Many years ago one was able to get fiber optic strands from various placea like Newark Electronics etc. You could make realistically sized signals in the smaller scales like HO and N. It wasl also good for lighting structures, particularly if you were doing the old-fashioned goose neck style lamps on the side of buildings. Wanted to add some to some buildings I’d recently started assembling. Guess what? Went to look up sources on the web and these things seem to have disappeared. Oh, you can get fiber optic cables, but these are for interconnecting pieces of equipment, and are not the individual fiber strands. Anybody have an idea where I can get some of these individual fibers? The things I’m talking about acted like a lightpipe (conducting the light from the source to where you want it, like a water pipe) and you could put any type of lamp at the source.
http://www.oakridgehobbies.com/g_scale/g_90a.html
This turned up along with several other search results
Here’s another source that Google turned up:
http://www.nextag.com/fiber-optic-strands/search-html
You might also look around for one of those fiber optic spray lamps with hundreds of strands that change colors through a rotating lens in the base. With any luck, you might be able to find one of those at a thrift shop that has a burned out light but the fiber strands are mostly all there.
http://www.fiberopticproducts.com/
http://www.nationalartcraft.com/subcategory.asp?gid=1&cid=296&scid=1446
It seems like the communication company links are at the top of the search lists now. You just have to dig a little deeper to find the hobby links. Far as I know any light source will work. I’ve got a fiber optic Christmas tree that uses a halogen flash light bulb to light the whole tree. You can even use LEDs for a light source.
you could also buy those dollar store flashlight things with the fiber on top. I think you’ll get about 40 or 50 strands of varying length up to about 6" in length…
The ones I’m talking about look similar to these:
