Car Park Part 2 - More progress

When at the club last night I managed to get a bit more done on the car park.  With the ground floor complete and two of the side walls on, it was time to start putting together the upper floor together.

The instructions are very well laid out, and so are the spur's.  You don't have little bits left here and there, as you complete each part of the instructions you empty each spur.  Which is magic for me, as I have a habit of losing bits.

Every Building on the layout will be lit,  one to show off the detail inside, and two am basing this layout in the evening about 8pm (I know, pretty precise).  The reason for this, is the football stadium, will have a match just about to start.  That way it would be normal to have fans still coming into the Stadium, so it can be nearly full inside and have fans outside.  As all the loco's and most of the coach comes with lights this will also show of them as well.

 The car park will be in the city near the station, I have decided it will be late night shopping night in the centre, so it is going to be full, as there are 200 spaces, its a lot of cars, and lots of people about.

A friend of mine Ross, has shown me his way of lighting N-Scale Buildings.  So this is how I will do it here.  Each level of the car park is split with an upper and lower floor per level, but both sides connect to the stair column at one end.  In the top picture above you can see I have drilled some holes to take the wires from the lighting out under the base.

I have started with the floor straight above the entrance to the car park and felt this would have the most light, as this is where you enter and pay to leave.  I first cut away part of the ceiling ribs to allow the LED light strip to be fixing to the roof as flat as possible.  The lighting strip is in Sets of three lights with each set already having a resistor attached.  The back of the strip is self adhesive, but Ross informed me that when the strip gets hot it has a habit of un-attaching itself, so I added a little super glue to help keep it in place. 











I cut away a small area to allow the wires to come from the lighting strip to the stairwell without being seen.  The lighting strip his two points marked to show you were to attach the wires.  As I had not soldered in a while I was hoping not to blow any of the lights by adding too much heat, but I am very pleased to say that all went ok.

 The LED lighting strips can be bought on E-bay for about £10 for 300 LED's in lots of different colours, the one I have used here is warm white.  If you require the lighting to be a bit more duller, you can add a resistor in the size you require to achieve the affect you want.  As the above photo shows I didn't kill the LED's and I think they look pretty good.

The next step was to add the barriers and cars to the level.  I will be adding people to this building, but as I am still moving this around and nothing is attached I will add them when I come to fix the levels in place, so they are less likely to be damaged.  

I then did the same for the level above, but I used less lighting strips, only 2 sets of 3, instead of 4 sets of 3, so there will be a little less light on the floors above.

While I was flying along, putting the barriers in and cars I forgot to add the arrow decals on the floor, so I will have to add these in before I get to carried away.

I am very pleased with my progress so far on this build, and look forward to completing the rest of the floors.



More will follow as the build moves on, until then I wonder if its possible to built a car park like this on the layout?????