OK, I know, all track and electronics and no scenery.... but that's what I know how to do. But my wife has spoken and scenery there is to be...
So i will need buildings. I haven't planned a major location that will need many of them; the space is taken up by trains. In the Clanfield village area there's room for a station building and then low relief buildings on the backscene.
Enter the Metcalfe cardboard kits. There is a set of lof relief terraced houses, and terraced shops. Both are availalbe in stone or brick: I've used brick. The detail has to be seen to be believed: there are a lot of parts offering curtains, various colour doors and interiors allowing you to make a row of houses that are all different. There are options for dormer windows and bay windows. The former are particularly relevant to Clanfield as half the houses have loft conversions in the real village.
I will be lighting the insides of these, with white LED lights turned on and off by the CML Electronics MSC8 "Scenery animator". This turns the lights on an off periodically on a randomised sequence, so the houses will look occupied. The white LEDs I have need a 2K2 series resistor when driven at 12v to give a quite bright enough light.
To make the shops a little more interesting, I made up shop fronts that match real businesses in our village. these are simply printed onto photo paper using an inkjet printer. I used "Visio" to design them but an image editor or even a word processing programme could be used.
Further down the road there will be a factory, for which I have a Faller plastic kit. I've made up the two smaller buildings: see one of them below. To try to get more realistic brickwork I've sprayed it with grey primer and them drybrushed the brickwork with acrylic paint. You can see some kind of evidence of the brick courses in the result below. Apparently another method to achieve the same is to paint uniformly with a brick colour, then "wash" a well diluted white on then blot most of it off. not tried that yet.
These will again be lit, and the factory has a fire. The MSC8 will control that too: the smoke generator will come on for maybe 1 minute every 5, and the flickering fire will be simulated with red LEDs. The fire engine lights can be driven too.