Sunday, January 10, 2021

Lighting for the freight house

The freight house will have both exterior and interior lighting: an exterior light over the entry door and two overhead lamps inside.  For the exterior light, I used a gooseneck lamp from Woodland Scenics' "Just Plug" series of lighting fixtures. The "Just Plug" system includes a base station that controls the current to each light, and the fixtures have plugs that plug directly into the base station.  Since I don't actually use the "Just Plug" system, I cut off the plug and wired in a 1000 ohm resistor to adapt it to my variable-voltage lighting bus. Here it is hooked up to a 9V battery:

For the interior lighting I used a couple of HO scale spotlights purchased from a Chinese company, also with 1K resistors. Since these lights gave a cool white light, I colored the lenses with a yellow sharpie to warm them up.  When I added lighting to my station I used theatrical lighting filters to adjust the color temperature, but the sharpie is a lot easier!  

In both photos you can see that I'm using yellow/black for the lighting wiring to distinguish it from the track wiring (black/red for the blocks and blue and white for the two cab busses). 

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