Layout Lighting

Lighting the layout has been a fun challenge.  With the help of a lighting expert,  Scott,  the layout has both warm and cool programmable LED lights.   Scott selected this bi color approach to give very realistic light coloring.  And the 5 meter light strings produce more illumination than needed for the layout.  They can easily produce more than 1,000 LUX readings at track level.

Night time is very realistically represented at very low levels with just the cool, blue LEDs powered.  Settings can take the light levels so low that trees on the layout just look like dark shapes, or a bit brighter to represent moon light.  Slowly adding the warm, yellow light brings sunrise to the layout or at the end of the day, sunset.  During the day, both warm and cool LEDs are powered to provide the balanced realistic sunlight.

Another friend, Kevin, is developing a phone based app that controls all the layouts lights.  One control will govern sunrise and sunset times.  At the start of operating sessions we'll select which "month" we're going to operate.  I'm planning on syncing our operating session months to the current, real month.   So in January Kevin's app will select the lighting controls for sunrise/sunset times in Phillips in January.  Each month will have different times, so the daytime duration on the layout will automatically match the operating month.

Also, the Dispatcher will be able to choose the weather for each session.  He could choose rainy or cloudy conditions where the light levels are down all day, or choose a clear day where there is bright sunlight.  He'll have the choice of several intermediate levels too.

Kevin is tying these lighting controls to the fast clock, all controlled by his app.  The Dispatcher will be able to vary the ratio for the fast clock and also pause the fast clock and the lighting cycle for crew breaks.

We're testing an approach that puts a "pocket watch" on crew members cell phones.  Rather than having fast clock displays around the room, crew members can just check their phones to see what time it is on the layout based on the fast clock.   When the Dispatcher pauses the system, all the pocket watches will pause too.

In order to curve the lights to follow the layout path, and to make sure the materials supporting the lights were able to deal with heat, I used copper piping.

The pipe was bent to match the flow of the layout.  It is has been temporarily rigged in place for now, but the pipe will be fixed to support drops.  And the LED strips will be permanently attached to the copper pipe too.

Scott also came up with another advantage to the copper pipe system, the LED light string can be rotated around the pipe to focus directly onto the part of the scene I want to highlight.