A structure illuminated with ‘fire light’

Like many in the model railroad hobby, I am enamoured of Disneyland. As Michael Broggie has pointed out in his Walt Disney’s Railroad Story, the park itself sprung up from Disney’s fascination with railroads and his creation of a one-eighth scale live steam railroad in his Holmby Hills’ backyard in the 1940s.

Besides the railroad, of all the engineering marvels of the park, one of the things that fascinated me the most about it (believe it or not) has always been the flickering candles and oil lanterns in the New Orleans Square and Frontierland areas of the park.

Obviously not operated on petroleum products, the electric flickering lamps dance in a variety of venues around the park, most notably the “Pirates of the Caribbean” and its adjacent restaurant, the “Blue Bayou.”

I began researching how to create a similar effect probably in the early 1990s and found nothing particularly satisfying. There are 120-volt flame-shaped bulbs that flicker, and are somewhat expensive (ranging from $1 to $4). One recommendation was to build a 120-volt circuit that used a fluorescent light starter (http://hometown.aol.com/hauntscapescd/ProjectsPage2.html), while another used an flame-flicker bulb to drive a whole circuit of flame-flickering inexpensive bulbs (http://www.hauntedillinois.com/lightflicker.php). These ideas all depended upon standard household current, not necessarily want I wanted out on my backyard layout, which was already wired for standard 12-volt garden lighting.

But in 2006 I found a large, battery-operated flickering candle (http://www.enchantedlighting.net/candle_batt.htm). I bought one of these and tinkered with it. While it was too expensive, it certainly could be adapted to work in a 12-volt environment.

Shortly thereafter, I began to learn about a new, cheap technology that was being mass-produced in China: the flickering tea candle. My first contact was the on-line posting, Otaku’s Tea Light Hack (http://www.johnnyspage.com/otakuFlickerHowto/otakuHack.htm).

Flickering tea candles have four main components: an LED to provide the light; a circuit board that contains a mystery microcontroller that handles the flickering; a 3-volt, coin-sized battery like those found in watches or hearing aids, and a milky-white plastic case.

I bought a dozen flickering tea lights on eBay (you can get them on Amazon.com, from whence I receive a vigorish) and when they arrived I began experimenting. Otaku’s goal was to make the tea light brighter, which he achieved by over-driving the circuit with four AA batteries and then added a larger LED. From what I’d learned about LEDs in building the lamp posts, I knew that it would be easy to drive such a circuit with my garden lighting system and rather than changing the bulbs the way Otaku did, I rationalized that I should merely add more tea lights.

(Otaku — and many other Halloween hackers — have goals that are entirely different that those of outdoor model railroaders: they’re shooting for one, or at most four or five, nights’ worth of performance. My goal is to illuminate a railroad every night, 365 nights a year.)

While I have a couple of buildings where I have merely added a bridge rectifier and a resistor and driven a naked tea lamp directly, more often than not I use four tea lamps wired in series (12 volts divided by four devices comes out to 3 volts each).

And while the flickering tea lights I bought on eBay were fine (they ended up being about $1.25 each with shipping), I began stumbling across them at retail stores as well. I found them at the national arts-and-crafts store Michaels (http://www.michaels.com/), as well as other arts-and-crafts stores, including Beverly’s. These were closer to $3 or $4 each, so I never actually bought any to play with.

But the real find was Walgreens: The retail drug store (it has more than 6000 stores in 49 states and unless you’re in Alaska, Hawai’i or South Dakota, it should be easy to find one) sold a version of the tea light built in China by Smart Candle LLC (http://www.smartcandle.com/). These tea lights (which the company calls “T-Lites”) have an extra-bright LED (probably 60,000 millicandelas) and they are really inexpensive. The stores in California seem to display these tea lights in a small bin on a shelf with the rest of the candles and sells them one for $2 or two for $3 (your mileage may vary). In Fall 2007, Walgreens began selling similar devices on a plastic card, six for $5 (available on-line, though once you add shipping, these are priced similarly to the Amazon and eBay tea lights).

Now, as we say here at GT&E, we were cooking with steam.

Here are two instruction sets:

• The first is to just strip down a Smart Candle T-Lite, add a rectifier and a resistor and then use the resulting board/light inside a structure by itself.
• The second shows you how to build a large canister of flickering light that can fill a structure, making it easily seen from 50 or more feet away.

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