30 Squares of Ontario

El Camino Municipal Swimming Pool – Test fitting some parts

2012-01-27T17:04:00.009-05:00

I’ve fitted the pickup bed, liberated the package tray from the interior bucket and glued it into what was previously the rear window, added some styrene I-beam to the base to boost the pool to a suitable height, and glued in a styrene sheet to fill the opening formed by the package tray and the door pillars. Also, a bit of filler was used to smooth out some joints that didn’t fit too well.

[I bought this kit a few years ago in the bargain bin at a nearby hobby shop. I like to look through sale items just to see if there is anything interesting, and cheap! I don't necessarily plan to use the items for their intended purpose, but more that they have interesting parts I might use in the future. This was one of those. It also has a great modern-style store front that I'll use someday, I'm just not too sure when that day will come and what the project will be.]

However, the most interesting job was adding the sign. It’s an item from an old Life-Like HO scale Kentucky Fried Chicken store kit. The sign’s support posts supplied in the kit were discarded, and some new ones were cut from 1/8 inch diameter styrene tubing. These new ones allowed me to tilt the sign to a more extreme angle than those in the kit and adjust the height to something that seemed right for this structure.

I usually spray paint car models and I want to do it on this project to get an ok finish on the body. Problem is I always spray outside and never in the house. With cold January weather here, I’m looking forward to the annual mid-winter thaw so I can squeeze in a little painting on some projects that are stacking up on the workbench, otherwise they’ll have to be parked until spring.

First Video

2012-01-22T08:31:00.004-05:00

I shot some video of the layout over the Christmas holidays. This weekend I finally got around to figuring out how to use iMovie to put the video pieces together and then load the whole thing to youtube.

El Camino Municipal Swimming Pool – First cuts

2012-01-19T19:29:00.006-05:00

I’ve been thinking about this build – along with several others I hope to finally get started – for quite a while. Instead of my usual pre-build fretting over how I think all the building steps should proceed, I just decided to jump in and start cutting. Although that seems reckless, it often helps me get over mental log jams. Simply making a start can often clarify things.

The donor kit is an AMT/Ertl 1959 El Camino. I chose this particular vintage of El Camino because the roof is shaped something like a cap that sits over the cab instead of being seamlessly integrated into the body as on later models. To me, this made it a little more building like. I also like the fins 

The pick-up bed, rear cab pillars and roof were cut away from the body using a cutting wheel in my dremel tool, followed by several iterations with the grinding drum and various sanding sticks. To get a square and even edge along the bottom, a sheet of sand paper was placed on the workbench, and the piece was sanded as a whole until it looked right.

I’ve been thinking this project might also be a good candidate for LED lighting. Small ones could be used in the tail-lights, and the bottom of the pool could be fitted with lights that point up into the ‘water’.

Niagara Falls Trolley Cards

2012-01-17T17:56:00.008-05:00

Over the Christmas holidays I was browsing through the family files at my father’s house and came across a post card set that was bought as a souvenir of a trip – probably taken by my mother’s mother ‘s family - to Niagara Falls.

I don’t know anything certain about the dates of either the vacation, or the cards, but they might both date from the 1920s. The set contains 11 cards, each one printed on both sides, of views of the falls, boats, bridges, and trolleys. They are quite beautiful. I like the ambience of these images. Debra and I last visited the falls back in 2010, and some of that feel still lingers there if one looks for it, but there’s a lot of Las Vegas there too.

Of canoes and ground throws

2012-01-15T11:59:00.010-05:00

I have lots of little jobs and projects that I've put to the side for one reason or another. Now that Christmas is well over, and there's lots of snow on the ground, it's a good time to tackle them. Those canoes are items from Sylvan that have been sitting on my shelf for years. They're nice little models, but they are actually waterline items and have flat bottoms. It turns out that my own canoe is for calm water and is also flat-bottomed, so no problem with me on that. These models come unpainted and need a little sanding to clean them up before painting. They're not super-detailed, but paint-up nice. I also installed two switch ground throws from Caboose Industries in the industrial section of the layout. Straight out of the package they are black plastic items, so I painted them with a little rust and primer red to match the yard crane that's in the same area.

The Oceanview Hotel: Basic Structure

2012-01-10T19:11:00.007-05:00

The Oceanview Hotel is a caricature of a boutique hotel – and a destination of the passenger service of the Lost Ocean Line - built using leftover window moldings from the Mr. Scott’s build. I had a large collection of extra window frames since I had drastically reduced the height and footprint of Mr. Scott’s to fit a particular location on the old layout. As well, the donor kit for Mr. Scott’s came with many extra parts, which further increased my window frame stash, and it seemed a shame just to let them gather dust.

