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Of course, all Holiday Villages need a train or two to support the villagers! Ours are Holiday Express steam locomotives and associated train cars from the Bradford Exchange. These are "collectible" train sets based on particular themes, each painted with often very detailed images, like Christmas scenes. We usually run two trains around our village scenes, each with a different theme appropriate to the specific village's season.
Here's a video of one of our locomotives on our Christmas Village scene - a Coca-Cola themed locomotive pulling a train of Coke and Budweiser cars. This locomotive has been converted to Digital Command Control (DCC) with sound for much more realism!
We also have a Thomas Kinkade themed train set for Christmas. Both are from the Bradford Exchange.
The locomotives discussed here are On30 models of 2-6-0 Mogul steam locomotives.
Converting a Collectible Locomotive to DCC & Sound
Converting a Collectible Locomotive to DCC & Sound
None of the Bradford Exchange locomotives come with the sound you hear in the above video. But many holiday village buildings come with sound appropriate for the season; some even synchronize animated lights with their own sound! When the “real thing” steam locomotives are so dynamic with rich and interesting sounds, why should your model “train around the Christmas tree” (or holiday village scene) be silent? So, I set out to convert our holiday locomotives to have realistic sounds, and the above locomotive was the first Christmas one I converted.
The following photo summary shows how I made this conversion. Following the photos is a document describing the full details of how I went about doing it. If your holiday trains are basically silent, you might want to try adding your own train sounds!
I started with two locomotives (left) - the Coke one without sound, and the bottom one is Digital Command Control (DCC) - a better control system with sound.
The idea is to swap the body shells from the silent collectible chassis to the DCC sound chassis.
First we pop off some trim.
Next is to release the front of the boiler body shell from the chassis. A tab and groove hold it in place at the front of the boiler.
A similar tab and slot holds the rear in place. Sliding the front of the boiler up then back releases the rest of the shell.
Here's each locomotive after removing the body shells.
Since the sound loco uses an LED headlight instead of an incandescent bulb, we need to swap headlight assemblies.
That's it for the locomotive part! We just need to swap the shells and put them back together, using the reverse of the procedures shown above.
The "guts" of the DCC control system (decoder) and the sound/speaker system are in the tender (coal car) behind the locomotive. We're using the DCC/sound/speaker bottom chassis (in black above), and just moving the Coke tender's body (green above) to it. Disassembly is merely removing one or two screws from the bottom. However, some plastic needs to be removed from the Coke tender to make the DCC sound circuit board fit properly. Still fairly simple. Then re-assemble using one screw. You're done!
The following document describes in detail the why and how of converting a collectible holiday locomotive to DCC with sound. The document can also be downloaded from https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c-IbQDKC9cam7dC0iR81dzPII7Iea48c/view?usp=sharing.
EASY Bachmann On30 2-6-0 DCC Upgrade.pdfPage updated
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