Part of Kato’s selection of rolling stock are a collection of bi-level commuter passenger cars that include cab cars. The cab cars have working marker lights for when they’re at the rear of the train and the locomotive at the front of the train is pulling them.
And for when the cab car is at the head of the train because the locomotive is pushing it as is common on commuter services where the trains aren’t turned at the end of the line there are headlights.
On a DC powered layout, these lights work without any problems. The direction of the train is controlled by the polarity of the current going to the rails – switch direction, the polarity flips and that flips the lights as needed.
On a DCC powered layout it’s not quite so simple. The polarity doesn’t change when you change direction, and cars like this can’t figure out which direction they’re supposed to be headed. With all of Kato’s cab cars, either the Budd variant or the Nippon Sharyo variant out of the box on a DCC layout these cars have both the head lights and the red marker lights illuminated.
Thankfully, Kato has a solution, and it’s fairly easy to install – the Kato FL12 DCC lighting controller. There’s a hatch in the bottom of the cab car, open the hatch, remove the spacer, slide in the FL12 and close the hatch…
On average the FL12 should run about $20, and honestly I find it irritating that Kato doesn’t ship these cars with the chip already installed and a switch to flip between DC and DCC operation.
For the last two years or so, the FL12s have been really hard to find. It took me a good seven months of searching and getting on wait lists to get the four I needed and three spares. I now have six spares because the crappy website run by a train store that will remain unnamed (it rhymes with shmaynauld’s hobbies) took my order, didn’t tell me that they were out of stock until the order completed, didn’t send me a confirmation to let me know that they actually had my order, and then sent me a shipping notice six months later for three more.
While installing the FL12 is fairly easy, shockingly programming them is not.
My initial efforts to program them were exercises in frustration. These decoders don’t send acknowledgement pulses that your controller can detect- so your controllers don’t know if the programming worked. It’s not possible for your controller to “read” the configuration programmed into the controller. I was also having a hell of a time getting these to take a four digit address.
JMRI wasn’t much help either, just like any other controller, JMRI can’t automatically identify the controller because there’s no detectable return pulse from the decoder. Until very recently JMRI didn’t have a profile for the controllers either although the Digitrax DN163 is supposed to be the closest analogue.
Even when I decided to just use a two digit address I’d run into situations where the cab car would stop recognizing the direction of travel and not change the lighting it was displaying. The whole situation was really getting annoying, especially since I knew that Duford Model Works had installed two FL12s into the Eurostar when he had it and those were working fine.
Thanks to an update to JMRI and this post over at Sumida Crossing, I think I found a solution. First, JMRI now has a profile for the FL12 decoders – but again, you can’t scan the decoder and have auto-detect identify the decoder. You have to manually select the decoder from the list. Next, if you need to use a long address for the decoder set it using the comprehensive programmer in JMRI either on the Basic tab or the CV tab, but remember JMRI will show each field as red after attempting the write command because it can’t read a response from the FL12. Don’t worry about it, the changes were written to the decoder.
Something about how JMRI sends the data to the decoder works where trying to do it from any other DCC controller doesn’t.
Using this method I was able to program all three of my Metra cab cars to use the car number as the decoder address, and they are showing the correct lights for the throttle position. For the two cab cars that are in the middle of the consist (like Metra likes to run them) those lights are responding to the Function 0 command to turn them off so that there’s not a car in the middle of the consist with headlights or tail lights on.
So far the lights have been functioning as they should be and the problems I had been having with them haven’t returned. I’m crossing my fingers that everything is good now.
