30Squares: Delving into the Mysteries of Model Railway Illumination

Saturday, March 15, 2025

Delving into the Mysteries of Model Railway Illumination

It weighs in at a slim 59 pages

Back in January I was rooting around Abe randomly looking for unusual model railway books. I'm always curious to see what might turn up. I was not disappointed on this expedition.

As soon as I saw the title of this book I knew I had to have it. It's not a subject you typically see an entire book devoted to. Especially when you consider its year of publication, 1955. It's written by E. F. Carter and published by Percival Marshall of London. An inside page tells me Carter wrote 15 other model railway books for this publisher.

Of the 15, Carter hints at this book being a little unusual in his preface:

"It may be said by some that Model Railways already give sufficient satisfaction in operation without any additions or complications, and, in one sense this may be in part true. Yet there must be an intense and added interest from watching railway operations in full scale being carried out after dark. There is a subtle fascination due to not being able to see all that is going on. An engine is then only recognisable by its running lights and the indication of a semaphore only by its lamps. There is an air of mystery over the whole railway scene.

"The running of a railway - real or model - during the hours of daylight is only half the story, and if it was only fully realised that as much, if not more, activity takes place on our railways during the hours of darkness, there would undoubtedly be a whole-hearted attack on the "night running" problems of our model lines.

"It is this end that the present book has been penned, and it is the writer's sincere hope that the reader will through its medium be tempted to explore a most fascinating field. The work involved is simple and not in any sense meticulous; moreover, the basic cost of materials is low, and the writer has - as usual - endeavoured to show how the greater bulk of the auxiliary apparatus can be made from "bits and pieces" usually to be found in the junk box or around the house"

An example of 'piping' light into a building via a tube or glass rod

So, in the junk box or around the house in 1955 - well, let's call it the early 1950s - there were no LEDS or fibre optic cables. And, they weren't for sale or in use on model railways. The internet tells me the first practical LED wasn't produced until 1962, and the first fibre optic cable was invented 10 years earlier in 1952. Without those mainstays of today's lighting systems, we're looking at lighting with small incandescent lamps enhanced with some interesting tricks, some of which Carter presents in this book.

I was particularly interested in the tricks discussed in chapter 2, On Lighting Station Buildings. Carter outlines three. The first is what he refers to as 'piped lighting', which one might think of as a rather rudimentary way to channel light in the pre-fibre optics era. Basically, a metal tube or glass rod is placed in front of a light bulb and pointed to where you want to the light to go, usually towards something that will disperse the beam, like the suspended clear glass jewel shown in figure 12. This allows light to be piped into relatively confined spaces with the bulk - and heat - of an incandescent bulb remaining outside the structure. Carter also notes the building's interior should be painted matte white to aid light dispersion, and the pipe, whatever its material, should be at least 1/4" in diameter. I suspect light losses, either in a tube or glass, would be considerable.

Other examples of using light piping for various sorts of lighting fixtures

Carter also mentions that mirrors can be used to light a building's interior by mounting a mirror "at an angle of 45° to the underside of the baseboard, reflecting the light in "bulk" upwards through a hole immediately under the building to be illuminated, on to the surface of a faceted bead or beads hung by a wire from the roof, as well as to the white-painted ceiling of the structure."

Carter ends the chapter with a third lighting method, and one I certainly wouldn't recommend experimenting with: luminous paints that make use of strontium compounds and uranium nitrate. He gives recipes so you can mix your own! If I'm reading the text correctly these were available at the local chemist's [aka pharmacy for us here in Canada] at the time, although he mentions some might need to be special ordered :-) Different times indeed.

Overall it's a fascinating look at lighting methods in the immediate post war era prior to LEDS and fibre optics.