After playing around with the frames it looked like a simple tower could be built just by gluing them into squares and stacking. The frames are a 9 scale feet high, so although the ceilings in the tower floors wouldn’t be generous, but they at least wouldn’t mimic floor 7 ½ in the Mertin Flemmer Building shown in Being John Malkovich!

The window frame connectors are built up from I-beam styrene pieces, and the floors are made from 0.040 inch styrene sheet stock. The central shaft for the elevator and utilities is also built up from 0.040 inch sheet, and is reinforced with glued-in square-section stock running the entire length of the piece.

The Oceanview Hotel would have lots of organizational and design problems if it were a real hotel, but I was pleasantly surprised by its look once I stacked up all the floors and stood back for a good stare. I’m moving on to painting and detailing. Also, if I can find a source of cheap LEDs I might try my hand at adding some lighting.

Ratio's OO/HO Yard Crane

2012-01-08T06:56:00.006-05:00

I started work on this kit during the Christmas holidays as a little diversion, and finished it a couple of evenings ago. Well, truth be told, I spray painted the parts sprue with red oxide colour primer in the backyard a few days before Christmas when the temperature was above zero since I can’t spray paint in the basement. It had about a week to dry before I started in on construction.

I saw this crane last summer in a layout article in an issue of Model Rail. I immediately was smitten and found a supplier here in Ontario to order one from. This crane wouldn’t find its way into Canadian railway practice regardless of era, but I liked it, so that was that.

All the plastic parts are contained on a single black sprue, and the kit also includes some thread for the lifting hook and a chain for the driving wheel. The parts are well molded and a pleasure to work with. My only comment is that some holes require a little enlargement for things to fit together without jamming or application of undue force. Overall, I’d rate this as a kit suitable for an intermediate-level model builder: it’s not a ‘shake-the-box’ item suitable for rank beginners, but likewise, it doesn’t require application of advanced methods like being familiar with photo-etch assembly techniques. However, I wouldn’t dissuade a beginner from giving it a try if they had already built a couple of kits; it would make for a good first step-up build.

Once it was assembled I applied some final washes of my favourite rust mix followed later with some washes of PolyScale grimy black to finish things off.

I glued the kit together so that I would have a fairly solid model when finished, but I suspect that a careful modeler could get those gears to mesh and turn properly with a little extra effort so that it could actually be operated – the moldings appear that precise.

James May's Great Train Race

2012-01-07T06:47:00.009-05:00

Over the Christmas holidays I was searching to see if there was a Top Gear segment reviewing the Honda CRZ and I had the happy accident of stumbling across the series James May's Toy Stories. Episode 6 was about an attempt in 2009 to build the world's largest model train setup stretching from Barnstaple to Bideford - a distance of 10 miles. Unfortunately, the attempt wasn't successful, but a second one, the subject of the The Great Train Race, was made in 2011 with better results.I've posted here the first segments of each show and you can find the others on YouTube. Both shows are good fun and worth a watch.

The fate of the old layout

2012-01-04T18:24:00.011-05:00

Over the Christmas holidays the old layout was moved out of the basement to make room for the new one. This blog got its name from the old layout: it was 6 feet by 5 feet in size, 30 square feet, hence, 30 Squares of Ontario. Maybe I should consider a name change.

I salvaged what I could from the old layout, then hauled it outside, wrapped it in plastic, and stashed it behind the shed for the winter. It’s too big to disassemble in the basement, so I’ll tackle that task outside in the backyard when the snow’s gone.

Debra commented that the remains seemed like some sort of strange abstract collage style painting. Well, if anyone wants to buy it as such, contact me and I’ll give you a price  Saves me the work of taking it apart 

The old layout’s rolling base I kept and modified to act as the stand for the new portable layout. The tilt-top action was eliminated and replaced by a fixed support frame. No big loss since the new layout is about half the width of the old one and just a little longer. This makes it easier to roll around the basement, and no tilting is necessary to get clearance when attempting to move around obstacles.

One good thing about the new layout transportation-wise is that only one person is needed to lift and carry it. I installed a lifting ring at the balance point along with handles before and after it. I attach a strap to the ring for lifting and carrying the board, and the handles are used to balance and tilt it – the strap takes the weight and the handles are for control. This seems to work ok, but the board could be built lighter through a more judicious use of materials!

Scenes to start the new year

2012-01-01T08:30:00.033-05:00

Happy New Year! However, the unhappy part is the train layout must now return to the basement, but before doing that I spent some time over the past week taking a few pictures.

