Years ago I found this Tomix building at a local train show for 10 dollars and when I built these modules I found it easy to fill in an empty space with it. It already had some unpainted interior details so I thought some day I would like to finish this structure and light the inside. That day has finally come.
Tomix buildings like these often come with a nice sidewalk section that interlocks with the structure base. This set had this front sidewalk plus another section for a parking lot in the back. When I first installed this on the module there was no room for the sidewalk so I left it off. Now that the modules are developed further, I decided to use the sidewalk so I cut the parking lot section to fit and moved the structure back just a bit.
This building has a sign in the front that lights with 3 LED's connected to a circuit that makes them flash in sequence. The light was barely visible through the sign and I had considered replacing it with something else. What I discovered was that the LED's were positioned too far behind the sign for the light to be effective. I found that if I fitted styrene tubing over the LED's the light was more focused so decided to keep the sign.
I built a small 3 volt regulator circuit to replace the pair of AA batteries that had been powering the sign. The load is very small but I still added a heat sink and did a 24 hour test to be sure this circuit would stay cool.
To light up the interior of the first floor I made a ceiling out of .030 styrene sheet and glued it to the existing plastic piece that holds the lighted sign and front doors and windows in place. 5 surface mount LED's were inserted through holes in the ceiling and scraps of decoder wires were used to connect them to a PC board from a Kato GP50. This was also something left over from a decoder installation. These will run on the 12 volt DC power circuit with a current limiting resistor. The photo below shows the top side of this ceiling.
