Piko Taurus: adding power buffer and red taillights

The Piko Taurus locomotive in G-scale I bought earlier this year is without any doubt a very good product. A conversion to DCC and adding sound functionality made the model even better and allowed me to enjoy it fully on my garden layout. Still, I wanted to give it a little bit of a personal touch and improve it further. That's how I came up with the following two extra modifications...

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Modification #1 introduces a power buffer in a similar way I did it before for my Piko BR80 (more info here). The goal is to make the locomotive ride smoothly despite any dirt that could (and will!) accumulate on the track. Taurus is a large vehicle, so I have more freedom in choosing a capacitor that will compensate for any power disruptions. The largest - reasonably priced - I could find was 22000uF / 25V element. Its capacity is basically twice of what I added to my BR80 in the past.

The electrical part of the installation is very easy - the capacitor's pins need to be connected to the "plus" and "gnd" sockets of the decoder. And it's all described very nicely in the manual. Physical installation seems to be trivial, too, with all the empty space inside the Taurus...

...well, not exactly. The photo above shows my initial placement of the power buffer. This is what seemed like the natural choice to me. Unfortunately in this configuration, the chassis wouldn't close. I was forced to move the element and install it somewhere else. Only then I was able to close the model. The picture below shows my final location.

In my post about the BR80 upgrade I tried to come up with some "scientific" ways of deciding whether a power buffer of this size was useful at all. The results were promising back then. Now I can say I'm 100% positive the capacitors that I use do provide enough power to smoothen the ride...

My confidence comes from a mistake I've made during the upgrade. The manual is pretty clear about the need of disabling "analogue operation" if a power buffer is added. That's something I did not do. The side effect? Locomotive going forward at full speed once the DCC power is abruptly cut.

The decoder probably assumes it's running on a DC layout instead of DCC when the digital signal is suddenly gone, and consumes the capacitor's entire charge at once for a short but a very fast ride. This does look scary and it's something I disabled right away once I saw it (bit 2 on CV29). But it also proves the power buffer offers enough energy to actually push the model forward. In case of the Taurus engine, the locomotive was able to move by over 10cm. Nice!

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Modification #2 is about adding red taillights. For some reason Piko's Taurus does not offer those. I really miss them, so I've decided to install my own set. I'm using regular 5mm LEDs with 1kOhm resistors. All soldered in the simplest possible way shown below...

The 5mm LEDs fit perfectly into the slots in the model's chassis. It almost feels as if Piko intended to include those but for some reason decided not to at the very last moment. Everything is ready - all I needed to do was to stick my elements into the holes. A tiny drop of hot glue gave me confidence my lights would not fall out.

Of course some simple extra wiring is needed. And suddenly the leftover cables from the DCC conversion became useful!

What I'm doing is basically bridging the front red LEDs with the back white ones, and vice versa. I do not need any extra control over my taillights, and it's OK for me that they will light up together with the opposite headlights (function F0 in DCC). I keep it simple!

My solution works right away. And now in addition to the strong headlights...

...I can also enjoy a little bit more subtle taillights.

I'm very happy with the two above changes. And I'm actually considering a third one already - adding a cabin light. I'm just not sure if I really need it or not... What do you think?