I made use of some old watercolour paintings as backdrops for these pictures. I frequently used a painting behind several different buildings which is why it sometimes looks like mountains and trees are moving around :-)

[Getting ready to load a flat car at Bunn's Feed & Seed. The rail-camino has already been loaded.]

[Bunn's as seen from the truck delivery side.]

[Bunn's at "night" as seen from the roof of the Barrel & Marble Works]

[The Barrel & Marble Works from track-side.]

[Getting ready to load a tank car at Jones' Chemical Company.]

[Jones' Chemical Company from the truck delivery side.]

[The 4pm car has arrived at Scarboro Square Station.]

[This was an early trial of building placements. Grille's is now next to the Bookery.]

[The streetcar passes by The Bookery. There are a number of issues with this picture, but I liked the way the overall composition turned out and the colours, so I went ahead and used it for the blog's new title picture. Once I fix up the grass-mat a bit and do some other scenic improvements, I'm going to re-shoot this scene.]

[I shot this interior scene of The Bookery back in the spring, but I rather like it and have included here for no other reason than that.]

[Walking to the beach along the boardwalk from the Amtronic Ranch House.]

[My two favourite tank cars. Still looking pristine. I don't have the heart to try and weather them. Unfortunately the curves are too small on the layout to allow this to run.]

[Looking from just above Grille's roof-top patio towards the windmills.]

There's obviously lots of detailing and building still to go on this, but that makes for the fun.

Rusty Spike Ceremony

2011-12-18T06:46:00.006-05:00

Friday was the Rusty Spike ceremony. The tracks and locos were cleaned and readied for showing off. The layout board was hauled up from the basement to the living room. During the course of the evening many trains were run, stories told and drinks drunk. So, with that final event, this year's train season comes to a happy end, and this will be the last post for the year. Hopefully I'll be back next year for more. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Paving the streets

2011-12-10T16:31:00.004-05:00

I'm working on 'paving' the streets. That is, inserting styrene pieces in the track to simulate streetcar track in the streets. I'm using a combination of Walthers street inserts and styrene sheets cut to fit.

Years ago at the beach

2011-12-10T01:13:00.004-05:00

As I make progress on the layout, scenes start to come to mind.

President’s Choice Organics Caboose

2011-12-09T14:58:00.022-05:00

I liked this little P.C. Organics caboose, and wanted to run it on the layout, but I thought it needed a little sprucing up first. I should mention before getting into the details of the upgrade that this thing is more a toy than a model for serious model railroaders, so it doesn’t have the basic detail that is commonplace on today’s model equipment. Several years ago the Loblaws grocery chain sold HO-scale train sets around Christmastime. One year they featured a set that contained cars printed with logos and advertisements from their then new Organics line of products that featured, you guessed it, organic foods. Well, we eat lots of organic vegetables, so it seemed like a natural match and I bought one. Most of the cars aren’t anything special, and are rather bland, but I’ve always thought the design of this caboose was well done. And as luck would have it, while I was thinking about how to upgrade the caboose I had from the set, I saw another one for sale in the used items bin at my local hobby store for $2.99, which I immediately bought so I’d have a spare in case I messed up - which is my code for accidently broke ! - the one I had on hand.

Basically all I did was a little painting, changed out the horn-and-hook couplers, and added some window glazing. Not a lot. It didn’t change it into a highly detailed, prototypically accurate prize-winner, but it cranked up its look a bit to make it somewhat more believable, and a little more interesting to look at. These simple changes can improve many older resale items and cast-offs into more interesting models, but one can’t expect miracle transformations.

The first step is to pry it apart and separate all the pieces. Nothing is glued to together, so this step is fairly easy. Turns out that is the hardest part, and the rest is even easier (in no particular order):

