An article by Giles Favell, reproduced here by kind permission of Model Railway Journal and Giles Favell. This article covers the subject of layout lighting and how Giles, a professional theatre designer & technician, uses the techniques of the theatre in his approach to model railways. This formed the basis of a talk and demonstration given at our Autumn 2023 weekend.
I have spent more than forty years working in and for theatre, and I find my theatre upbringing inevitably permeates through my modelling in all sorts of ways. Inevitable, really, as both are replicating and manipulating reality to create a world and illusions of our own vision – the only significant difference being one of size.
In Theatre, we usually (though not always!) make a head-start for ourselves by using a theatre building. A building which is very specifically and carefully designed as a tool for presentation. The theatre is a controlled environment intended to place the audience in very specific positions in relation to a stage of equally specific size and shape, so that the performance may be placed and enacted to the captive audience in the best (optimal) way. That at least is the theory of it….
Further-more, the theatre is carefully decorated to a) look nice and b) be sympathetic to the performance, especially when the lights are down and you want the audience to concentrate on what is happening on stage. The carpets, the wall finishes, the seats, and the light fittings are all carefully chosen with this in mind – both visually and acoustically – as well as practical concerns of longevity and maintenance.
The stage area is nearly always predominantly black, so that when the set or actors are placed on it, all focus is on them, and there is no distraction. As audience we take this so much for granted, it is not even noticed….
Lighting is vital for a theatre show. It is part of our doctrine that if you cannot see their face (the actors) you can’t hear what they’re saying…. strange perhaps – but true in practise. Therefore, a West End show may be lit by 300 lanterns or more. Two thirds are likely to be in the stage area (most above, but many to the side), but a third will be front-of-house – in the auditorium – and this is the lighting that enables you to see the actors faces….
We don’t want to make our model railway into a little theatre as that isn’t what this is about at all. However, there is much in common, and therefore some theatrical ideas and philosophies can be applied to our benefit. In building a model railway, we are creating a section of (miniaturised) world which is intended to be viewed, to be appreciated, and of course this comes to a focus at exhibitions, though it applies at home as well.
A classic theatre has a Proscenium Arch (the picture frame at the front of the stage). This is often necessary for a variety of reasons. It acts as a view-blocker both sideways and (importantly) upwards, thereby hiding stored scenery and allowing scene changes. Very importantly, it actually holds the Fly-tower up!
Some people choose to reproduce this feature, which makes for a very neat presentation. It also emphasises the job a proscenium arch does in controlling and limiting sight-lines (what the audience can see from where), and leading the audience’s attention where we want it to be. There are many ways of recognising this issue and dealing with it – a fully masked Pros-Arch box is one full blown solution, but won’t suit all needs or all people.
I choose to treat the problem slightly differently.
When I’m looking at a model railway, I find I am most distracted by incongruity behind the scene. This usually means the back-scene is too low to hide movement or some-such. When I built ‘The End of The Line’ I built the back-scene as high as I could fit in the car, which given the small size of the layout, and the close proximity of the audience probably just about worked (wrapping the back-scene round to include one end of the layout helped a great deal as well).
However, with ‘Denton Brook’ that simply wasn’t going to be possible, so I went more ‘theatrical’ for a solution, and simply did what we do in theatre, and used a back-cloth. The idea behind this was that it should be high enough so that the top of it would effectively be out of the eye-line of anyone actively looking at the layout (about 2.2m), whilst the bottom would drop down out of sightline behind the layout. It would sit about a foot behind the baseboard, not butting up to it, and would be a bit wider than the scenic portion. The audience wouldn’t be actively looking at the back cloth, but it would fill their field of vision (to all intents and purposes). The sides are less easily dealt with and so I resorted to another theatre convention of ‘going to black’. That is, as soon as one leaves the ‘stage’ – the scenic portion – everything is painted black. All fiddle-yards etc….. The eye very quickly accepts this convention without even realising it, and ceases to trouble over it – and indeed it made the fiddle-yards look neater as well! The front of the layout has a profiled face to the scenery, also painted black, to which black wool serge (inherently flame retardant IFR) is velcroed, starting at the lorry fiddle, and running right round to the standard gauge fiddle.
All this helps isolate the scenic layout away from unwanted visual distraction.
The first backcloth I tried was a vinyl display banner, printed with my photo of dark, gloomy clouds – but I was very disappointed that it was gloss, and had wrinkles that I couldn’t get rid of. I dumped that, and got a much more expensive (£170) printed cloth back projection screen made up with the same gloomy clouds, and pockets top and bottom – and that has been great! It is completely matt, hangs nicely- particularly using stretchers to pull it taught side-to-side.
The cloth was supported on two light stands – and initially a push-together 4-piece pole bought from E-bay as a photographic back-cloth set (for £29 I think it was…) however, the top pole wasn’t rigid enough, so I replaced it with a length of rectangular ERW 40mm x 20 steel (a light-weight box section) that I had lying around, and put the light 4-piece pole in the bottom cloth pocket to weight it. Given that the projection cloth is so light, this 3.2m length of steel doesn’t deflect at all in use, so the cloth hangs very nicely with no wrinkles.
If I had a very large layout, I should be inclined to use a deeper cloth, and have it about 750mm away from the base-board to the rear, which would allow someone to walk between cloth and layout in the event of a problem, whilst retaining all the benefits of a full cloth. If necessary, a ground-row of two-dimensional scenery could be added to the back of the baseboard to add extra ‘relief’.
Hand in hand with this has to be lighting. Assuming we are going to light a layout to be seen and appreciated in a realistic fashion, then we need to decide what time of day, weather etc.
The principles of basic stage lighting are interesting and are perhaps of some use – even though we can’t realistically fully apply them in our context. They can still help us with our decision making.
In very basic terms, lighting is most effectively achieved (area by area) from an angle of 45° both vertically and horizontally – either side of the viewing position. If lights are straight on, it ‘flattens’ the scene, and makes depth and detail harder to perceive, and if lights are just from the side or above (90°) then it is equally hard to see detail on the face. This is why Front-of-House lighting is so important, as without it, the actor’s faces will not be seen.
