STREETLIGHTS AND LIGHTING BUS

With most of the sidewalks and street markings complete in the Commercial District and station area, I am now adding street lights! Below is what they look like ---without power!

I'm using very inexpensive, yet surprisingly good-looking LED light posts from We_Honest (and others) from China, available on eBay.  They are straight LED's without resistors, so you can't just hook them up to your accessory output - you need to add resistance.

However, one of the challenges with these lights is that the wire connectors are a very fine gauge - maybe 30 AWG or so? Pretty difficult to work with - particularly after being threaded through the layout and working over your head under the layout.  The goal is to speed up and minimize the time and effort connecting hundreds of wires under the layout.

My solution to this is to create a 'lighting bus'.  This is simply a thin, narrow material using copper tap (or somethings bare copper wire) attached to both sides.

The resistors are added to one side (I'm using 470 ohm resistors - you can wire these lights in series with lower resistors, but its actually more work to connect these tiny wires than just attached each light separately to its own resistor).

Then these strips are hung or attached underneath the layout parrelel with the streets and the wires from the street lamps.  Now its just a couple of quick taps with the soldering iron to soften up the solder and attach the wire tips and their bare wire leads.  Voila! Done!

In addition to street lights, having this wire bus also makes it easy to add lighted cars.  As you can see in the below photo!

I'm working out from the Station area towards the Commercial district: Below is looking up the Avenue of the Liberation of Quinntopia towards the Commercial and Residential areas.

Piko Street passes under one side of the station and connects Avenue of the Liberation of Quinntopia towards Minitrix Avenue and then onto an end where it does a hard right and turns into Kato Avenue.

 Next! More lights! Once the street lamps (and cars) are installed, then buildings can be placed.

MAP OF NEW QUINNTOPIA!

As the municipal electrical employees begin to add street lights to New Quinntopia (having completed adding all of the necessary street markings last week), the city planners have published their first map of the street layout of central New Quinntopia!

The central area of New Quinntopia is currently laid out in three sections.  Below is an overview of the central area with some of the key features:

Starting from the left, there is the undeveloped industrial district, which may or may not have factories:

Next to the industrial area, and bordered by the QMT (Quinntopia Metropolitan Transit) line, is the Commercial District. This is the area where the main QMT station is located (Latveria Station) along with many office towers and hotels.  Planning is underway for the intercontinental railway station Gare de Quinntopia. Which will be completed someday. Probably.

On the right side of the Commercial District, the elevation grows and clusters of houses and apartment buildings dot the hillside.  This area is also currently undeveloped.  There is some concern from city planners that the ground has a strange pink appearance and is very soft.  Outside consultant assure future residents that layers of a new environmental solution called plaster will cover up the toxic and unsightly mess. Everyone is happy.

The City Planners have also given each street a distinctive name.  The below images show the city streets without the QMT elevated transit overlay.  As you can see, Latveria Station faces the Avenue of the Liberation of Quinntopia (named after a famous battle that took place in Quinntopia).   On the opposite side of the station is one of the main thoroughfares of central Quinntopia; Minitrix Avenue. The station is bounded by Piko Street on the left, and Tomix Street on the right.  A very narrow street - Roco Street - bisects the block opposite the station.

Moving to the right of the station, we see that Minitrix Avenue continues, while the Avenue of the Liberation of Quinntopia turns into a one lane road before ending at Fleischman Way - where the future train station will be built.  Parallel to Minitrix Avenue is another major roadway: Kato Avenue.  Here in the heart of the commercial district both Minitrix and Kato avenues cross Fleischmann Way and Arnold Way before they continue on and merge in the residential areas along the hillside.

Unfortunately, New Quinntopia is not a great destination as no one road yet known to us actually leaves New Quinntopia; so if you get there, you may never be able to leave!

STREETS & SIDEWALKS

The very tedious process of creating sidewalks is finally nearing completion.  The process I've come up with takes several steps, so it's been...well, tedious!

The good news is that I am now moving on to much more interesting steps.  Namely, the placement of street markings!  This is another somewhat time consuming step, but when its all done it will be worth it!

Once I have all the street markings down (almost there!) I'm going to weather the streets with some weathering powder, and then apply a flat clear-coat over the whole mess. Once that's complete, I'll add street lighting and then the buildings are added!

The last time I create street marketings was six years ago, and I used a similar solution: dry transfer decals.  However, my experience last time led me to prefer the dry transfer decals from Japanese company "TGW".  The Busch are nice, the Faller are difficult (but that might be because they are old and the decals have dried out?) and Woodland Scenics leaves too much glue residue. I ordered the TGW street markings from Hobbysearch Japan.  While not perfect, they apply really well and don't have tendency to crack or break as much. I had to trim the crosswalks to avoid a specifically Japanese style, but this was just a minor step.

And like I said....soon the buildings are coming back! Here is my jam-packed workbench with most of the large structures out of their storage boxes! Soon!