Working With The Just Plug System

When I started this layout 25-plus years ago, I wanted to incorporate lighting in many of the structures. I did in fact do this, although the available means were basically 12-volt flashlight bulbs in little screw stands from Bachmann and Model Power. Over the years, these have pretty much all burned out, come unsoldered, been damaged, or whatever. Discovering the Woodland Scenics Just Plug system has rekindled my interest in lighting, and I'm beginning to install new lighting in buildings or reinstall Just Plug LEDs to replace old burned-out bulbs.

In addition, last week I picked up some woodland Scenics Light Diffusing Window Film at the hobby shop. This is very useful for letting light shine through windows, while keeping a viewer from looking inside the building and seeing there's no interior. For instance, here's the Light Diffusing Film installed in a Campbell Carstens Flophouse lobby. (On my layout, this is the McKittrick Hotel on 14th St in Bay City.)

Even without the lights, this is very useful stuff. For instance, I found a basic set of walls for the old SS Ltd San Francisco office building at the old Caboose Hobbies in Denver several decades ago. I built them into a nice oblique corner building for Zenith. I even went as far as to add floors and an elevator shaft, but I knew adding a full interior would be something I'd probably never get to, even though the large windows beg for it. Here was the result:

I added the Light Diffusing Film and another type of tinted film that comes in the same box to darken and block out the view inside. I think this is a big improvement even without lights in the building.

There's other capability available with the Just Plug system, which is the ability to set individual strings of LEDs to turn on and off at random. I am doing this with an option in the NCE Illuminator, which runs Just Plug LEDs off the DCC bus, but Woodland Scenics offers a light hub with the same ability. Basically, if you add interior walls to a building, or have LEDs in separate individual buildings, you can have them turn on and off at random. Here's how I've set this up in a pair of storefronts on 14th St next to the McKittrick Hotel:

Here are the lights turning on and off individually. The storefront windows have also had the Light Diffusing Film applied:

I'm doing the same thing with lighted buildings on the N scale T-Trak layout.

However, as I work more with the NCE Illuminators, I'm finding these have a high error rate -- like 30-50%. While NCE has a return policy, their support staff is hard to deal with, makes errors (I had to send back to them a set of decoders they'd fixed for a different guy, and they want to play phone tag instead of use e-mail), and they keep your defective decoder for weeks before sending a replacement, which itself will be iffy. As a result, I'm going to continue to use Illuminators only with the T-Trak modules, where running off the DCC bus will minimize wiring, while I'm going to move to Just Plug light hubs on my HO layout.