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 My family’s Christmas, er, New Year’s layout, Shogatsu, has been retired for the year. We haul it out of the basement for only a couple months each year, around New Year’s, to work on it and display it. This year’s time is up. We made some small progress on it, especially in forestation and village construction. New concrete retaining walls were built, and our village received a bath-house, a liquor store, a long string of merchant stalls for the New Year’s festival, and a portable shrine being hauled down the main street. It also received a new bit of rolling stock, a Tomytec モ1030.
Before we packed it up last weekend, I made a video of it, below.
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 It lives! Tomix EF81 with working DCC provided by a TCS CN-GP. [Update 7 July 2010: The decoder failed by February. TCS advised that the CN-GP is a very delicate decoder; consequently, I cannot recommend this installation method. Currently looking for a new method of installation. Watch for future posts.]
Read Part 1.
It’s done. Well, almost. [Update 10 Jan 2010: Yep, it's done.] Anyway, it works, and that’s what counts. Here then I recount the two hours I spent last night making it work, and the year of effort that culminated in those two glorious hours. (Yes, it takes me about one year to install one decoder. No, I’m not that slow: it’s just a function of how much free time I have, and how I choose to spend it.)
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 Tomix EF81 “Hokutosei”
Here’s today’s subject: A Tomix EF81. This one, no. 98, is a special edition, not easily replaceable—and not DCC-ready, either. In this article, I will cover how to disassemble the locomotive—which is very easy—, and mill the frame to fit a TCS CN-GP decoder—which isn’t terribly hard.
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Breadboard circuit
After success building circuit described here on breadboard, I began construction of something more permanent this past weekend. But, as I did so, two events conspired to frustrate my efforts. First was the discovery, thanks to a member of the JNSForum, of the Lenz LF101XF function decoder, which does precisely what I designed my [...]
 OSHI25-901 circuit board This is the lightboard from the OSHI 25-901 dining car from the Tomix 92950 “Yumekukan” set. This board sits in a fitted pocket in the galley of the dining car. There are three SMD LEDs (the three white boxes on the left); three long lightpipes run from the LEDs to the rear of the car. The middle LED lights the taillights and signboard, and only lights when this car is at the end of the train—it doesn’t light when the car is at the head of the train. The outer two LEDs light two rows of table-lamps in the dining room of the car, and remain lit whichever direction the train is running. The two leads on the right connect directly to two steel strips that run along the bottom of the car and (in addition to providing much-needed ballast) contact pickups in the trucks. So, when +12V is fed across the leads (I don’t know which direction, to be honest), all three LEDs light; when -12V is provided, only the outer two LEDs light. In addition to the LEDs and resistors, there is what I’m guessing is an SMD bridge rectifier (for the table-lamps)? Although it has six pins instead of the usual four. And there’s some other tiny little resistor like thing by the middle LED.
The challenge before me: Convert this puppy to DCC. The board is too small to modify. And there’s no space to construct a replacement board. And, as many of my readers will know, controlling two independent lights with a DCC decoder requires three wires: Two “function” leads (that when activated, short to ground; when inactive they are left floating), and the +12V blue common. In my favor, there is a fair amount of room in the galley for additional circuitry, beyond just a decoder.
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White and red are the colors of the Japanese New Year, Shōgatsu, and (for now) our layout reflects those colors in white and pink foam. Amy and I have decided to name it simply “Shōgatsu”. Anyway, this weekend we have significant real construction!
I’ve always been rather intimidated by those 8′x4′ sheets of insulation foam that the [...]
Last year, my wife Amy made a Christmas layout around our Christmas tree. It was made from a cheap second-hand H0 set, and lots of fake snow sheets and batting, and some terribly out-of-scale dollar-store Christmas village houses. It was terrific. We both loved it. In fact, it was that project that got me into Japanese [...]
Happy birthday to me! This set was a gift from my wonderful wife. Actually, we kinda picked it out together, for reasons I won’t yet reveal.
The box reads “J.R. Limited Express Sleeping Cars Series 24 Type 25 ‘Yumekukan’ with Electric Locomotive Type EF81″ (which is far more terse in the original Japanese: “JR ＥＦ８１・２４系２５形特急寝台客車（夢空間）セット”).
The centerpiece of [...]
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