Night photos of model railroads are among some of the most dramatic and one of my long term goals is to eventually wire and light my layout to do some night time operations, but I am beginning to come to grips with the problems that presents. Aside from the obvious added work required and operating the layout in less than optimal room lighting, there are other issues that seem even more daunting. The problem is the night time is more than just one period. There is the period just after dark when a city or town might still be functioning. Then there is late night when most people have gone home and only a few businesses are still open. Then there is overnight when the sidewalks are rolled up and the streets are deserted. Structure lighting is going to have different requirements from at 10:00 pm than at midnight and then 3:00 am. The problem is, how do you model these various period and have them look realistic. That busy auto and pedestrian traffic that you need to model a convincing daytime scene is going to look out of place at night. Short of scooping up most of the people and cars, how are you going to make your night setting seem realistic. You also will need different lighting patterns for the various time frames. The more I think about these problems, the more I wonder if night modeling is really going to be worth the extra effort.
Interesting consideration. I have thought about the difference in lighting between the evening hours and late night, setting up a 7PM to 10PM circuit, and a late night circuit. But I had not thought through the difference between traffic and activitites of day vs night. Perhaps some areas could be kept DARK to be inconspicuous for late night scenes.
(Of course, autos IN TRAFFGIC LANES would need headlights on for night scenes!!! )
Meanwhile, some staged scenes trying out lighting in structures I built this year ( but I cannot install due to train room commandered by lost-his-arpartment stepson)
imagineered station scene for my future passenger station, using computer 3D rendering
Wow. You could have fooled me. I’d have believed the passenger station was a layout photo. It does demonstrate the desirability of doing night ops despite the issues involved. I hadn’t even thought about the headlights but that is one more problem. I began to think about these issues when I was looking at some street lights Walthers had on sale. I began to realize if I lit up my city streets, I’d be revealing unwanted details in the scene. Maybe instead of doing full fledged night ops, I’ll restrict it to just a few scenes where I can stage late night effects. One of the things that got me thinking about doing night scenes was John Armstrong’s recreation of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks painting and I would like to do something similar on my layout.
John Armstrong also had what he called his “Eugene O’Neill Machine” (think “Long Day’s Journey into Night”) It was a manual device that when activated simultaneously reduced the room lighting and gradually brought up structure and street lighting circuits at different intervals on the layout.
With computer controls, you oughta be able to pull that off pretty easily.
I dig night running, too.
I like the atmosphere it creates… And I can sit in a darkened room watching a lone headlight run around the layout for hours.
Lee
In 2000 during the NMRA national convention held in San Jose I had the distinct pleasure of visiting Kermit Paul’s layout in Pleasant Hill(?), California. Kermit cycles his layout through daylight and nighttime and his light measures up and down with the time of day. I don’t know for sure just how he does it but I am going to guess that he utilizes some sort of motor driven rheostat to control his lighting. These same type devices could be used to switch building lights on and off; in the early-'70 when fiber optics were relatively new and modelers were experimenting with their application to model railroading there were a number of articles in the hobby press about how to control the lights passing through the fibers.
The Bellingham Society of Model Engineers operates a large HO layout. We use a ceiling mounted mix of blue floodlights and white floodlights on separate rheostats to adjust the amount of “night” that we want. About half of our roughly 80 buildings have some interoir/exterior lighting. As well, several of our passenger consists use some sort of subdued interior lighting.
In our night scenes I would say that our layout represents about 8 pm. There is still plenty of pedestrian traffic and vehicle traffic on the streets. Those vehicles in the traffic lanes have headlights and taillights. Those parked along the side of the street do not have lights. Many of the lighted buildings have lights which are typically 12 volt bulbs being run on 9 volts, so they appear a bit yellowish. We have numerous streetlights at lower voltage and use some Miller Engineering “neon” signs. Between the streetlights, vehicles, lighted buildings, neon signs and the trains themselves, there is quite a bit of available light. This amount of light permits us to run the layout as a night scene for our open house dates without having visitors stumble around in the dark.
If we chose to represent different times during the night, I think we would approach it in this manner. We could use an “always on” circuit for streetlights, station lights, vehicle lights, neon lights, exterior building lights, and some dim interior lights for downtown shops. This circuit, when used alone, would represent the middle of the night. We could have another circuit which would provide additional lights for a more lively time of night like 8pm. At this time, the circuit would turn on additional brighter lights for some of the shops, restaurants and maybe something like a gas station. This circuit could also be used for room lights in windows above the shops or window lights in a large background factory. For a time like 10pm, we could use th
I’m curious why it really makes a difference what time it is supposed to be on a layout when operating? And what if all the vehicles are in the same place as during a daytime session? Seems to me the operations of the railroad itself should be the most important thing, structures, cars and such are just backgrounds to the railroad, just like scenery.
You could go to the extremes suggested, making ambient lighting change from light to dark, make the street lights and structure lights come on then go off, but what difference would this really make in operating trains? You’re not (I hope) operating a whole city and its infrastructure, but a model of a railroad. At night would you need/want garbage collection, street cleaning, police around monitoring the undesirables that come out at night? You can take things too far!
The problem isn’t the lighting. Those issues are solveable. How do you deal with scenic elements that belong on the layout in the daytime but not late at night.
It’s only a problem if you want a realistic setting to do your operations in. You can do realistic operations on bare plywood if you want but it won’t look right. At the same time, having scenic elements that don’t belong is as unrealistic as not having any scenery. Realistic scenery is not as important to some as it does to others, but to me, operations aren’t very satisfying if they are done in a realistic setting.
When I run at night, I turn all my lights on the layout on, including my control station light near my DPDT switch.
Not a problem on my freelanced n-scale layout; all the little people live in a world of daytime and nightime–no dusk, no dawn. I can assure you they have never complained about it.[:)]
(If they ever get bent out of shape, its because they’ve moved around too much.)
Seriously, though. The question poses some interesting senarios. It’ll be interesting to see more responses to see how others really do take this into account.
I model a city that never sleeps…
F. Sinatra
Why be concerned with night operations? To model a schedule including trains that run a certain way because of the time of day.
KK Passenger schedule based on 1954 prototype schedule at Galveston
6:50 AM #16 TEXAS CHIEF depart9:50 AM #5 Mail train arr8:15 PM #15 TEXAS CHIEF arr7:30 PM #6 Mail train dep*******************************************************PROPOSED FREIGHT SCHEDULE 3:30 AM thru freight terminates at KK7:30 AM thru freight terminates