White River Division - Lighting

On the right one of my new Ikea lights is seen above the  Bellows Crossing scene. On the left is an original single halogen spot light.

Lighting the White River Division

Adding Ikea Spot Lights

When my layout began to take shape during construction I realised that florescent lighting was not going to cut it. A lot of the main features needed to be highlighted. I also wanted to be able to photograph the scenes without the use of free standing spot lights hanging around the room.

During construction I could not put a proper ceiling up in my layout room as most of the important piping runs up above. This really became evident this past winter when the hot water heaters piping had to be replace above White River Junction. The ceiling does has heavy plastic sheeting stapled over the entire layout room to keep the dust down. I then added the florescent fixture to the centre of the room and also some single and double spot lights for highlighting. Eight fixtures which have at total of 12 spot light bulbs were used. This was all done about 10 years ago.

During the last two winters I have been changing these spot lights out with a three bulb halogen light from Ikea. These are a great deal at $10 including the 35 watt bulbs. They are Tross fixtures or part number 17999. I have three currently installed and two more on hand for this fall. I eventually will change them all out. My spot lights are separate from my regular room lighting. I have my spot lights hooked up to two dimmers which lets me adjust the intensity of the lighting. I spent an entire day in the layout room cleaning this past week and these light were on most of the time. Although they heat up there was no issues on the layout...it was kind of nice to work in just a t-shirt on a cool day. You might want to look into this type of lighting for your own layout...George Dutka

These are two of my Ikea lights that will be installed this fall. These lighting fixtures include the 35 watt bulbs for $10.00.