Illumination

I have some lamps that I will shortly be adding to the platform at Hexworthy, and I had thought it would be nice to add lighting to the station building too - after all, there's no point in the platform lamps being the only source of light. I'd added the DC voltage regulator connected to the 16V AC supply via a switch on the control panel when I wired up the playground, and I had some assorted LEDs and resistors to hand.

To complement the platform lamps I thought there should be lighting under the canopy. I had some tiny surface-mount LEDs (SMLED) with wires attached, the wires were passed through holes punched through the foam walls just under the canopy and the LEDs were fixed under the canopy bracing with a dot of superglue. For the indoor lights normal 3mm LEDs were used, I tried white but the colour was too stark and blue, so I settled on yellow, a bit too yellow but it looks OK. The corridor and booking office share an LED in a hole in the wall, inserted through the ceiling, while the right-hand room has an LED pushed through the wall from the old goods shed. Being made from polystyrene foam it is very easy to make holes in the walls for wires or LEDs. 

From above the lighting installation is not so neat! The rear upper roms house the connections out of sight. The power comes up in the back left corner (seen in the previous photo), and the negative is a bare single-core wire that all the LED negative wires could be connected to. This is a bit nerve racking as one downside of a polystyrene foam building is it isn't compatible with a soldering iron! The four canopy LEDs are wired from the 5-way terminal block rear right, and each have their own resistor. However, the four indoor LEDs are wired in parallel pairs sharing a resistor, mainly to save terminal block space. From the upstairs rooms an LED pokes through the wall to light the front centre room, while another serves the old goods shed via a hole in the end wall. 

In a darkened room the effect works quite well, the canopy lights are remarkably bright, the indoor lights a bit yellow but give a cosy feel. As I'd previously painted the inside walls there is little light bleed, except where I poked LEDs through holes in the walls - light seems to travel through the walls and make them glow (as seen where the goods shed meets the station). Some black paper or foil around the sides of the LED might stop this. 

I then had an idea. Could I put a light inside the phonebox? Well it seems with one of the SMLEDs it isn't that hard! Here the LED is glued to a square of black paper (to stop the top of the phonebox glowing), the wires bound in heat-shrink to protect them and keep them stiff. 

Installation needed a hole drilling through the clay base, then punching through the polystyrene landscape and foam-core board. The wire was then passed through and connected up underneath, and the phonebox glued in place. 

The result works quite nicely. Being a plastic phonebox it does glow through the red, although it isn't so obvious to the eye as it looks in this photo. I may go for a bigger resistor to dim it a little. I like the way this is largely hidden by the water tower from some angles, but comes into view as a splash of red in daylight or now as a glowing beacon in the dark - rather like real old phoneboxes did.