Nice job on the urban renewal, Don, and it'll put a big smile on the face of the guy from the town's Assessment Department, too.

Wayne

Thanks guys, with a lot of brick and mortar hobby shops, "we can order anything, just pay in advance".... Oh, I should tell Jim that I ordered a full display rack of Evergreen, they shipped the empty rack, but said that they couldn't ship the product to Arizona.  

That would be true Wayne, just that we are in a designated Historic District, (note the sign), and we are tax exempt through 2050, at which time, the whole town becomes historic or is that hysteric?

What! You aren't paying taxes? How unpatriotic.

(03-15-2021, 08:04 AM)Tyson Rayles Wrote: [ -> ]What! You aren't paying taxes? How unpatriotic.  

We go with the flow, we figure since the mayor isn't paying taxes on his mansion, why should we? But... being on such a low budget, we did hold a fund raiser and was able to come up with the deposit of $9.24 to the electric company. We now have lights in the historic district. 

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Looking good!

Thanks Mike, appreciate the kind words.

I had a problem with the lighting, the LED's were too close to the front of the buildings created hot spots, plus the Big Blue Train Club had no lights at all. Up to now, I've been using 12 volt incandescent lamps (center of first photo), to light my buildings, but they draw more current than I like, so I took apart one of those free flashlights that Harbor Freight used to give out, and took the white LED's, added a 2.2K resistor and attached them to wires (outside of first photo). They were too bright and unnatural as-is, so I painted them orange giving me the look that I wanted. I can run them up to 12 volts, but they look fine at 8, and there's no glow through the walls.

The second photo shows where they are now, about 1/2" from where they were and raised up just a bit. I had the little guys wire the train club room while they had the building off site, and you can see the results of their efforts.

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That looks good Don. I am using LEDs for everything now and they are ultra cheap on ebay. I like the warm whites and the yellows because the light from the 50's as i remember it was not such a brilliant white. 
Charlie

(03-16-2021, 07:40 PM)Charlie B Wrote: [ -> ]That looks good Don. I am using LEDs for everything now and they are ultra cheap on ebay. I like the warm whites and the yellows because the light from the 50's as i remember it was not such a brilliant white. 
Charlie

Thanks Charlie, I've got all sorts of LED's from when we got rid of our business. Red, yellow, green, orange, T1, T1 3/4, rectangle, jumbo and even flashers, but we left in 2001 before they had blue or white LED's, so now I thought, what could be cheaper than LED's from a free flashlight? Just that I had to work with very short leads. I tried the yellow and orange a long time ago, but couldn't get the intensity to light up a building, and experimenting with white just didn't look natural. Dipping them in orange paint and a 2.2K resistor seems to work well giving the glow of an incandescent bulb. At least, I think so....

Nice, Don. Gives a good feeling.

On a different phase of my layout, I've been putting together a display cabinet. Just about all my rolling stock has been in boxes for the past five or six years when we were first going to move and I moved both my layout and display cabinet to the landfull. They've been packed so long that I think that they qualify as antiques.  

There's two rows of "track" on each shelf. Instead of tracks, I just have dadoes spaced at track width. I guess it's time to get to unpacking and filling them up.

Yes Jerry, there really is a cabinet...

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Good looking display cabinet!

(04-09-2021, 06:54 AM)Tyson Rayles Wrote: [ -> ]Good looking display cabinet!

Thank you Mike, a bit bigger than I thought it should be, but once I started to unpack everything, it didn't look that big anymore. Glad I'm into Normal scale otherwise I'd have to have one giant size cabinet. Here's what it looks like now:

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Looking good! Nice job!

Yeah you needed every inch!

Thanks guys, yeah, I've already filled in those empty spaces. No, I'm not building a second one,