You are right Garth, it could mislead. I just provided the information from a guy who bought his passenger cars at "Hobby Search". It could be interesting to have also a high resolution picture from the circuit board if some people dont want to send back, or made shopping on ebay. This way, perhaps it could be possible to identify the risk, and eliminate.
I suspect the risk comes from running the cars on a power pack with a constant lighting circuit (CL circuit) like the Pro-Z and Tomix designs and at 12vac there is too much heat generated by some components on the circuit board which could. if run continuously at a train show lead to deforming of the body of the car and if hot enough to it actually burning. I doubt there is an actual fire hazard but the body could be deformed by a hot component and cause distortion or blistering of the surface of the car above the component in these conditions. SO current control is required on the board to eliminate this risk. Running on a standard power pack at 9 vdc or less I don't think will cause a problem. In my case I have been running behind a Pair of D51'a So my track voltage is less than 4 vdc and I see no evidence of heating with seven cars towed behind a pair of D51's. I have on more than 3 occasions run them for six hours at a show and have not seen the problem personally, but there is a big gap in heat capacity between 12vac in a circuit and 4 vdc to consider. cheerz Garth
Constant lighitng and DCC ares essentially the same thing as far as the lighting circuit is concerned. They are AC supplies of voltages in excess of 10v. The circuit board was designed for DC operation at 10vdc max. and and it has no filtering, rectification or current limiting devices on it so no way to limit the heat resulting from the high voltage AC supply of the constant lighting and DCC supplies.
So do you think if these are run on a regular Marklin power pack or snail speed controller - they should be ok? I would rather not return mine.
To be honest, you dont have to be from the Los Alamos research to design a interior light-kit to work from 2V to 20V DC or AC. For that, nothing to be proud. So they just pay the price for simplissimus. Most of us build a lot of interior lights with very simple and restricted number of parts, and before all, no problems. Best would be not to send back the cars but to improve them. For this, pictures, or better, plans would be welcome.
My guess is that if you are using D track supply and keep it below 8v you should be okay, but there are no guarantees if you don't return them at this time.
