Here’s an idea that I have done. Take your video camera to a busy trainyard, turn it on and let it run. You don’t need to video any particular train. You just want the sounds, an engine switching off in the distance, the occcasional horn or bell, and the crashing of coupling cars. Then transfer just the soundtrack to a DVD or CD. Put an old CD player under the layout and a couple computer speakers, and you have background sounds. I put my camera out in the yard one late summer evening, and got an hour of just crickets and birds. I also made a recording of frogs and pond sounds. You can also make a recording of depot sounds and passenger trains arriving.
And for you single guys, get a can of creosote at the hardware store, and just paint it on a sheet of scrap wood or cardboard, and stash it under the layout. Aaaah, the sweet smell of creosote during an operating session.[:-^]
The yard sounds are a great idea! Kinda like mood music in a good restaurant.
The smell idea is also great, but I joked in a thread a while ago about simulating the odours from a train of stock cars!?! [swg][(-D][+o(][}:)]. On second thought, might be better to stick to the creosote and maybe a bit of diesel!
Your post got me to looking about my layout for something “aroma” might augment for reality. The first thing my eyes came to rest on is the currently under construction pulp mill. Ever been downwind of one of those? I recall one hot July afternoon cruising down I-95 just outside of Savannah when I first encountered that particular stench- it was a nasal bender first class. I would seriously consider modeling that aroma as a means to get rid of annoying visitors. I can’t do it because after 45 years of smoking a pipe skunks can sneak up on me. I would still like to be able to release such an aroma at a touch of a button since I now could not even detect it and anyone who could would be gone post haste.
You’re probably in more danger from all that high fructose corn syrup in your food, you unknowingly consume, not to mention chlorinated and flouridated water, fumes at the gas pump. [:-^]
When I was a kid we had to go through Espanola in Northern Ontario to get to the cottage. Espanola had a pulp mill, and that was long before the era of emissions controls. STINK-WOW! Yes, my young nasal passages were severely bent! Strangely, now the thought elicits fond memories! (but no - I won’t go that far in my modeling despite the fact that my favourite railroad served the pulp mill).
As for the cancer risks of using a very small amount of creosote to add to the layout ‘experience’, so far I seem to have survived large amounts of creosote throughout my life (including painting the aformentioned cottage a few times with the stuff straight out of the can, AND getting it all over me when doing the painting, AND assembling numerous military tents saturated with the stuff…etc. etc.). Maybe I got addicted to the smell! I still love it!! Maybe it has preserved everything except my brain![swg][swg][(-D][(-D]. Some things I am not going to worry about any more.[2c]
I have some smoke fluid that I got at a local train show, that is suppose to smell like coal smoke from my Lionel smoking loco. Since I don’t have any track set up for it, I haven’t used it yet. He also has other railroad “scents”, diesel I think is one of them, as well as several others.
Aroma therapy, huh? How about taking some socks, wear them a few days in a row (maybe get them wet?) and then hang them on the edge of the layout- there, you’ve now re-created that pungent scent of the railroad yard workers’ locker room! Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!! Cedarwoodron
My layout is quiet - and it will remain that way. I do like the sound of a loco (one at a time), but that´s about as far as I´d go. No background noises, no scents. I think we are subjected to too much noise and strange smells in real life, we don´t need that in our miniature world.
The train-scene odor idea was commercially market 2 or 3 decades ago under the trade name Olfactoiry Airs. They had a little gizmo like an air purifier with some kind of a pad soaked in a compound.
I notice they do not seem to be around any more.
Or if they are, they changed their tune,
Or their name.
Or their scent.
(When I was a kid, I went to an elementary school that got odors from the adjoining factories, depending on which way the wind blew. Fortunately, one was a bread-baking plant and the other a coffee-roasting plant.)
My wife and I have enough problems breathing without adding any artificial flavors to the atmosphere.
As for the sounds of a modern U.S. railroad operation as background - I model a very specific time and place, and the sounds would have borne almost no resemblance to a 21st century American non-equivalent. Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll continue to restrict my background noise to PBS or recordings…
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - where locomotives didn’t have bells)
and the voices of the railroad or local police asking you what the heck you’re doing there, and telling you that if you don’t move along you’ll be arrested.
I’m sure that they will find your explanation that you are video taping sounds especially interesting.
I agree, but then again I don’t…almost nothing in the whole wide world is more soothing, more relaxing, and more powerful to me than sitting next to the tracks and listening to the wheels and track sounds of a hundred-car-long string of full coal cars going by. Some guys race to beat the coal trains near where I work; me, I deliberately try to get stuck at the crossing, drive up to the base of the signal, then get out and just listen.
Don’t know if I could plausibly work that into the layout though.
I like the yard idea a lot, but don’t know where I would find a yard with lots of yard sounds and not just the annoying noise of real city life, which I agree with you, isn’t needed in my miniature world.
Take your video camera to a busy trainyard, turn it on and let it run. You don’t need to video any particular train. You just want the sounds, an engine switching off in the distance, the occcasional horn or bell, the crashing of coupling cars,
and the voices of the railroad or local police asking you what the heck you’re doing there, and telling you that if you don’t move along you’ll be arrested.
I’m sure that they will find your explanation that you are video taping sounds especially interesting.
. . . just before TSA operatives (if they can spare some time from stealing iPads) come to haul you off to Guantanamo.
I guess I should concentrate on detailing a Jamaican mountain railroad, then, to complete the illusion; already have the aroma*…hmmm, I could mix a few palm trees amongst the pines…ya, mon…
MR had an article sometime in the past few months about adding background sounds from a CD player, using re-purposed inexpensive external PC speakers.
The problem I forsee with background sounds, unless used for a layout with a single scenic theme, is that the noise can’t be limited to a small area. For example, city sounds or yard sounds would interfere with the birds and burbling stream sound that is playing on the opposite side of the aisleway. Or if there’s no wildlife sounds the city noises are heard everywhere even where they don’t make sense.
While there are ways to limit sound projection through managing acoustics, the baffles and walls needed might interfere with the layout design.
