Drop-In Decoders are EZ-Mode

 I've done a few DCC installs so far, mostly trying to use wired decoders. Which are fine, but for my last couple projects I've been using drop-ins and motherboards, and oh my gosh they makes things so much neater.

In particular, I've recently acquired several old Proto 2000 engines in B&O livery from an estate sale. This works for my vaguely New York metro area theme since the B&O hauled freight over the Staten Island Railway. What doesn't work for me is that these are all DC engines, since my layout is only DCC.

Here are the three engines covered in this post - two EMD SW9's from 1996-ish, and an EMD SD7 from the first release in 1995:

The SW9's as-built (by Life-Like, anyway) have a sizeable circuit board which handles the directional lighting, but not much more space than that available inside the shell.

Luckily, NCE makes a drop-in replacement decoder/circuit board - the plainly-named NCE SW9-SR. This is just a motor decoder, not a sound decoder, but you'd be on your own trying to find a space for a speaker anyway (maybe in place of the front weight?). Installation is simple - de-solder or clip the wires off the old board, pop the old board off, new board on, trim and solder the wires back on. Here it is done, less the rear headlight leads:

There's only one thing I'm not a big fan of with this, and it's the lighting situation - the rear (cab) headlight is hard to replace (so I didn't) and the decoder supports its use, but the decoder requires that you replace the front (hood) headlight. On my engines, this means that the front headlight is much brighter than the rear. Not so much a problem as it's running along, but for switching operations it looks a bit ungainly. If you're more adventurous than I, you could come up with a solution for this. But for me, it works well enough. Que sera, nyaa nyaa.

For the SD7, I bought a kit made by TCS, and followed their very helpful instructions. I don't have a "before" picture, but here's everything installed:

The motherboard in the kit isn't an exact replacement for the as-built circuit board (in fact, the TCS board is significantly smaller), but the suggested double-sided foam tape makes for easy mounting. The speaker housing is also mounted with foam tape, using two pieces and leaving a lengthwise gap in the middle to allow the front (long hood) headlight and truck wires to run underneath. You will need a tool (I used a Dremel) to remove some small posts off of the weights, which I did off of the locomotive to protect the mechanism from metal shavings. My only complaint is that the placement of the keep-alive capacitors can make it tricky to place and hold the truck and headlight wires for soldering. But once it's all together, it looks so professional. Plus, between the decoder, keep-alive, and having given the gears a thorough cleaning, this runs at least as well as any of my much more modern locos.

Still to-do on the DCC side from this estate sale are two FA2's, and one or two GP18's. I'll be doing a different FA2 first though, so look out for that "soon".