 The What's Neat Show is sponsored by Lombard Hobbies, your value hobby shop for over 40 years of modelers helping modelers. Big inventory, value pricing, fast shipping and great service. And by Broadway Limited Imports, the cutting edge leader in model trains. Check out their website at Broadway-limited.com. And by Bachman Trains. Now that's the way to run a railroad. Check out their website at BachmanTrains.com. And thank you for helping us support the best hobby in the world. This is What's Neat. For December 2023, I'm your host Ken Patterson and this month we've got a good show in that. George Bogatuck from Soundtracks stops by and he shares with us a new layout that he's building and today's subject matter in December's video is how he lit the layout. Layout lighting. He did a very, very good segment on that and it looks really good. Also, this past October, the podcast crew, we stopped at Lombard Hobbies to visit the store and see some wonderful layouts up in Chicago, which we will be running in future What's Neat Shows. The Lombard Hobbies, we got an interview from a lot of the folks up there that really, truly have a passion for this hobby. It's an amazing store with more product than I can tell you I've ever seen anywhere. It's just an absolutely well run machine for this, the best hobby in the world. And that's just the go-to source because they help us support this The What's Neat Show. So thank you very much for that. Check them out at Lombard Hobbies online or go visit the store up there in Lombard, Illinois. They will not be disappointed. Also this month, Bachman Industries stops by. Doug Blaine shares with us a lot of the Christmas train sets that are perfect for this time of the year. After all, it has always seemed like it's the Christmas train around the tree. That was the one thing that got so many people started in this wonderful hobby of ours. Now, on the table, I've got some beautiful end scale and HO scale locomotives from Broadway Limited. I've got the USRA Heavy and Light Pacific Locomotives. These are 462 locomotives, brand new in their line, featuring the Paragon 4 sound with authentic sounds, prototypical operation in both DC and DCC environments. Plus you can also purchase these beautiful little locomotives in the Stealth series where they have no sound at all. And I mean, they're just exquisite. They were wonderful to shoot outside as I share with you some of the beautiful photography of each one of these precious little gems that run just smooth as can be on the end scale layout that we've got down here. Also I've got this GP35 locomotive in Burlington. This is a brand new run of GP35s from Broadway Limited. As you know, these things were all over the United States with over 1,300 locomotives in production, 26 units were built for the Canadian railroads, and another 57 were built for Mexican railroads. These freight locomotives are absolutely exquisite in that they have got the Paragon 4 sound system in them, which runs DC and DCC. Plus, these things have got the go-packed capacitor packs in them, so they won't stall. They'll just continue running even on very dirty track or dead frogs or even a dead spot on your layout. That's an amazing technology that we're starting to see in more and more models in Broadway Limited. Thank you for doing that. They've also got the Paragon 4 sound in them, as I've mentioned, and they're very accurate in the fact that they recorded the sound off of the GP35 number 216 at the Conway Scenic Railroad Museum. Additionally, these models come with a lot of lighting features depending upon the road name, either headlights, rear lights, Mars lights, number board lights, front classification lights, emergency rear classification lights, emergency light on the SP units only, rotary beacons were appropriate, ditch lights, and cab lights. I'm telling you what, they continue to outdo themselves at Broadway Limited. You can check out all the road names in both end scale for the steam locomotives and HO scale for the GP35s by going to www.BroadwayDashLimited.com. That is the website to go to. Check them out or simply Google Broadway Limited. Also be sure to check out the What's New this week show that we produce down here at this table every Saturday night, keeping you updated on what's in the hobby with special guests, our regular podcast crew, plus again, it's a great way to be informed every single week and just hang out with us as we run trains and have discussions about the hobby in depth on all subject matter. And so with that, let's continue on with the rest of this December 2023 What's Neat. For almost three years now you've been watching the What's Neat show whereas we've had Lombard hobbies in Lombard, Illinois, helping us support this, the best hobby in the world and helping us to present the hobby to you. Today I'm with some of the proprietors of Lombard hobbies. I've got right next to me, Alex. Hey, Alex. Hi. How are you, Ken? Right next to Alex, I have Jeff. How you doing today, Ken? Good to see you. And on the very end, my favorite, I'm even going to hand you this. This is Andrew. Hello, all. Yes, it's me. Now, I know you can hear me because I'm talking loud, Andrew, but I want you to