Work To Do In Zenith

I mentioned in my last post that I discovered I'd found some lighting units I'd almost finished installing in Zenith city buildings on my layout, but apparently forgot about them before I hooked them up. But meantime, I'd converted to DCC and then discovered the Woodland Scenics Just Plug system. This had a couple of ripple effects. One was that I realized that the legacy lighting with incandescent bulbs on my layout was running off a 12 volt DC circuit that in fact had terminal strips I wasn't fully using. But if I wanted to run Woodland Scenics light hubs off those terminal strips, which would be a good idea, I should scrap the 12 volt DC power on that circuit and convert it to 16 volt AC to power both the light hubs and the legacy incandescent lighting, since the light hubs need 16 volt AC, while the legacy incandescent bulbs can run off either. So this I did.

So I finally hooked up the legacy lighting that had been installed in my Chinese restaurant. It brought the building to life.

The street and sidewalks in this area will be redone to let me install a trolley-interurban line in the street here, so things are a little messy, and the restaurant will need to be backed up half on inch or so.

I found some leftover Model Power incandescent lighting units in my junk box and will install these. The first one went into this old Walthers White Tower:

The bus that's approaching is a New Jersey Public Service Old Look GMC of the type I remember on Route 24 that used to be Main Street where I grew up. An upcoming project will be to light up the box office area under the marquee of the Magnusan theatre just up the street from the White Tower.

I need to do some touchup on Hill Street in Zenith and light up some of these buildings as well.

The buildings aren't completely straight. The one on the left is a Lytler & Lytler Iron Front kit. This was basically a box full of small white metal parts that built only the facade of a 19th century iron front building. The kit was sized to match Roundhouse modular brick buildings that you had to scrounge half a dozen of yourself to build the rest of the building. I added SS Ltd chimneys and a Blair Line radio antenna.

I finally have to do something about the cables on the Woodland Scenics backhoe in front of the iron front.

I built this from the old Woodland Scenics white metal kit of this model. It had elastic threads for the cabling, which eventually warped. I will simply replace these with brass wire painted black that won't warp.