Post by david1 on Nov 3, 2021 0:50:04 GMT
Bottom line… Good lighting is EVERYTHING in a train room.
One of the best investments I made when I wired my train room with track lighting was the Philips HUE "smart light" system. It was expensive in 2017 -- and still is almost 4 years later... but the results are pretty dramatic. The next step up from these kinds of lights would be to employ professional, theatrical lighting... which would be a MAJOR step up in price.
As it stands now, there are over 3-dozen light heads in the train room, consisting of wall-washers for the backdrops as well as BR30 and PAR16 bulbs overhead for flood and spot purposes. The smart lights are LED technology, so there's little energy consumed and the lights run cool as compared to the temps of a similar halogen-based technology. Every HUE smart-light can be programmed to illuminate any color desired for a given scene. By using my iPhone or iPad, different daylight, twilight and late nighttime scenes can be activated quickly and effectively with a couple of keystrokes.
In short, nighttime scenes are created by ADDING blue light to the scenes in varying degrees. So in essence, there's still a lot of "light" on the layout for twilight and nighttime scenes. However, it's BLUE/VIOLET light instead of the more traditional white light.
Take a look at some of these photos, and you'll get the idea.
The first set (Photos 1-6) have lighting programmed to simulate twilight / early nighttime scenes...
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The second set (Photos 7-12) have lighting programmed to simulate scenes much later in the evening. Note however, that even in these scenes the room is never completely dark. Rather the amount of blue/violet light is increased significantly.
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