tell us because I can see you have a passion for this hobby. Well, you know, we all have a passion. Our passion started lots of times for us when we were kids. And the biggest passion here with our shop is when Jeff and his dad started the business almost 50 years ago. And we've just carried on the torch, tried to improve things and really as modelers ourselves just give our customers what we would want because we're modelers, too. Very simple. And sometimes the easiest things are the hardest to achieve, but that's what we try to do. We even have it all in our simple bag that many people have. It's fast shipping, great customer service, value pricing, and great customer service. And so, Jeff, what would you add to that? It's just a great deal to have Andrew next to me. I'll tell you that. Otherwise, we could never do what we do. And likewise, we like to also say the importance of our team. We've got a great team of almost over 12 people, which Ken's got a picture of, he may show during the show. And also, our second in command, we like to thank Alex, who we were able to poach from Kato. Sorry, Kato, but you guys lost a good one. But Alex is our social media director and our sales director. Just fantastic job. It's come along and just done a wonderful job and, again, part of the team that we couldn't do without. Alex, I want to hear from you how cool it is to work among all these amazing trains. Oh, it is quite amazing. And just as Andrew said before, we work with a great team. We're all modelers here, so we have a passion for what modelers are looking for. We work with great companies and manufacturers. You know, I worked for Kato for seven years, a great company, and we deal with them, along with many, many others here. We couldn't do it without great leadership, without the team that we have here, and of course, the customers that come through our door and order online every day, so we really appreciate everything that they do for us as well for the hobby. That's absolutely fantastic. Jeff, I'm going to let you close this out because this is amazing. And I have heard nothing but amazing things about you. I met you back in 19, what was it, almost around 1999 to 2000, when I was doing that automotive series. With Walters. With Walters. We met up there. Yeah. That's how long ago it was. Time flies. That's absolutely fantastic. Yeah. Thank you guys for what it is you do, anything in closing. Just a great deal. I'm glad everybody can be here today. It's going to be a great, great day for everybody, customers, dealers, and everybody. Andrew, tell them what's going on today. Tell them what we're doing. Well, for those who aren't familiar with what we're doing today, we're doing a midnight madness. So why it's not dark yet? It will be. And we're doing that from 3 p.m. to midnight for all our in-store customers. But we haven't forgot our online customers, and a special sale starts for them at the conclusion of this, starting at midnight for 12 hours. And that's one of the things. We feel every customer is important, and we enjoy our customers, their camaraderie. We're really fortunate to have just the wonderful group of customers we do, and we're glad to serve our fellow modelers. So we hope, as every day, we try to bring the best price every day to every product. But sometimes, and it's been over 20 years since we've done this, but sometimes you just got to really blow the doors out. And that's what we're going to do today. Wow, guys. Let's give them a round of applause. And can I add one more thing? Thank you to Ken and his crew and Holly. Everyone, what they do to help promote the hobby, and without great shows and the talent that goes behind that, we wouldn't be able to help do what we do. So it's always a team effort, whether it's a manufacturer, whether it's promoters of the hobby, and yes, other shops too, because give them a hand for all they do, because it's a tough business every day, no matter what business you're in, whether it's hobbies or whatever. And everybody puts a hard, hard work into that. And so we say support your local hobby shop. But if they're not there, which unfortunately we hear so often, we're here and we'll take care of you. Good job. Hey, guys. George here. And in this segment of What's Neat, today we're going to talk about layout lighting. And what does that mean? Today we are recording this from the new Casa de Bogatec. Yes, that's right. My wife and I bought a house, and we moved the layout to this new garage. Now the cool thing is we've got a lot more room, so we'll be doing some expansion of layout. So I'm really excited about that. But in doing so, we had to reinvent and redo the layout, which includes the lighting. Now, as part of this, I built these valances and shelves above the layout to store product models, things like that above. But what about the layout lighting? And how did I do that? Well, today I'm going to show you a very inexpensive way to do good looking layout lighting that you can do affordably for your layout. So first thing what I did was I typically built this standard shelf box, took some one by fours, built the box, put some supports in it, laid a piece of plywood on top of it and mounted it up onto the wall with occasional roof supports to support it up front. Now, up here as a balance, I've taken some eighth inch masonite and cut it into eight inch strips and simply screwed them up into the top part up here and then painted it solid black. So it gives that nice finished appearance look. Now you may notice also here, the last time you saw the layout, this was unfinished. I had painted that black as well since I had the black paint out. So now we have more of a finished appearance. But what about the lighting? Now obviously you can see the lights are off and so therefore it's kind of dark in there and the layout or the garage lighting doesn't really shine in to give you that nice look. So we have to look inside at the lighting inside and underneath these shelves to make sure that we can see the layout. So I'm going to run over here and I'm going to go ahead and turn on the lights and you can see what a difference it makes when you have layout lighting. Now what I've done is underneath here we've taken some industrial type just light bulb sockets really inexpensive you can get them at the Home Depot or the Lowe's for anywhere about two to three dollars a piece and I spaced them about 20 to 24 inches apart and just with two screw holes through here with a nut on the other side we tied them to the inside. Now to wire them all together you go to the store and you get some 14 gauge Romex home wiring wire that you would normally wire inside a wall and it's three conductor you have a white a black and then an unfinished copper ground but with the ground we're not going to use that. And so therefore we just cut it in short and you can bend it back or cut it short whatever you need to do. Then you have left and right and you connect them all the way through. So you can see here how it's wired in and you can see the lights base where it is wired to the Romex cables and you cut the Romex cable a little longer than what you need because you can always fold it up and shorten it up and fold it up and out of the way to make sure that you have enough space but you can't grow it so it's harder to grow. So what we did here is you just simply take a piece of Romex and cut it a little bit longer strip the ends and what I did was I took the self crimp connectors and just put them on the end of each of those and then slid it under the screw terminals and tightened the screw terminals. Now because we're dealing with AC you don't have to be perfect but if you do want to pay attention to polarity pick one side and be consistent throughout the entire run. Now what we've done here in this case is we've used LED dimmable light bulbs and what this does this allows you to change the brilliance. Now the one thing about these is you have to make sure that you have a dimmer switch that is designed for use with LEDs and what this does is this will allow you to change the overall brilliance. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to walk over here and I'm going to show you that we can adjust the brilliance to kind of simulate different parts of the day as you choose. And this is just using a wheel dimmer switch that you can see here is mounted in a box one of the electrical outlet boxes that's mounted behind the fascia and mounted behind the fascia then I've got a wires coming out to an electrical plug that you can then just simply plug in the wall. Now this is a very simple easy thing to do. Like I mentioned these sockets for the light bulbs are usually about anywhere from between three to four dollars somewhere like that a piece and then you just have to decide how many you need. The light bulbs you can usually get I think I was getting four packs for about ten bucks or so. The junction box is a buck or two at the hardware store the fascia plate and the wheel the little wheel that goes on top of the dimmer switch and then the dimmer switch is actually the biggest cost being somewhere around twenty eight to thirty dollars and then of course the role of romance and that's going to determine how much you're going to determine how much that's going to cost based on how much space you need to cover. Now in this particular space I've got about twenty three feet one way and we're actually looking at going another twenty feet in the other direction so I went ahead and put them all up even though I don't have that space all filled out at this moment in time. But one of the other key factors that I was able to do in this particular case this is how I had the lighting at the old layout at the old place and one of the things I noticed when I first built put this up is that when I had left the underside of the wood and everything here underneath just bare wood what I used was these daylight spectrum six thousand K light bulbs and what happened was the blue would come down but then the brown would actually reflect off the underside of these shelves up here and it would cause a brown tint to kind of come over the entire layout. Now we spent a lot of time to make sure we have the right colors and everything and that brown just kind of washed everything out so what I did was you'll notice this blue color back here is all painted well when I painted this I also painted the underside