I am building a New Haven layout, but my streets are dark. What kind of street lights did they have in the 50's/60's in New England? And: are they available in N scale? They do not need to have real light bulbs, fake is good enough.
Hi Thieu, If you have not done so already, you might pose this question in the N scale forum and/or the Inspection Pit.
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Streetlights in New England Thieu, I grew up in eastern Massachusetts, in New Haven territory. The streetlights in the suburbs were mainly attached to telephone poles and were incandescent bulbs. They had a shell-like shroud over them to direct the beam to the ground that looked something like a curved football. Again, this is what was common in the suburbs.
Wow, after more than 2 years, I get a reply. :tb-biggrin: In the meantime, I have found nice lamps from Viesmann and I have installed them on my onetrak module:
Hi Thieu, I rarely visit the NH Forum, but the title caught my attention. The lights you selected are representative of street lights that had been installed throughout New England before WWII, and still widely used well into the 60's. However, sodium vapor lamps, developed during WWII, were becoming widespread as municipal budgets recovered from the wartime economy. Sodium vapor lamps in an urban street application usually were installed within a "box" at the end of an aluminum arm over the middle of a street. The box, measuring ~50cm on a side and ~30cm deep, was divided in half with an aluminum reflector on top and a translucent plastic lens on the bottom. The pole usually was a spun aluminum tapered tube mounted to a base in the sidewalk and extending ~6M where it was bent at ~60* angle towards the street, terminating at the lamp box. Sodium vapor lamps emitted a sickly yellow-orange glow that was bright enough for safety, but with such a narrow frequency spectrum that everything was seen as varying shades of yellow-orange, making it very difficult to determine colors. This was OK if you knew where you were going, but very difficult if you were attempting to locate a green store-front, or were a policeman looking for a blue car.....:tb-hissyfit: I doubt if any model manufacturer ever developed a sodium vapor lamp, but it certainly would be an eye-catching scene in a dimly lit environment.
Hello Hank, Do you have an example of those lamps? I can not make a good picture of your description.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_vapor_lamp shows an example of a sodium vapor street light in the top photo. The lamp is rectangular rather than square, but the photo shows the upper portion of the type of pole that I described. Understand that this photo is of a more modern design, rather than that which I remembered from ~50 years ago. Apparently sodium vapor lights are popular in the Netherlands judging from the photo of the building in Nijmegen near the bottom of the page. Perhaps you can find examples of older sodium vapor lights near your home that are similar to those I remembered in New England.
Aha, yes, I understand what you mean. This kind of street lights is very popular around here. Our country has them everywhere. Well, if they are cheap, it is understandable: we are a stingy people. :tb-wink: I am not a technician, so maybe they use other types of lamps, but when I look at the street light in front of my house, I see this same kind of design. And yes, the illumination is not that good, but I think that the usage of low pressure sodium is used mainly in alleys, at emergency exits etc. The brighter version is used on the streets. At cloudy nights, our cities are covered by an orange glow. Viesmann has produced these lights. I also have tried, many years ago, to make dummies by myself. Just bend some stryreen into the correct shape, and use a file to flatten the spot where you glue a small piece of flat (yellow painted) styreen, and paint the post in a grey color.
Thieu, the streetlights you put up in your photo are still in use in many cities in NH territory. Those lights are still in Naugatuck, CT, a block from the station, Waterbury, and parts of West Haven. I know that because I saw them when I did criterium races in these towns on my bike.
Hi all, Spent most of my formative years (weekends) in New Haven (probably explains a few things)... The ones I remember in New Haven were from Westinghouse "Silverliner" series of mercury vapor lamps. Full story here: http://www.angelfire.com/stars4/streetlights/ov25.htm I thought the "sodium" lamps weren't widely used until the late 70's for energy-efficiency reasons (the Silverliners got changed out in the 1980's to those sickly orange things). I used to go out walking at night with the silverliner's and you felt "safe"... Never did with the sodiums casting bizarre shadows and making people look weird and creepy. Well, maybe in the 80's the people were weird and creepy... :tb-ooh:
