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. 

The back cover and spine are blank! Cost saving I assume?

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The videos illustrating this post were sourced from the following three YouTube channels:

Havelock Yard

Eric Gagnon

Steve Boyko

All are excellent and highly recommended.

Revisiting Bryce's Home Made Bread

What appears to be the business end of a Bryce's Home Made Bread facility

Longtime readers may recall that back around this time in 2014 I posted some pictures of Bryce's Home Made Bread that my uncle, William Henry Wood, took in the 1940s. While on my current dig through family photos I think I may have unearthed some photos of what appears to be another Bryce's facility. 

You might ask why didn't I find these on my first pass through the photos 9 years ago? Because I didn't know what I was looking at, didn't examine them with a magnifying glass, and the photos don't appear to have any organization. They're just scattered here-and-there throughout a variety of albums. I know a bit more now about what I'm looking at in these pictures, so new aspects pop out that I didn't appreciate before.

Cropped version of the opening photo

The connection to Bryce's was clear once I closely looked at the logos on the wagons and truck.

The wagon on blocks (on the right) has written on the side: Bryce's Bread

The wagon on the left doesn't appear to have a company logo, but the one up on blocks to the right does.

'Bryce's Bread' appears on the truck

The same logo that's on the derelict wagon appears on the truck.

A slightly modernized delivery wagon

The deal was sealed when I stumbled across the above photo.

A cropping of the previous photo. That's Mr. Bill Paterson on the right

The other tip off was the presence of Mr. Bill Paterson as he accompanied my uncle on this audit trip.

Outside Bryce's. Left to right: Mr. W. B. Foster, Bill Paterson, William Henry Wood

In the above photo we also saw Mr. W. B. Foster standing for a portrait outside the other Bryce's Facility.

A cleaned up and cropped version of the previous photo

The next 3 photos give an interesting view of an office inside the building. No PCs, laptops, smartphones, or much of anything we'd associated with today's office life.

My uncle with a mountain of paper work

I suspect the two were having a good time staging the next two photos, but if nothing else you get a good idea of what typical office equipment was like in the 1940s.

My uncle again with a lot less paper, and many more office tools. That thing that looks like a tire beside his elbow is likely an ash tray

And here's Mr. Paterson taking his turn at the desk:

Bill Paterson looking concerned

As I've noted before, the puzzling continues.

[21 Nov 2023 update: I discovered another photo album with annotated photographs. It turns out this facility was located in Calgary, not Winnipeg, and the photos were shot on August 4, 1944.]

Just There: Lessons from streetcar scenes in Winnipeg

I'm always impressed by the detail in old black-and-white photos. Scanning them and enlarging the resulting images seems to always yield interesting details and surprises. 

Over the past few days I've posted a few images of Winnipeg's Portage & Main that my uncle shot in the 1940s. Each included a streetcar, so I decided to blow up the streetcar section to see what there was to see. Over there on the left is the intersection of Portage & Main with a streetcar on each thoroughfare.

And here are a couple of streetcars on Portage, obscured by automobiles and pedestrians, but still clearly visible.

And finally, here's a streetcar just peeking out of the left side of the image near The Bank of Hamilton on Main St..

I think what's important in all three is that they include streetcars not by deliberate choice, but because they happened to be there when my uncle was shooting pictures of other things that interested him. They were an everyday part of the world in that era, so naturally they're just there. It's that feeling of 'just there' that I'm looking for in my model photos. Just there if I'm looking out of an office window. Just there if I'm walking across an intersection. Just there if I'm going to the bank. Just there.

The Bank of Hamilton building, Winnipeg, 1940s (?)

This magnificent structure is The Bank of Hamilton building on Winnipeg's Main St., along Banker's Row. The Heritage Winnipeg blog has this to say about the building: Started in 1916 at a cost of $400,000 and completed two years later, the building was the most lavish branch in Canada constructed by the Hamilton company.

And is now standard with these Winnipeg photos, there's a streetcar peeking out of the lower left. I don't think my uncle was particularly interested in streetcars, but I think they show up in all these photos simply because the city was busy and there were a lot of them on the streets. They were just another mundane feature of everyday life.

Another view of Portage & Main, Winnipeg, 1940s (?)

Another view of the intersection of Portage & Main in Winnipeg. Over on the right side of the image is a better view of the facade of the Canadian National Railway building. Over on the left - somewhat obscured by automobiles and pedestrians - are a couple of streetcars.

Portage & Main, Winnipeg, 1940s (?)

A photo taken from high above Main St in Winnipeg looking towards Portage Ave. circa sometime in the 1940s, although I can't be certain about the date. 

That large dark building originating on the right is The McIntyre Block. Towering above the block, near the centre of the photo, is The McArthur Building on Portage. Near the intersection is the Canadian National Railways building, which looks rather modern compared to its neighbours.

And in this photo, unlike a few others I've posted, you can see streetcars on both Portage and Main, and not just track and overhead wire :-)