Well I don't have a model railway but I do have an interest in electronics. I believe that some DCC decoders have outputs for lighting that will change over with direction. It does of course require a fair degree of cutting/soldering, unless your loco has a DCC socket already.
I expect that you would have to convert the whole layout to DCC rather than just having a chipped loco on a DC system in order to benefit - go on splash out, you know you want to
