It’s been a REALLY long time since my last post, since I got caught up in several other things after I started this review. I also planned to do more real-world testing with the lighting system reviewed here. I haven’t found time for that either, but I kept procrastinating on posting hoping I’d find a spare weekend. I didn’t. So I’m going to post what I have, and I expect I’ll eventually do a follow-up when I’ve had a chance to light a couple of buildings.

Woodland Scenics came out with their Just Plug building lighting system a couple of years ago, and I’ve been meaning to take a look at it, and see how useful it would be ever since. On the surface, it appears to be a dead-simple plug-and-play method of lighting buildings that you can power off any low-voltage AC or DC supply, such as the AC accessory outputs on a DC power pack or a simple “wall wart” power adapter. And it is.

It’s not cheap. A pair of stick-on LED lights with wires sell for US$10, the basic hub goes for US$17 without lights, and the expansion unit for a similar cost, and they’ll happily sell you a 1 Amp power supply for US$20 (about three times what you’d pay from a good electronics shop). A large system, with two expansion hubs, eight light hubs, and 32 lights would cost about US$348, or US$10.88 per light (with power supply). You could build the same thing yourself for less than a tenth of the cost. Except for two things.
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Tags: Electrical, Lighting, Model Building, Structures, Woodland Scenics

I’ve been thinking about a number of things related to the layout this month, but mostly about lighting the layout itself. The current layout is lit by a mix of my original track lighting system (using compact fluorescent bulbs) and the newer fluorescent tube valences.

That experience convinced me of the merits of fluorescent tube lighting. It also convinced me of the need to build the lighting valence as part of the benchwork, rather than trying to suspend it from an irregular ceiling. As you can see above, the heating ducts caused some difficulty in attaching the lighting units in this part of the basement.
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Tags: Lighting, Benchwork, Electrical, Design

Up until now I’ve been concentrating on my Kato models as far as DCC conversion goes, and at the same time I’ve only really paid attention to the interior lighting of those cars. Now that I’m working up to large-scale DCC conversion of my non-Kato stock, which is mostly MicroAce and Greenmax at this point, I need to think about lighting the interior of those cars.

And it turns out, they’re pretty much identical. Both MicroAce and Tomix make their own interior lighting kits, and they’re very similar. A third-party company, F&MOKEI also makes lightboards, and claims they work with both manufacturers’ cars. And Greenmax notes compatibility of its cars with Tomix lights (Tomix is far larger a company than MicroAce, so it makes sense they only mention one).
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Tags: DC, DCC, Lighting, Micro Ace, Tomix, Greenmax

One of the hardest lessons in model-railroading, at least for me, has been that “good enough” really is good enough. I spent fifteen years on my HO layout doing very little, in large part because what I did do fell short of what I’d set out to do, and I’d get frustrated and go do something else for six months. With Sumida Crossing, I started with the premise that I wasn’t trying to do a picture-perfect layout of the kind featured in magazines. Neither my skills nor my available time were up to that. Read More...

Tags: Kato, Lighting, Administrivia, DCC, E233, DCS100

Work on the layout continues slowly, but I now have the second lighting unit assembled. The wiring is still rather temporary (the orange extension cord is not a permanent feature). It is working very well, however. My software things the color of the light is around 4150K, or perhaps a bit lower. The intensity is quite good, allowing me to take photos with a fairly large depth of field. The one above was taken at f/8, at 1/50-second exposure. I could easily halve that without using a tripod, or go lower with one. There’s a large amount of glare off the top of the backdrop, apparent in the photo above. You don’t really noticed it standing in front of the layout, because the top of the backdrop is hidden by the edge of the valence.
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Tags: Design, Lighting

I finally decided to experiment with fluorescent tubes, after living with the track-lighting with CFL (compact fluorescent light) bulbs I’ve used to light the layout for the past two and a half years. I’m sorry I waited this long. The new fixtures, the first of which is shown above, weren’t cheap, about US$90 each by the time you add up all the parts. And they’re fiddly to hang properly given my less than perfect basement ceiling. But I’m getting twice (or more) the light from one 26W bulb that I was from four 14W ones, and it’s much more even lighting. I’m still debating using two tubes on the fixture, although that will raise the cost each substantially.
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Tags: Design, Lighting

The nice thing about the “Bike Shop” is that it’s a small model, and hence fairly quick work (by my standards a month really is quick). I’d written about this model a couple of weeks ago. At that point I’d finished the structural work, and given it several coats of paint from spray cans, providing a solid flat black layer to make it light-tight, and then a white interior layer for reflectivity, followed by a colored outer coat to give the “stone” a concrete look. Read More...

Tags: Bachmann, Model Building, Structures, Interior, Lighting

My latest Kato model is another subway train, the Tōkyō Metro 10000. I already have a model of this train made by Greenmax, which I have mentioned briefly a few times (it featured in the “first run” video of the subway, see my Subway First Run musing for more on that). It’s not a bad model, but it lacks an interior and requires wire-in decoders for conversion to DCC. And while I’ll eventually get around to that, it’s not high on my priority list. So trains that are easier to convert to DCC, and that means Kato, are at the top of my list for actual operations once I finish up installing all the DCC electronics for the Commuter and Subway loops.

