Orion and I have completed fixing the ceiling light fixtures above the mountain. These fluorescent lights went off somewhere back in 2017 and were left unchanged because they are really hard to reach. This job has just been completed and it took about 3 hours to change the two fixtures:

Mountain-side Fluorescent Fixtures, before	Mountain-side LED Fixtures, after

The train room features fluorescent light fixtures which date from the 60s. They use old style ballasts, the kind filled with PCB, and some of them have leaked over the years. We already tried using Type A LED tubes in these and they won’t even work properly.

Back in 2023, I replaced one of the (somewhat) accessible light fixtures over Richmond Yard using one of the new-style “integrated” LED fixtures. This involves removing the entire old fixture. Instead, for the rest of the train room, I decided it would be easier to just do a fixture rewiring and use Type B (aka “Direct”) LED tubes, which would allow us to keep the existing fixtures in place. Orion was interested in learning more about that and do it, so I had him practice on the workbench using the old fixture from Richmond Yard, and once he got the hang of it, he did an in-place rewiring of the fixture in Lodi. That was a good learning experience and a great spot to do so because it’s easily accessible.

We had wanted to change the dead ones over the mountain for quite a while, but as you can see below, one challenge is getting in there and accessing the fixture:

For the new lights, I particularly like the GE Hybrid 32W QE T8 -- these can handle both Type A (ballast) and Type B (direct), and they have a physical color switch to fix them to the color temperature we want -- in this case 4100K.

Rewiring is actually a fairly easy job:

It merely involves cutting and removing the old ballast, and using Wago electrical connectors to connect one side of the tombstones to neutral and the other one to hot. We can reuse all the existing wiring.

I tried to show good safety measures to Orion -- cut power off at the breaker box, use an NCV multimeter to make sure the circuit is dead, and don’t touch the nasty ballast material.

I have recorded some of the operation using Orion’s VHS camcorder, a Panasonic AG-188:

---