of the layout fascia up here so you can see that now this whole underside is blue so it does two things number one is it reflects the blue color down so that it gives us that color that we're looking for with everything but also what it does is if you're working up close up front here let's say you're operating you don't notice that brown cover inside that fascia because your eyes are focused here and because this is all that same sky blue your mind kind of fills it in so you don't really notice it there and so that way you have a little bit more of that illusion that we are actually outside in the sky and in the natural world now when you're spacing these out as I mentioned they're about 20 to 24 inches apart you have to look at shadows if you put them too close then you can get multiple shadows coming at it from different directions and spacing them out helps give an even look but also helps minimize that duplicate shadow in different directions because remember we only have one sun and so therefore if you had multiple shadows in different directions then it could create a poor illusion now the last thing I'll talk about here on these lights is when I built the fascia up here if you guys remember in the past this layout is only two feet wide so what I did was I built the upper fascia here at about 30 inches out from the wall so that gave me about a six inch play so that the light bulbs were not immediately over the front of the layout now on top of that to help reinforce the strength of this front of the shelf up here so that it doesn't cause any excessive wear I also then screwed a two by four all along the front to help secure and add some extra strength and then we put the fascia on it so in actuality I'm about seven and a half inches out from the front of the layout and so therefore when the light is coming in you're actually seeing the light shining on the models instead of above it causing a dark shadow here in front and so that way we're able to actually see the lights on the models and we don't have to rely on garage lighting or any other lighting that you've got in the room so you could actually dim the lights in the room that you're operating in and the focus can be on the trains now one of the other things that I did in this particular installation I wanted to be able to create a sunset or a sunrise or even a moonlight now remember we're trying to do this affordably and so I looked around and you can buy different all kinds of LED spectrums and brillances and and color tones and things like that but what I found was I went to the local Walmart and I found a role of these monster LEDs that you can buy in two fit it comes together as a pair it's 250 foot rolls I think it was about 35 or 40 dollars and they have multicolors so you get one of these little remotes that comes with it and as you can see you have a whole range of different colors here that you can see and what this does this allows the RGB LEDs to create different tones to also help kind of set the mood so right now with the daylights on you wouldn't be able to see it but we're going to go ahead and change the lighting situation now so first I'm going to turn off the garage lights and then we're going to go ahead and turn off the lights inside the layout so now what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and turn on our blue LEDs just to kind of give you the illusion of night so as you can see now you've got a moonlit night that is shining down on the layout and what I did was I took these 250 foot rolls and I doubled it so because I've all got about 40 foot run here in the new house I only lost about 10 feet on each roll and what I did was I went and secured it to the inside of the fascia under here and then tack tacked it in place using hot glue just to kind of help hold it because the adhesive against the back of this masonite board doesn't really hold all that well but the cool thing is about this is that you also have a brilliance adjustment so we can change the overall brilliance to decide what our color is going to look like now if we wanted to do like an orange type sunset you can kind of change that or sunrise you can kind of see how now you've got a different tone in here so we're able to create different types of sky any of you guys in the Midwest if you've seen a green colored sky like that you know there's a storm coming so this gives you some really cool flexibility now one thing I found is that with a single strand it just wasn't bright enough and with two it gives you just the right amount and you can always dim it as we talked about but one of the things we wanted to do in this particular case was because we're trying to create a midnight look with sunmoot with a moonlight coming in but we didn't want to be so dark that we can't see what we're doing this way the lights on the trains can come through really really cleanly and you can appreciate those lights that you spent all that time to put on but now you have that dark setting and you can work by locomotive headlight but it's not so dark that you can't see what you're doing so with that I'm gonna go ahead and turn the lights back on so for all of this to put all this together probably cost I'd