Kato HO Scale P42 DCC Installation

Several years ago Kato released an HO scale model of the Amtrak P42 locomotive. At its release, they highlighted what they thought was an innovative design feature of self-contained motorized trucks. These are sometimes referred to as Stanton Drives. Both the front and rear trucks are powered, and the motor is contained inside the truck instead of in the body like most other locomotives.

This seemed like a good idea at first, but then modelers quickly found out that it was terribly inconvenient to install a DCC decoder. Because the track pickup wires don't route through the circuit board, there is no where to connect a decoder.

So what needs to be done in order to install a decoder is: disconnect the motor wires from the trucks, extend the wires from the motors up through the frame to the circuit board, cut some of the traces to isolate the connections needed to interface the decoder, wire the decoder (or an 8-pin socket) to the circuit board, then reassemble the model.

All of these steps are covered in a modification guide published by Kato and available here:

https://www.katousa.com/wp-content/up...

I went one step further and tapped screws to the trucks to keep them from being pulled off of the frame.
One other modification you might consider for your model is cutting the light pipes for the ditchlights, then gluing some very small LEDs to the cut ends of those pipes. Then wiring those LEDs to the AUX functions of the decoder to allow for flashing ditchlights, which is common on most Amtrak locomotives.