For the above-ground Commuter loop, I have lots of Kato’s commuter EMUs, but trains for the underground Subway loop are another matter. As mentioned back in October I’d hoped to have the Kato Ginza Series 01 be one of those, but it ended up not supporting the EM13 motor decoder (probably due to the narrower width of the cars).

The Kato 10000 had been on my must-buy list anyway, but with fingers crossed that this one would be “DCC Friendly”, I eagerly awaited its arrival. Kato hadn’t actually said it would be DCC Friendly (meaning compatible with their Digitrax-made proprietary decoders) although they rarely do, and there was a cryptic reference to some issue with the interior lighting that had me worried it was some kind of one-off design. I’d previously bought several of Kato’s new “version 2” LED light sets (which I describe more on my new Kato Interior Lighting page) planning to install them in the Ginza train, but hadn’t gotten around to that after it turned out not to support the DCC motor decoder. So my plan was to use them, if I could.
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Tags: Kato, Greenmax, Lighting, Subway Train, Administrivia

DCC is often said to simplify a model railroad because it requires “only two wires”. While that’s true to an extent, most real model railroads will require quite a bit more. Or maybe I just like to over-complicate things.
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Tags: DC, DCC, Lighting, Electrical, LocoNet, Digitrax, RR-CirKits, Kato, PM42

Well, I’m not moving the site just yet. Conversion of pages is going more slowly than expected, and there are more pages that I consider necessary than I first thought there would be. So I’ll probably have a few more posts over the next couple of weeks before switching over to the new software and hosting provider. However, for the curious I’ve included some jpegs of the new main page and one of the subordinate pages showing the new layout and navigation links in the Diagrams album (these are reduced somewhat by iWeb; the type used for text on the page is about the same or slightly larger than the type used today).
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Tags: Lighting, Electrical, Structures, Expressway

After a relatively quiet winter and spring, work on the layout is picking up (most people do this in the winter, but I don’t seem to work that way). As mentioned in the last musing, I spent most of May working on the subway station of the Riverside Station scene. And I’m still basking in the glow of completing that. I go down to the basement every few days and turn the station LEDs on just to grin at it for a few minutes and think: it’s done, I actually finished something!

A big part of that was making signs using found photographs and graphics images. I’d described that briefly earlier in the month, but hadn’t gone into much detail. This method worked out very well, and I used it to produce the station platforms signs (using images from Tōkyō Metro’s website plus my own text), the subway maps (using an online map, vastly reduced in size), the advertising billboards (from photos found online), and even the vending machines on the platform (from photographs of real ones found on Flickr).
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Tags: Lighting, Signs, Tram Layout

I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about light. First it was the layout lighting, then it was the flickering interior lights, which annoyed me when I detailed my first commuter EMU, and which I wrote about nearly two months ago when I did the original planning for a flicker-prevention circuit. Now I’m back, having built several prototypes and refined my design. I think I have a winning solution.
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Tags: DCC, Lighting, Video

There isn’t much status to give for this month, as the only major layout event was finally completing the Rapid/Shinkansen loop and running DCC trains (a major milestone, but one I’ve already covered). But this month also marks the one-year anniversary of when I first started keeping this record (I didn’t actually get it online until November, but I was making offline entries and writing down design information from September 2009), and it’s worth a short look back on the year.
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Tags: Kato, Lighting, E231, DCC, RRampMeter

I haven’t done much work on the layout recently. Aside from having fun running trains, I’ve been working on finishing up my first DCC train. I started added DCC decoders (motor and cab) to this train last October.
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Tags: DCC, Video, E231, Kato, Lighting

DCC doesn’t need to be complicated. At the simplest, it’s a pair of bus wires from the command station running under the track, with feeders connecting the track to it at intervals. I can, however, make anything complicated. Probably more complicated than it needs to be. It’s a talent.

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Tags: Electrical, DCC, Digitrax, Lighting, BDL168, PM42, SE8C

Kato’s four new tower buildings are available now in Japan, and mine just arrived. Although these aren’t modular (like Kato’s older towers), and the signs are all pre-attached, these are still very nice structures. Two very interesting details came to light once I had them.
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Tags: Structures, Kato, Lighting

Lighting the layout isn’t something I’d expected to spend a lot of time on. I had existing lights that worked on my old layout, and I planned to continue using them. Initial experiences, and some problems with color accuracy in photographs, led me to do more investigation, and to ultimately change my plans. Read More...

Tags: Design, Lighting

The subway level track is nearly complete, with the underlying foam and cork glued down, and the Unitrack in place. Read More...

Tags: E233, DCC, Design, Electrical, Subway, E231, Lighting, Construction