Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Lessening the mouse hole effect

Taking a break from working on Waterbury structures to offer a planning/construction tip. 

The train emerges from a darkened staging yard. What's the first thing your eye sees in this view? The scratch built station? No, it's the cavernous black hole. 
Turning on the lights in the staging room offers an immediate improvement. The next step will be to screen the exposed stud and support post with a realistic backdrop that will blend into the layout room backdrop. 
Frequently on model railroads track passes through walls. Typically the mainline leaves the scenicked portion of the railroad and heads into a staging yard in a separate room. That's the case near the White River Junction station on my layout. 
Modelers frequently disguise these openings with highway overpasses, buildings, and the like. But in my case no such options were available. 
Let's face it, we're not really fooling anybody into believing the train isn't going through the wall. What we need to do is lessen the impact of the track heading into a dark mouse hole. 
The easiest way to ease the transition is to maintain the same light levels and type of lighting on both sides of the opening. 
The photos (underlit purposely to show the effect) illustrate what I mean. 

2 comments:

Colin 't Hart said...

Bob Smaus had a good solution for this which was written up in an article in Model Railroader years ago.

Stic Harris said...

Any thoughts on coving that corner as well?