Model Engine Works: Wiring directional lighting into a Kato 11-110 Chassis

I took a closer look at how the Kato ‘Hayau-Go’ rocket train’s LED lighting has been fitted - it is a fantastic little bit of fantasy and has the interesting feature of directional LEDs. Kato have used a split chassis design which makes it easy to pick up power. There is, however, an interesting property with LEDs: they are polarised, and only work if wired to the correct polarity. This got me thinking that a model can have lights which work only in the direction of travel – a simple case of switching the wiring polarity to work with the direction of travel.

I decided to try this as a practical experiment and used an idea that I saw at the 009 Rainhill and AGM meeting in April 2025: a small rail van with working lights. I planned to use an old Hornby diecast Austin van. These were sold by Hornby sometime ago as white primed vehicles that you can dismantle and paint yourself and were ideal for what I had planned.

I removed the glazing, plastic interior and wheels, leaving the metal body work, from which I cut off the spine used to screw the interior. The other modifications were to drill a hole in the roof for a 3mm orange flashing LED - this will illuminate in forward travel. I also cut of the bodywork forward and behind the wheel arches - this removed 2mm of metal which I filed flat. This allowed me to sit the body on to a 3D printed foot plate into which a Kato 11-110 could be fitted.

I intended to use the current head lamp holes for a white and red LEDs which will illuminate depending on the direction of travel. As these holes were smaller than the 3mm LEDs, I opened them out on the inside so the LEDs would be closer to the surface just showing through. This allowed me to paint a thin wash of black over them to reduce the intensity of the light to a glow.

I now turned to the power pickups from the Kato chassis. The easiest way I could see of doing this was to piggyback the current motor pickups; but I wanted to make the setup serviceable. To make this work I used bronze strips with black and red wires soldered to them and slid these into the pockets where the current pickups are housed. This needed a little adjustment to the pockets to allow for this, but worked well. The bronze strips were then cut and bent to feed the wires out through the plastic top on the chassis. Once the top had two holes drilled and then clipped back onto the chassis it all held in place nicely and did not affect the running qualities of the unit.

The next step was to test the theory behind the idea. I used pre-wired LEDs from Bright Components on eBay, which I find very good for this kind of project. I used a small 5-amp connector block to attach the wires to the pickup tails from the chassis and did a test run on some track to see if this would work as intended - which it did. In forward motion the white and orange flashing lights worked, and in reverse the red one worked, so that was all good.

To mount the Kato chassis in the correct position on the body work I drew up a simple footplate with cow catchers at the front and a NEM coupling pocket at the rear. After a couple of prototypes this fitted and allowed the chassis to sit nicely into the body. To get the wiring to fit I had to take some of the plastic shielding off the connector block and make it into two separate parts. I decided that I would paint the body before assembly and went for a deep red and cream livery with a grey roof. I did yellow panels to the front and back which does give a more modern vibe; to tone this all down I applied some matt varnish, and, when this had dried, a black acrylic wash to pick up door panels and shading.

The lighting was fixed in place on the body with a hot glue gun. Then the footplate was added to the metal body, bonded with super glue. The wiring could now be connected to the chassis, and all squeezed into place within the body - this was a tight fit. I disguised the wiring with black insulation tape so that it could not be seen through the windows. This was also used to stop the light from the LEDs shining into the cab. With everything squeezed together I sat it on the track and crossed my fingers. It worked, even at lower speeds the lights were still visible. To finished off the model I added some wire guard rails between the wheels which I painted yellow and chipped some paint off when dry to create a used look. The NEM coupling pocket came in useful - it allowed me to add a flat wagon or van behind for tools and materials. With the van being metal it has good weight and has some pulling ability.

Wednesday, 10 December 2025

Wiring directional lighting into a Kato 11-110 Chassis

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