The only one I did, actually a pair for a friend, were the ones without a socket. I hard wired the decoder, repalced the headlights with LEDs, and used the factory board as a support. I put another LED in to light the passenger compartment.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
I replace bulbs with LEDs whenever practical. Of course, I always put a 1K resistor in series with the LED.
As the RDC cars are not modern era, you may want a yellowglow LED and you may want to increase the resistor size to get the level of illumination you like.
It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse.
It has been a while since I "chipped" mine. I recall that they were incandescent lamps for the headlights but mine may have been the "first run" that had solder pads for the seven decoder wires.
I seem to recall on at least one or two RDCs I did by electrically eliminating the PC board all together, only using it to support the interior LED lights.
There are some photos here:
https://tonystrains.com/news/installing-dcc-in-the-proto-1000-ho-scale-rdc/
I learned the hard way in some of my early DCC installs to always use an LED. Too much heat generated with the incandescent lamp running full brightness would sometimes distort the body shell
Regards, Ed
At some point the circuit board was altered to provide an 8 pin decoder socket. Were led headlights also added or do I need to switch out bulbs in addtion to the decoder? Thank you