Wind and rain on the layout

[scubadude]

If you can find access to the old "Workin' On The Railroad" TV series, they did a story on a guy who did a good job modelling an approaching storm that included lightning, wind, thunder sound effects, and even animated a tornado going across the layout as trees and scenery fell! It was pretty cool. I've always wondered if you could design a glass window of sorts to place at the front edge of a scene and using an aquarium pump, pump sheets of water down the glass to simulate rain.....sort of like the table top water features you can buy for decoration....

[tv_man]

"Ironic walthers sent an email on the subject as we were talking about it"

So apparently they really can read our minds.

I am not too sure about a glass window to simulate rain as it will probably look too much like a waterfall (unless you want to give the impression that you have a fishbowl layout, cool in itself!). Maybe in a not too distant future (maybe even now already) an image of falling rain could be projected onto the window.

How was this tornado done? Light and shadow only (with the falling scenery and so on) or was the tornado visible too? (I guess this might be easier to model when the tornado can be hidden in the darkness of the night)

[Sumpter250]

The "Tornado scene", may be the one I saw at the 2001 NMRA National Train Show in St Louis. First lightning ( flashing lights ) and thunder, then the "tornado" came twisting around the corner, ran to the opposite end of the module and spun there for a bit, then moved back, and around the corner, and the lightning and thunder faded away. As I recall, the tornado was about 9"-15" tall, and maybe 6" diameter at the top.

It was, ...........different.