Sharing 16-20V AC accessory power between turnouts and lights

It's often said that incandescent lights on a layout, be they inside your structures or the streetlamp variety, look better and last longer if they are run below their rated voltage, for example running a 12V lamp at 9V. To do that, though, you can't just wire up all the lamps to your accessory power, you generally have to run them off the variable DC output of an extra transformer.

I have a nifty solution for this problem, which also reduces flicker in the lights if you use the same accessory power with remote turnouts. Using diodes, create two circuits off the accessory power with each circuit rectified in a different direction. The half-wave rectified power in one circuit is still plenty powerful for the coils in your turnouts. The other circuit goes to the lights, and since there is a lag when incandescent lights switch on or off, they appear to still be glowing continuously, albeit a bit dimmer.

Note that this doesn't work for any LED lights, the half-wave power will product a very noticeable flicker since LEDs shut on and off instantaneously.

Hi-Res Color Pictures of American Cities, Mid-20th Century

These are really something, should be very inspiring for those of you modeling transition-era American cities.

How about a layout on an ironing board?

A discussion group to which I belong recently started talking about building a small layout on an ironing board. I think this is brilliant. A typical ironing board is a bit over four feet long, about a foot wide at the fat end, tapering at the narrow end. In N scale, that's enough space for the narrow end to be a switching headshunt, with enough width at the fat end to include both an Inglenook/small yard, and a small industrial switching district.

Other thoughts:

• Most boards are covered in fabric with felt underneath, so no need for raised roadbed, which you don't usually see anyway in small yards and switching districts.
• Built-in folding legs, easy out-of-the-way storage when not in use.
• Build the headshunt track to extend just fractionally beyond the tapered end, then later build a second ironing board layout, connect them, and you've got a two-piece modular layout over eight feet long! The second layout could contain a town, passenger station, and freight house, and maybe one more large-ish industry.
  

A great microcontroller board for model railroaders

I wrote earlier about the myriad uses for microcontrollers on model railroad layouts, and at that time recommended the pricey but easy to use BASIC Stamp by Parallax. It's a great learning system for those who are new to microcontrollers. However, for those who are a bit more comfortable with basic electronics and simple programming, I'd recommend taking a look at the Arduino, in particular their Diecimila board which costs about US$35.

Unlike the BASIC Stamp, which runs interpreted BASIC on the board, the Arduino uses a compiled language called Wiring which is very close to C/C++, so code runs much faster; the software and development environment are freely downloadable. In addition, there is 14K of flash memory on the board for your program, 14 digital I/O pins, 6 separate analog input pins, and serial communication. There's also an on-board USB jack for easy connection to a PC; the board gets its power from the USB jack, a battery, or an external power supply.