Seahaven

Lighting really makes your layout look dramatic (as if it wasn't dramatic enough with a train ferry!). How tall are the mast lights in terms of scale height? I know you are using them for a general wash of light, but they look very tall (or is it because the left hand one looks taller than your cliff face?) Not a criticism, as I haven't looked at exactly how tall these things are in real life!

6 hours ago, SteveyDee68 said:

Lighting really makes your layout look dramatic (as if it wasn't dramatic enough with a train ferry!). How tall are the mast lights in terms of scale height? I know you are using them for a general wash of light, but they look very tall (or is it because the left hand one looks taller than your cliff face?) Not a criticism, as I haven't looked at exactly how tall these things are in real life!

Hi Steve. They are 300mm 5mm diameter brass rods which represent a 45m high light mast. Pretty tall but about right for prototype (found a manufacturers website that had a case study on Dover harbour which was useful to gain some insight). Some of these things can get up to 60m!! The pipe should really taper as it goes up but I haven't found a way to do that so it looks a bit thick at the top. Although I need that thickness to fit the wires in. Also the bottle tops are a bit overscale in diameter fo a light cluster but to be honest I need that to cover up the LED and resistor at the top. 

Are you wiring the LEDs in series or in parallel?

4 minutes ago, goldngreen said:

Are you wiring the LEDs in series or in parallel?

If a knew what that meant I could tell you! To me if I wire something up and it works I regard that as a victory! Seriously though, I think I had been wiring up in series hence the ever diminishing returns of light where as now I believe parallel as there is direct power and return to the transformer for a maximum of 3 leds. Is that right? You wouldn't believe my father was an electrical engineer. He'll be shaking his head when he reads this!!

 

 

15 minutes ago, Paul Robertson said:

If a knew what that meant I could tell you! To me if I wire something up and it works I regard that as a victory! Seriously though, I think I had been wiring up in series hence the ever diminishing returns of light where as now I believe parallel as there is direct power and return to the transformer for a maximum of 3 leds. Is that right? You wouldn't believe my father was an electrical engineer. He'll be shaking his head when he reads this!!

 

 

I am not an expert but guessed that, if you were finding that the brightness diminished as you added more, it was probably in series. I have not wired up LEDs before, only traditional bulbs. That prompted me to look on the internet to see what was said about LEDs specifically. I found this which might be useful: https://www.ledsupply.com/blog/wiring-leds-correctly-series-parallel-circuits-explained/. Having said that, the lighting looks great in your later pictures so I think you have a good solution.

 

29 minutes ago, goldngreen said:

 

 

I am not an expert but guessed that, if you were finding that the brightness diminished as you added more, it was probably in series. I have not wired up LEDs before, only traditional bulbs. That prompted me to look on the internet to see what was said about LEDs specifically. I found this which might be useful: https://www.ledsupply.com/blog/wiring-leds-correctly-series-parallel-circuits-explained/. Having said that, the lighting looks great in your later pictures so I think you have a good solution.

 

Thanks to your excellent link I have now worked out that in fact I'm running my lighting via a hybrid series / parallel circuit! Who knew?! certainly not me when I was stumbling about in the metaphorical and physical dark! I guess that's why model railways are set at 12V and 1 amps so the electronically challenged can't kill themselves when experimenting with the dark science of layout electronics for the first time (Although I had the rather neat experience of using my body to complete a circuit when holding either end of the wires in my fingers with the transformer still on, a very weak light came through the LEDs. I was just grateful it wasn't 240V and 13 amps!)

17 hours ago, Paul Robertson said:

Thanks to your excellent link I have now worked out that in fact I'm running my lighting via a hybrid series / parallel circuit! Who knew?! certainly not me when I was stumbling about in the metaphorical and physical dark! I guess that's why model railways are set at 12V and 1 amps so the electronically challenged can't kill themselves when experimenting with the dark science of layout electronics for the first time (Although I had the rather neat experience of using my body to complete a circuit when holding either end of the wires in my fingers with the transformer still on, a very weak light came through the LEDs. I was just grateful it wasn't 240V and 13 amps!)

Pleased to hear that it helped.