A few shots of the station area, now that I've made some progress with station lamps and lights in the buildings.

The overall area is illuminated by an LED lamp, bounced off the ceiling, onto which I've attached a home-made blue filter. This gives a nice moonlit effect whereby you can still see the trains, tracks etc, but the lights still stand out and cast a pleasant orange glow.

Personally - and thinking mainly of the steam era - I like to keep illumination at a really low level. If it's easily visible under normal layout lighting conditions, then in my view it probably ought to be a bit dimmer. To get the necessary warm but dim glow, I wire 12V bulbs together in series in groups of three. This not only keeps the illumination dim, but it usefully prolongs the life of the bulbs - indeed, I've never had one burn out on me. You could quibble over the brightness, and to some extent it'll depend on period and location, but one of the points they make during the night scene session at Pendon is that house, station and carriage lighting would have been a lot dimmer in the early 20th century than we are used to now, and I think this helps set the sleepy, rural atmosphere.

Finding room for three bulbs in a station or pub is easy, but it can be trickier when the building is small, such as a signal box. In this case the three bulbs are shared between the signal box and the nearby goods shed, with one in the box and two in the shed. If it's impossible to find a place to put an additional bulb, then as a last resort I wire a bulb in series "off scene", which is equivalent to using a resistor of the appropriate value. Sometimes when you're mixing and matching different makes of bulb you have to do this anyway.

Most of the buildings and lamps are equipped with internal lighting circuits, which are then wired into the layout using micro-pin plugs. This allows the buildings to be easily removed without fussing around with screwdrivers underneath the baseboard. It also means I can easily ring the changes by swapping buildings and so on. Indeed, if you've read the whole blog, you'll know that virtually every man-made object in the scene is designed to be swappable without too much hassle, including the platforms, and I knew this wouldn't work unless all the lighting effects could be made to be changed in an easy manner.

Cheers, and thanks for reading...