… And there was light. (Genesis 1:3)

While my light is nowhere near as impressive as God’s light in Genesis, it still makes me glad to see a little more light on the trains in the basement. Now that I’ve got some upper-deck benchwork in, it opened the way to try out the layout lighting I’ve been wanting to do for a while. I’ve looked into LED strings and other bundled lights, but in the end, I’ve settled on using individual multi-color LED “smart lights” I can control with my phone. It’s not the cheapest solution (about $7 a bulb, and my layout needs 40), but it’s bright, and they’re customizable for a dizzying array of colors and brightness!

This is a more modern evolution of the lighting on my last layout which used cheap plastic fixtures and compact 40W lightbulbs. I was able to recycle the fixtures and wiring for this project, but the technology is so much better than my previous little analog dimmer. Not only are the LEDs brighter, but they run cooler, only use 9W each, and I can get a nice “cool white” that looks a lot more like sunlight than incandescent lights. I was also able to play around with the colors and dimmer, and a wide range of effects are possible including a nice moonlit night and a warm sunrise/sunset. It’s also easy to “group” them so one command changes all the bulbs simultaneously.

I’ll keep playing with them to try to mitigate the glare spots and shadows. I’m also going to figure out a way to automate going from nighttime to sunrise to day–I’m sure it’s possible with all the Smart Home controls out there now. One thing I hadn’t counted on is the lit portion of the bulb is about 2″ further out from the fixture than the old incandescents. For now that’s creating more shadow along the front of the layout than I’d like. When I put the valance in for the upper deck, I’m inclined to move it out over the aisle a few inches to try to improve this, and I might mount a few of these in the overhead fixtures as well. For now, I’m calling this experiment with 8 bulbs a success, so now I’ve ordered more to keep working around the rest of the layout.