I’ve finished the initial build of the first Metra station. Still plenty more to do, such as weathering and interior details, but for now it is perfect for testing the initial track plan of Western Yard. The Metra station is on the Western side of the yard, at the back, with the mainline and yard in front, so that is how I will position it on my layout. However, the prototype Western Avenue Metra Station just has two long waiting rooms, no actual station building, so I will purchase a few more of these kits, as well as various other models, and kitbash to use the various main buildings for the other stations, keeping just the waiting rooms for the Western Avenue station.
Just arrived are a load of tiny LED’s (0805’s), already wired with resistors attached – thank goodness for Amazon! I have bought bright white as well as golden white – the Faller/Kato kit comes with holes drilled for 27 of these LED’s to light the outside of the station, but I definitely won’t need to use as many as that!
I test fitted one of them and lit it with a 3V battery (which already had a resister soldered to it). In conjunction with that and the resistor already fitted to the LED, the light was still very bright (even though they are 12-14V LED’s!), so I guess I can dial the voltage down even more! Just need to work out how I’m going to set up the wiring for these to make it easy to remove the station if I need to without having to worry about all the wiring. The model comes with black paper inserts to block the light inside, but I think painting the inside walls will work better, as well as allowing me to detail the interior (the inserts currently get in the way).