say somewhere around 100 to a hundred and a quarter for just the lights and so forth once you factor in all the light bulbs all the wire and everything else that you need to get so it actually is a really affordable way now there's of course studio lighting that you can get and you can go up and spend several hundred dollars on specific studio lighting if you want to really create these these brilliant effort brilliant sunsets and so forth you can also go in and spend a lot of money buying all these little multiple LED strip lights or like the fluorescent lights tube lights LED and mount them all around and that cost adds up a lot but these light bulbs and I'll just take this one out right now so you can see it's just a standard light bulb like you would see at the hardware store at the home depot or at the Walmart but these are LED and they're dimmable so they have the specific circuitry in there for LED operation and they just literally screw in place and with these little sockets back here easy lighting you line it up you draw your two holes you put your screws in there you tighten it down with your nut you wire the sockets for the electrical lighting and then plug it into the wall test multiple times while you're doing it make sure you're not doing anything bad make sure you're not crossing any wires and take your time and hopefully this has been very helpful for you guys when it comes to layout lighting now as I mentioned I've moved and I have a new place so I'll be doing some other layout tips and segments and things like that coming up in the future so be sure to stay tuned and thanks for watching for this segment of what's neat I've got Doug Blaine from beautiful Philadelphia Pennsylvania from Bachman Industries hey Doug always a pleasure to be with you and your audience can I know this is going to be airing in December so happy holidays to everyone thank you very much and yes it's going to be a good Christmas this year for everybody and we so look for seeing some of the new Christmas products that you're gonna talk about today I have a lot to show you so I'm probably not gonna spend a whole lot of time on each item but this is just a reminder to people how so many people get started in model railroading the set under the Christmas tree is iconic how many people were first introduced to model railroading and we hope to inspire you to pass the gift of model railroading on to somebody else today you know what as we show these train sets and other products consider getting them to give someone else or treat yourself as well absolutely whenever you are ready I will we'll get going I couldn't have said it better Doug go ahead and shoot all right sounds good so I'm gonna run through some of our set offerings in in Christmas colors and themes you're gonna notice a very very fancy zoom zoom feature on my camera I'm holding my chair back I love you you're funny alright that's for our North Pole Express it's done in colors reminiscent of a very popular children's story okay the scale so it's the the locomotive and three passenger I'm sorry two passenger cars and it's got a nice it's got a larger oval of track to accommodate these larger size pieces of rolling stock it's 22 inch radius snap bit easy track wow one and I'm gonna roll through several more here here's a jingle bell express in more traditional Christmas colors okay there we go also each scale of course it's got an operating headlight again the snap bit easy track complete ready to run train track power pack everything you need to get going for a quick setup nice all right oh and also for sets let's as I know when over let's not forget our Thomas and friends fans again a great way to introduce folks to the to model railroading this is also an HO scale set with a sir sorry an oval of track Thomas has a holiday hat and plow on it's got the flat car with a sleigh on it and it's an iconic episode that features this sleigh and as you know Thomas comes to save the day of course and a nice break in with the Santa figure on top or riding in the front there very cool so moving on to end scale train sets we have two here for you one is this is the merry Christmas Express okay I was there gonna have to zoom out again a nice bright set again an end scale we have the spirit of Christmas this is a passion passenger set with a combine a passenger car and regular coach car an observation car also we have some own 30 sets this is O scale narrow gauge so this one is this is a battery operated reversing trolley set Norman Rock that's a normal concept and again it's reversing set battery ops so this is great for areas where it's a little bit difficult to get electricity to run maybe a mantle or a shelf space it's got the great reversing action pauses you know for a number of seconds at each end for a pleasing effect you can control the speed of the the trolley as it goes back and forth so there's one reversing set I've got another reversing set in O and 30 which is this set which has an engine house on it or an engine shed nice so it's got a Christmas themed streetcar on it closed streetcar directional lighting interior head interior lighting inside sorry for the glare folks no that's nice and I know that building