end of the loco from the ditch lights.
Thanks Bob Horn & JDG for replying to my inquiry. But I need instructions on installing the 4 ditch light wires on my Atlas Dash 8-40CW to a Digitrax DN163A0 decoder board, currently Rich Businger of Digitrax is going to assist me. gene maddox
Hopefully Rich will figure it all out for you, but here's a couple things to note... The resistors for the ditchlight board are on the main board, so don't hook up the wires directly to the standard outputs on the Digitrax board. Either add resistors or find the undocumented pads with resistors on the Digitrax board (if that decoder has them ... some do, I don't remember about this one). The red and brown wires seem to be the positive wires, based on the small '+' on the board, but you should probably confirm this independently. If confirmed, those two wires would go to the common on the Digitrax decoder and the blue and black wires to the function outputs.
JDG.. Can you post a link to thet TCS tutorial? , I would like to see this. I looked on TCS website but could only find decoder info for the older version of this loco
Red and brown wires both get soldered to the neutral in middle of board behind front led, black wire gets soldered at far other end with 1K resistor, blue wire gets soldered also at other end, same side as black, next function pad back. In my picture, I have extended black wire with black, blue wire with grey, red wire with red, brown wire with orange. Be sure to use heat shrink to cover solder joints in wire or resistors. 20160225_200026 by Adam Henry, on Flickr
One thing I don't like about the digitrax board is the rear light is so far from the back of locomotive, the light is fairly dim when in reverse.
