For a while now, I’ve been thinking about how I might put in a lightning effect on my layout background, and so far, the only idea I’ve come up with would be to take a razor knife, carefully cut the lightning bolts out into the clouds and through the back board, glue white paper across the back and use a couple of yellow or white Christmas tree lights and a timer. The only thing about the timer, it will blink every couple of seconds… I’d rather it blink irregularly like actual lightning would strike.
One of the videos about an O-scale layout that was shown on RFD-TV last year featured a layout with a thunderstorm scene and lightning in the background. If I remember correctly, the person who made the scene said the backdrop was plexiglass with a black paper cutout glued behind it for the lightning bolts. The different bolts were isolated from each other with some type of light barrier, and small light bulbs or super-bright white LEDs were flashed randomly. Rumbles of thunder could be heard from a tape recorder or CD player.
If you can receive RFD-TV keep an eye out for a re-run of the O-Gauge Model Railroads series. I don’t remember if this was an individual’s home layout or a club layout.
I’ve seen this done before in a “Jurassic Park” module. They took a peice of Mirrored glass as a back drop and cut a line or two in the back. They then enclosed a camera flash behind the mirror and fired it off from time to time. it looked really good especially with trees and bushes in front of it.
Actually, that would be really cool. It would give it kind of spooky effect too…
The Jurassic Park layout I saw several years ago at a train show was nothing more than a 4 X 8 with a roundy round track, a “lot” of trees and dinosaurs that would pop up every now and then. As for the train. It was a mutated commuter train with Jurassic Park decals and had battle ship looking guns glued on it front and rear.