is nice too that's cool yep so there's that and to go along with that we have some separate sale Christmas streetcars in two different paint schemes one says seasons greetings and one says Merry Christmas oh beautiful very nice so I'm gonna do I'll do one at a time here just try and flash around a little bit just so you can see the paint hopefully without a glare so these of course will work on you know any track but they're particularly useful for that reversing set that I just showed you very cool all right and one more in O and 30 this is also in our Norman Rockwell themed products so this this is a great O and 30 set nice and colorful it's got the Norman Rockwell scene at the you know the midline of the coach again like lighted coach cars because got the observation car on it and anyway just nice attractive classic Americana for Christmas with this set that's beautiful and that would work perfect around a tree absolutely all right now I'm gonna go into well let's see we got a large scale set that I think you're gonna bring up on screen for us here okay so this is the night before Christmas this has a about a four by five foot oval of track and this is just you know perfect for under the tree it's got a great size for kids it can take some knocks won't matter too much if the dog knocks it off the track or the cat takes a swat at it so it'll it'll it'll it'll take the licking and keep on ticking so that's a great one and also in large scale we have a separate sale locomotive a 460 locomotive okay and that's our anniversary edition 460 it's got metal gears for long long lasting performance and this can can run outside perfect for the rail rotors you should know about that right Ken yes I do have 22 years behind me on this garden railroad out in the yard although I have not run it that much every year lately well I'll show you we have an additional car for outdoor rail rotors this is the reindeer car so it's a stock car and when you go around the curves the the reindeer hoax our heads in and out of the open open doors so that's kind of fun one a nice animation effect but you know a great add-on to a large-scale operation or train anywhere just to add a Christmas theme car is nice very very cool all right just a couple more separate sale items of course any of these for a review if you want to go to our website at Bachman trains calm you can just search for any of these search Christmas or North Pole and Southern that's our our house railroad name for Christmas themed products so search for North Pole and Southern or Christmas and you should come up with many of these if not all these products this is an O gauge three rail egg liner we call it I think you should be familiar with those it's got a nice let's see if it'll come up right up that's oriented correctly Santa sleigh on the top so nice addition there and let's see this is an 060 HO scale locomotive in good Christmas colors also North Pole and Southern all right and let's see what else we have here also motive power for HO scale this is a cable car all right and the ever-popular Christmas themed Gandhi dance so this has been in a line for oh you know about a hundred years but it's it's always a fun one looks great going around and we got a little Santa and elf figure on there I think it's Santa yeah Santa and elf figure very very nice always fun and also last one for HO scale rolling stock is again stock car with the reindeer heads that poke in and out through the open doors and lastly we have to end scale pieces of motor power this is a North Pole and Southern 060 steam locomotive that shows up okay that's nice lastly is a brool street car also in a nice nice classic colors for you so that's great for you know like a street scene city scene if you have that if you have a nice Christmas Christmas garden Christmas village underneath that always looks great you are correct so that's just a quick rundown of everything we have for Christmas I shouldn't say everything there's some things that we're not in stock that I wasn't able to show you again Bachman trains calm you'll be able to find everything and I'm happy to share these products with with you today and I hope your viewers were will share them with other people as well as I said at the beginning it's this is the perfect time to get other people started in model railroading you are so right Doug and this is now December's issue this is the last show for 2023 on behalf of Doug Blaine Bachman Industries myself Joe Fugate and everybody that helps me produce this the what's neat show for this past year I want to wish you and yours a very happy and merry Christmas right so absolutely a very merry Christmas from Bachman on behalf of Bachman as well happy holidays to all and I wish everyone a great 2024 yes I hear it comes and so with that that is this segment for what's neat all the products seen on this episode of what's neat are available from Lombard hobbies in Lombard Illinois or order online at Lombard hobby dot com and by Broadway limited imports the cutting edge leader in model trains check out their website at Broadway dash limited dot com Bachman trains now that's the way to run a railroad check out their website at Bachman trains dot com