5/17/2012

Lighting students from across the UK got a taste of working under professional-style pressure recently — as part of a competition to light a railway carriage in less than two hours. Six teams were invited to take part in the 3rd annual Locos in a Different Light event, in the Station Hall of York’s National Railway Museum – and ETC was on hand to provide lighting fixtures, control consoles, and support.

Helen Ashby, Head of Knowledge & Collections at the National Railway Museum, said: "The competition gives students a unique opportunity to light a developing area of the museum and potentially have their ideas incorporated into the long-term plans for the space. We enjoyed seeing our collection brought to life through light and welcomed over 1,000 visitors into the museum on Saturday evening to experience the displays."

ETC’s Associate Regional Manager for UK and Ireland, Jeremy Roberts, helped the student-competitors by supplying a range of ETC’s Selador Desire™ LED fixtures, as well as six ETC lighting control consoles. “I was really impressed with the imagination and technical ability of the teams,” said Roberts. “Many of the students had seen ETC SmartFade and Congo jr desks before, but fewer had seen ETC’s recent Congo Kid and Element. The programming syntaxes would have been familiar to them, since the boards are part of ETC’s Eos or Congo families, so the students were soon up to speed.” The Congo Kid™ console has 40 master faders and all the controls of a Congo®, built into a small desk. The Element® board, was designed for modest rigs and maximum hands-on fader control. The Desire LED fixtures come in a variety of versions, which allowed the students to experiment with looks. The Desire Fire™ luminaire offers the warm red-orange-yellow palette, while the Desire Ice™ provides soulful shades of blue and more. The Desire Studio HD™, Studio Tungsten™ and Studio Daylight™ provide three different ways of producing powerful white lights while Desire Lustr+™ and Vivid™ offer a vast color range for spectrally balanced saturated and tinted light.

In this competition, students from the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts gained not only recognition for having won but also a chance to drive a steam train. In a separate public vote, Rose Bruford College picked up an honorable mention.

The Locos in a Different Light event was devised by Ed Fagan, Curriculum Manager in the performing arts faculty at Amersham College, who suggested that a competition might provide the ideal stimulus for the design of a permanent lighting scheme. The Museum’s lighting contest was part of the city’s greater Illuminating York digital arts and lighting festival, held in October.

Photo credit: National Railway Museum, UK