Paint the inside of the body flat black. This reduces the translucency of the body giving it a little more solid appearance as well as obscuring lines of sight into the interior space.
Paint the doors, window frames, chimney, and end hand-rail assemblies flat aluminum.
Paint the body-mounted hand rails and rear platform safety chains flat yellow.
Paint the roof-top walkway flat aluminum, and wash it with thinned flat black to make the grid stand-out a bit.
Paint the underside of the floor assembly with a loose mixture of flat aluminum, flat black and brown.
Pop out the horn-and-hook couplers and replace them with Kadee knuckle couplers.
Put a thin plastic backing behind the molded holes – inside the body – to form the red end lights, paint the resulting cup bright red and then fill with Micro Krystal Klear to form the light.
So, I lied a little, there is one tricky part to this conversion. The fore and aft windows on the cupola don’t have ledges. Meaning, any glazing added won’t have the affect of sealing off the body to the elements. I had to cut some styrene pieces and glue them in to serve that purpose; however, I cheated and didn’t fit them so they’d be level and seamless with the top of the roof. I merely inset them. This seals things off, but in a prototype this would create an artificial tray where rain and snow would collect.
Cut and glue clear plastic glazing into the window openings.
Add black cardboard view blockers to the interior so viewers can’t see right through the body. This, along with the inside walls painted black and glazing added to the windows gives it a little more solid appearance.
After snapping all the parts back together, I applied some loose weathering washes to the body and undercarriage to make it look like it has been in service for awhile.

That’s it. It’s not a perfect model, but it’s interesting. To wrap up, I thought I’d end with this ode to vegetables by Brian Wilson from his Smile album.

Fair weather excursion car

2011-12-03T17:11:00.009-05:00

In the fall of last year I accompanied Debra to a conference in Orange County. While she conferred, I went to the beach and visited some model train stores. I think I visited a total of three and they were all good. I saw the Bachmann Excursion Car at one. It was one of those things that spoke to me even though I didn’t have a specific plan for it, so I went ahead and bought one - and they were on sale too, so all was good.

This conversion was dead simple and all it involved was cutting off the part I didn’t like all that much: the roof. Its molding seemed too simplistic, and it was so large it blocked the view of the interior as well as casting it in a perpetual gloom. It was easily severed with sprue cutters in a few satisfying seconds. My dremel and some sanding sticks made easy work of cleaning up the stubby remains on the main body.

After the surgery I did a little painting. Green on the passenger bench to match the green of the diesels in my fleet; a loose brown and black wash on the floor boards and externals; and some rusty red and black wash on the undercarriage. The undercarriage might get a little more weathering in the future depending how it looks in photos.

The only addition I made was an advertising sign-board on both sides of the body. It’s made from 0.012 inch styrene. The Highlander decal came from a 1/24 scale car kit, and the 4 is from a 1/72 scale model airplane kit.

All it needs are some paying passengers and a sunny day.

Miniatur Wunderland 2012 video

2011-12-02T14:49:00.004-05:00

A few weeks ago I posted what I thought was the most recent YouTube video of the Miniatur Wunderland, but I saw this official 2012 video this week. Quite spectacular.

Toronto's Bloor Street Viaduct circa ?

2011-11-30T19:17:00.007-05:00

I came across this old postcard in the family files. It's hard to imagine the Bloor Street Viaduct ever so empty, but it's a great image.

Building the beach

2011-11-28T19:17:00.037-05:00

I hummed-and-hawed a long time before getting started on the beachfront scene. I was very hesitant about cutting into the Styrofoam until one evening I simply picked up my saw and started hacking away. Although it turns out I cut a little too deep, it was easily fixed up. If you’ve got a similar task ahead of you, don’t hesitate, just get started, it’s better to make a start and deal with what happens than to wait for a magic moment when you think you can do it perfectly.

[I cut the styrofoam out in small chunks]

The beachfront shapes are formed through a trial-and-error approach of gluing small Styrofoam pieces into areas that need building up, grinding down the foam to approximate shapes with my Dremel tool, layering in wood filler and poly-fila, grinding that to shape once dry, and repeating the filling and grinding process – with a bit of sanding near the end - until the resulting shapes are to your liking.

[Here it is after all the rough cutting is finished]

[Beginning to shape the terrain with foam blocks and filler]

On the cleanliness side, I draped a plastic drop-cloth over the layout to prevent the dust and particles from messing up the other areas. I also wore a breathing mask during the grinding and sanding operations. And don’t be dumb like me and wear corduroy 

[In the midst of shaping]

As I mentioned, I used tubes of wood filler and poly-fila for the shaping media. Turns out I had some partially used tubes in the workshop left over from some other projects, so I decided to use them up on this project instead of letting them go to waste. It’s sort of an expensive way to shape the terrain since new tubes from the store aren’t cheap. If you’re starting completely from scratch, I’d probably use some sort of powdered plaster mix to keep costs low if you have a lot of terrain building to do. However, if you just have a small amount as I did with this beachfront, although buying filler in tubes isn’t very cost effective, the ready-made stuff doesn’t require mixing, and the squeeze tube makes it easy to apply – can’t beat the convenience. I should also note that before applying any of this stuff to the layout, I slathered a bit on some foam scraps and let it dry to make sure it bonded solidly to the foam and didn’t eat away at it or show any other adverse chemical reactions.

