River Valley: Town

I started doing some mockups of the River Valley town module. It's going to be very minimal if I can help it, a couple buildings or a couple houses at most. Just enough to convey that there's a town. I can't decide if they highway should be "Main Street" or if the highway should be perpendicular to it.

The real meat of the town will be the co-op and scrap yard built on a quad module and irregularly shaped S module. Placement of things here is more straightforward, obviously the elevator and fertilizer shed go on the elevator spur, and the scrap yard office somewhere on it's spur.

Farm Site: Lights and Stuff

A mock up of the farm site scene tonight, lighting finished in the farm house, the shop, and on the yard light pole.

Here is a cutaway of the house showing how the upstairs bedroom is lit, the kitchen on the back of the house is done similarly. All of the fiber optic pipes are bundled together under the house and epoxied to a warm white LED. I plan to use a 5v lighting bus, so a 100Ω resistor is wired in series with each LED. A hole was drilled in the lens of the LED to help gather the light pipes and hold them in. I also wrapped aluminum foil around the LED to block light from leaking out the sides and hopefully reflect more of it down the pipes. The pipes themselves are painted black to block light from escaping and hide them inside the house. The shop is lit similarly with light pipes and a cool white LED.

 The yard light is a warm white SMD LED chopped off a holiday light set that had very fine enamel coated wire attached and a gob of glue for a lens. I trimmed the enamel wire on one lead very short and soldered it to a brass rod, the other lead was super glued down the length of the rod to simulate a mounting arm and conduit on the pole. Wires were then added to the bottom of the conduit and the pole for connecting to the 5v bus. I painted the lens of the LED with transparent orange paint to give it a high pressure sodium look, then painted the rest of the LED glue blob black to block unnecessary light out the top and sides. The pole will be painted brown and the conduit gray.

I planted all the buildings and some trees to mock up the scene and draw some guide lines for the driveway and outlines of each building. Since it was all in place I wired up the lights to a power source and was more than pleased with the result!

Farm Site: Farm House Remodel

Originally I had planed for this module to be just a driveway and bins, the house having been torn down years ago. This Bachmann farm house is somewhat special to me, I've had it since I was a kid with a train set. When I rediscovered it in a box of old train stuff I had to use it.

It's a pre-built, and the build quality is ok but it is a bit of a fixer upper. It was pretty easy to take apart, there was very little glue. Most of the joints were just heat melted together.

While it is apart I've started installing lights. I wanted a yard light on a post for this module, it only makes sense to add a couple of porch lights and a few lights on inside the house too. There is one warm white LED swiped from a string of Christmas lights under the house with fiber optic light pipes from www.thefiberopticstore.com. There is a hole drilled in the LED and all the light pipes are stuck together and shoved in the hole. I have a little more work to do with it but so far it is turning out well.