Bowser C-630M Lighting Upgrade Instructions

This page was last updated on Wednesday, November 30, 2011 02:48:04 AM

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These are the instructions for doing the lighting upgrade on Bowser's C630m line of locomotives to increase the intensity of the light for the headlight, rear light, and ditch lights on their units.

The assumption is that you have the necessary skill sets to accomplish this task which includes an expert ability to solder in very tight areas and a working knowledge of electronics. A poor soldering job may ruin the lighting board and make it non-repairable.

With that said, let's proceed.

To start, open the engine by remove the couplers. Once open, remove the wires on the sound board going to the number boards on the shell (the only wires going to the shell, this will make the work much easier).

Starting with the rear light board, there is one resistor for the single LED on the board. Using a pair of nippers, cut the resistor from one side. The resistor is brittle and it should just fall off leaving two bare pads and a gap between them. This gap needs to be jumped for the LED to work again. I use a small piece of wire from common resistors. The result should look like the photo below. Test the engine to make sure the soldering was done properly before proceeding to the front board.

This is the EASY one.

Next, let's proceed to the front LED board. Let me give a summary of what you should see so we cover each model Bowser sells. All of the Bowser models have the same lighting board as shown below but each model differs in the number of LED's on the board.  A summary of what to expect is below.

All CN models have ONLY the headlight LED

All CB&CNS models have ONLY the headlight LED

CP #4502 and #4505 have ONLY the headlight LED

CP #4503 and #4507 have the headlight and ditchlight LED's only

BC Rail #701 has the headlight and nose light LED's only

All PGE modles has the headlight and nose light LED's only

The WNY&PA model has headlight and ditchlight LED's only and also rear ditch lights

The Arkansas & Missouri models have headlight and ditchlight LED's

BC Rail #702, #703, and #704 have  all three sets of LED's (model shown below)

You only need to remove the resistor's for the headlight and ditchlights as located by the arrows above. The nose lights do not need to be removed as there is no light bar.  The final jumping of the two tabs is shown below.