Sunday, March 11, 2012

Blue lights above

I ordered some optical fibres and illuminators awhile ago. They showed up in the mail late last week. That's a 3mm diameter side-glow fibre lit up with a blue LED illuminator. I'm trying out some ideas with the fibres, and one was to have an illuminated overhead system for the streetcar fleet. It's certainly not prototypical, but I thought - given the 'retro-future' setting of the layout - it might add some interest to the city scene. So far, several problems: the fibre will need longitudinal support since it isn't rigid as an overhead wire would be; instead of 3 mm, I'll need to try it again with the 2mm fibre to get better tracking of the trolley poles; in general, trolley pole tracking could be tricky problem because the different streetcars have different systems with different properties. I'll have to give this some more thought.

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