I have always liked trains in streets.
Growing up in Toronto, I regularly encountered street cars. Then when we moved to the Niagara Peninsula, I discovered the Canadian National Railway used tracks once owned by its subsidiary, the electrified Niagara St. Catharines & Toronto Railway, to serve a number of customers in St. Catharines – including some the railway accessed by running up the middle of city streets.
Given that the NS&T is my primary modelling interest, some street running will be essential – and since the trains would obey traffic lights, having working lights at an intersection will add an interesting operational wrinkle.
I’m not normally a fan of “gimmicks” on layouts – I never need to see another emergency vehicle with operating lights, thank you – but I am definitely a fan of anything that contributes, directly, to engaging operating sessions and in this application, working traffic lights definitely fit the bill.
Some online searching turned up a Chinese company called WeHonest (I kid you not), which sells via eBay. It offers a broad range of lighting systems for model railways at reasonable prices. Shipping was reasonable and fast, too.
I purchased two sets of street lights (they come in pairs), plus a controller specifically designed to use them to operate four lights at an intersection. I also acquired a 3v DC “wall wart” power supply from another source to power the controller. The controller can be set to multiple sequences to mimic those found in a variety of jurisdictions.
Here’s a video of the lights in action. The walk signals start to flash red, then turn solid red as the road signals switch to yellow then red. After a brief pause, the opposing route clears from red to green. Note there’s no audio on this quick video.
It’s easy to adjust the length of the cycle time via two buttons on the controller. I set it to roughly 20 seconds before the changes start. This would give model railway crews an opportunity to start from a stop and occupy the intersection before the lights start to change again.
While these signals are HO scale, I think it would pretty straightforward to modify them with taller masts for my S scale NS&T application. I would slip a brass rod over the threaded base of the mast, secured in place with epoxy, then file down the flange that represents the base of the pole to match the diameter of the added rod. A press-fit into a thicker road base is all that’s needed to secure the masts.
I have not measured the signal housings, but I imagine they’re a little oversized for HO and would look that much more to scale in 1:64.
Even few years ago, such a feature would’ve been a major undertaking for the average hobbyist – but it took me more time to screw some styrene to some wooden blocks than it did to install, wire up, test, and program the lights. The hobby just keeps getting better!
The Model Railway Show 