Hello All,
I’m looking for advice. I recently acquired a 4x8 DC HO Scale layout. I want to light some of the buildings interior and exterior. What would be the best way of installing lights and powering them? I was thinking about Woodland Scenic Just Plug. I was thinking of adding about 20 lights.
Thanks in advance,
Henry
The WS products are kind of expensive to buy. If you can solder or just strip the ends of wires and twist them together or connect them to screw terminals on barrier strips, you will find that much more economical.
What kind of buildings, and what shape are they in? I do a lot of kit-building, and I illuminate most of them. I take special precautions to avoid problems like glowing buildings, light leakage through corners, roofs and basement seams, and looking into large windows to see a cavernous room with visible light bulbs.
If you have buildings already built up, you may have to partially take them apart to properly add lights.
Or, you may be able to simply mount a bulb on a long, stiff wire and push it up through the layout base, and sit the building on top of it. Sometimes that works too.
Hello,
Most are in decent shape and I have built plenty of buildings that I wil light, nothing too extragravent. I appriciate the lighting tips. I did notice the WS products are a costly.
I am one of those people who has all sorts of great ideas for things to do someday, but have a tendency to put things off for another day based on no reason than some slight barrier of time or effort. The WS lighting system is certainly not cheap but it has the advantage that it works as advertised and you can buy the stuff and just do it.
The same is true of many of their products. You can make your own ground foam too, much cheaper than theirs, for example. But it wasn’t until WS put it in packaging that hit the dealer’s shelves that you started to see as many scenicked layouts as you see today. People could do it - but didn’t.
I suppose it can also be pointed out that there are cheaper lightings systems out there - I see Walthers is selling off on sale the old Life Like 12v lights.
https://www.walthers.com/bulb-w-wired-socket-pkg-2
Dave Nelson
For internal lighting you may use LEDs strips and power them with any 12 V power supply of suitable current rate. They can be obtained in both warm and cold white.
Regards
Walid
That’s true, but then you need to add resistors to your circuit or your LEDs will become DEDs very quickly.
I prefer incandescents because I think the warmer glow better suits my era, but I do have some LEDs and they’re fine, too.
No. LED strips consist of parallel sets of 3 LED each connected in series with the resistor installed. All you need is 12V power supply.
Walid
Series sets, but yes. The LEDs on the strips are wired 3 in series (so about 10.5 volts) plus a single resistor for the 3, which is significantly smaller than the resistor needed for 1 LED on 12 volts.
The strips are usually marked with a dotted line every 3 LEDs to show you where you can safely cut them and have the group of 3 still work.
–Randy
Another thing to check on when lighting plastic buildings is the"glowing walls". Some plastics are translucient and the light will make the walls glow. This can be corrected by painting the inside of the walls with black or some other dark paint. Check this by shining a flashlight on the inside of the wall, best done in a darkened room.
Randy,
This is exactly why I said LED strips and not LED. To avoid the resistor by using the 3 LED module as a unit.
Regards
Walid
Here’s a photo (worth a thousand words) to help visualize:
These are from about five years ago when I was experimenting with the then recent LED strips.
Thank You, Ed
MrB, you should post some of those exquisite night scenes of your building and especiall store fronts along with description of your lighting placement, interior diffuseres. Excellent work on them.
Thanks for the kind words, Bob.
This is the rear view of my “Shamrock Hotel,” renamed to match the Miller Engineering animated sign on the roof. It was originally the DPM “M.T. Arms” hotel. I cut a simple set of floors and walls from craft store foam board.
A typical “hotel room” inside looks like this:
I downloaded and printed images for the carpet and the side walls of the rooms. The Venetian blinds and window shades in other roomsh are from an acetate sheet by City Classics. You can see the 16-volt bulb on a wire poked up through the foamboard floor to place it near the ceiling of the room. Honestly? The windows are small in this room, and the Venetian blinds obscure the view, so even though this was not a lot of work, I still put way too much effort into these rooms which are not really visible to the viewer.
Here is the front view of the finished product.
The attempt to provide “lit rooms” and “dark rooms” came out pretty well. I didn’t really plan it, but the silhouette of a couple about to “get lucky” at the Shamrock Hotel was a nice surprise when I viewed the picture.
Merchants’ Row is a series of Walthers kits. This one has a lot of interesting features outside, plus large windows, so I spent a lot of time paint
All lights in photos are a mixture of SMD strip lights in various lengths, 1.7 mm Pico light chips. 3mm LED’s and 1.7 mm incandesants on their own transformer power supply in control panel…over 250 so far in a 15ft section…not counting street lights. No need for over head lights to operate in the dark…
Take Care! [:D]
Frank
