Illuminating your layout
Your trains are running smoothly. Your layout looks great. Now is the time to add lights. Yes, running your trains at night can also be fun, as long as you manage to go to bed at a decent hour to ensure you have enough sleep.
Let’s begin with the outside lights. You will, of course, want a railroad crossing...or two...okay, maybe more. Add in some flashing lights and a gate that goes down as a train approaches and goes up after it passes. Automatic gates start at about US $20. A simple crossing gate goes for US $5.00. Consider a few street lights, and lights on some of your buildings. Think about how buildings are lit up at night...start to notice these details in the real world and apply that to your train’s layout!
Once the outside wiring is done it is time to move inside. As you can imagine, regular household bulbs will not do. They give off heat, which might melt the plastic, or even cause a fire. Instead we need smaller bulbs like holiday lights. One string can almost light your entire layout.
First we have to change the bulbs to all white or clear. Then place one or two bulbs in each building. Taller buildings can have a bulb on each floor. Just secure the wire to the side of the interior wall. Zip ties (tie wraps) work well. You can glue them directly to the plastic or you can glue paper clips in the building and then run the wire thru the clips.
A nice touch is to add a set of blue twinkle lights to the interior of a couple of the buildings around the layout. That makes it look like TVs or computers are being used.
So go into your train room with a flash light. Turn the lights out. Now with the flashlight illuminate parts of the layout and start deciding what and where do you need lights.
Until next time hope to see you around the tracks.
