leds and reversing the polarity for use

[KenS]

maybe be interesting a snippet from a japanese blog

 

URL please.

[keitaro]

http://blog.joshinweb.jp/joshintrain/ right at the bottom no pic btw it also has the unpainted kato subway ginza line

[KenS]

It's actually at the bottom of the 8/11 post, or about in the middle of the page you linked.

 

It sounds like an updated interior light for trains, although the "Indoor LED" part makes me wonder if it might be the building lighting for the pre-built towers they introduced last year.  Those clearly have a fixture on the base for a light of some kind.

 

Kato seems to be nearly as bad as Apple about keeping us in the dark about new products.  You'd think they'd release more info to build up interest, but they seem to like keeping things to themselves until just before introduction.

[keitaro]

the 1mm thin seems as though they are trying to make more interior room for the car though ? i hope it is cause i may ust use them i hate the current ones too thick i hate cutting my people too much.

[keitaro]

so on the ginza page they mention at bottom of this seems for the new compact models

 

http://www.katomodels.com/n/metro01kei_ginza/

[The_Ghan]

Interesting.  Maybe they couldn't use their existing lights in these new models.  The Ginza 01 series is a narrower car, although it runs on standard gauge.  Kind of like the London Met., I think.  But the Ginza 01 cars are also short.  16m long, I think.

 

Cheers

 

The_Ghan

[KenS]

I think you're right about the width.  The old lights could be shortened by cutting segments off the diffuser, which you had to do in the cab car.  But the Ginza model description specifically says that the body is narrow: "Small section of the body according to the specific narrow underground tunnels..."

 

It will be interesting to see if they're compatible with the old lightboard (meaning just a new diffuser, and the old DCC converter will work) or if they introduce a new DCC decoder for interior lights (or if these work as DC / DCC boards beyond simply not burning out, but for cost reasons building DCC control into the base model seems unlikely).

 

Between this and the spate of recent subway train introductions, Kato seems to have decided to enter this segment of the market seriously.