The Centreville Railroad Museum is a big supporter of high-speed rail both in the US and around the globe. So this week the Japan National Railways 100 Series Grand Hikari shinkansen train is visiting the layout.
The rivet counters may complain that a Japanese shinkansen can’t run on a North American railroad – especially one that doesn’t have catenary strung… But we’re always willing to exercise a little creative license in order to run interesting trains.
This 100 Series Grand Hikari is another Kato model that I’ve had for just over 20 years, and appears to have been originally released back in 1994. Kato re-released the Grand Hikari set in 2014, that one is likely drop in DCC friendly – this version, not so much. However, this 20+ year old train has been retrofitted with DCC.
The ugly shot above is from BEFORE I soldered everything in and trimmed the wires down. But installed in the power car is a Digitrax DZ126 decoder. I isolated the motor reeds from the pickup strips with kapton tape, and soldered the Red and Black wires to the power pickup strips. Then the Orange and Grey wires to the motor reeds.
That’s all it took for DCC in a 20+ year old Kato shinkansen.
Alternatively, it’s been suggested that the same could be accomplished using a Digitrax DN163K4A installed like in the photo above. You may have to trim some of the “seat backs” in order to fit the chip in. I haven’t tried this so I don’t know how easy it is.
What I haven’t done is add Kato FL12 or something similar to the head or tail cars for lighting control, for now I’m ok with the lights not being prototypical and not having control over the lights.