In the centre section I glopped on the poly-fila a little too thick. This causes a mesh of cracks – not deep ones though – to form on the surface as it sets up and hardens. This wasn’t a big problem because my plan was to surface the shapes with sand and the cracks would be concealed in the process. Also, it takes much longer for the poly-fila, or any filler for that matter, to harden when it’s put on too thick. To help you determine if it’s hard enough for the next stages of work, you need to both press it periodically to determine its hardness, and also ascertain if it’s cool to the touch. If it is, that means it’s still setting up and not ready. If it’s at room temperature it’s ok. I had to leave the thickest portions for 4 or 5 days (!) until I was satisfied it was ready, but I was probably being too cautious. So, if I had to do this again I’d be more patient and build the terrain up in relatively thin layers.

[This is the sand after sieving]

The terrain that will make up the sandy beach is painted with Tamiya Flat Earth, and areas that are to be covered with water are simply painted black.

[This is what got removed from the sand!]

To prepare for pouring the water, I had to add a fascia to the front of the scene in order to hold the water material in. This was made from pieces of 0.020 inch styrene glued to the layout’s Styrofoam substrate. It was also painted black.

The sand I used was some I collected at a beach last summer. After letting it dry out, it has to be sieved to remove over size debris. I bought a cheap kitchen sieve for this job – take it from me, in order to maintain harmony in the house, don’t use one from your kitchen  I’m always surprised by how much stuff gets separated out during the sieving process. The sieved sand isn’t strictly HO scale, but it has a passable look.

[After shaping and painting, but before applying the sand]

Bonding the sand to the terrain was a two step process. The first part simply involved painting the terrain with a thin, even coat of white glue and pouring the sieved sand onto it. Don’t worry about getting the sand shaped properly. Just make sure that everything is covered. When it’s all in place, tamp it down lightly with your fingers. That’s it. Let it dry for a day.

The next day I came back and used an old paint brush to sweep the excess sand into the ocean area and then scoop it into my stock bag so as not to let much of it go to waste. Once I’d scooped up as much as I could, I vacuumed up all the remaining loose sand from the terrain, ocean bed, and anywhere else it had gotten into. It didn’t look too bad after step 1. And, actually, you could stop here if you want to, but the next step adds some tones and helps seal the surface.

[Applying the first sand covering]

The second step is basically just sprinkling some loose sand, along with a little ground dark green scenic foam, and gluing it in place with some thinned white glue. The glue mixture is just a 50 / 50 mix of white glue and water with a few drops of 70% isopropyl alcohol (IPA) added. The IPA is used to partially reduce the surface tension of the water in order to help make it flow better. Without the IPA, when you drop the glue / water mix on the terrain it will clump up into balls and may or may not eventually soak into the terrain. So, lightly sprinkle the beach with sand and ground foam to get the look you’re after, use an eye-dropper to carefully wet a section of the surface with some IPA straight from the bottle (this further helps the water / glue mix soak deep into the scenic material by breaking down the surface tension of the water), and then, using another eye-dropper, apply the water/glue mix. Don’t worry if you get a few little white puddles here and there –it’ll eventually soak into the terrain. If you get big puddles, I normally use a little bit of paper towel soak up the excess. Don’t scrub the surface with the paper towel, just gently touch the surface with it and let its absorbency do the work for you – this way you minimize disturbances to the surface material. Work your way across the beach until all the loose material is glued down. I normally leave it for a day to dry, but you may find it dried after just a few hours depending on the local humidity.

[The first sand application is drying]

Well, that’s it for beach building. I’m moving on to pouring the ocean, but for now, I’m going to take a toast break:

Victoria Park Streetcar Turn-around

2011-11-27T07:24:00.006-05:00

Last weekend Debra and I met her friend and colleague mc for breakfast on Sunday. The directions mc gave me to find the cafe were simply "it's on Queen Street East near the Victoria Park streetcar turn-around". And it was.

A replacement for the lost E.L.Moore truck

2011-11-26T16:11:00.009-05:00

Awhile back I did a kitbash of a VW microbus in order to build a truck similar to the one frequently seen in E. L. Moore building construction articles in the '70s. And later that same year I lost it while taking some photos outside. I've been getting ready to build a replacement, but last weekend I stumbled across this one at George's. It's a VW T2 Pick-up from Brekina Automodelle in Germany, and it's a great little model. It needs a little weathering here-and-there, but it's just the replacement I've been looking for.

Where It's At

2011-11-23T18:28:00.005-05:00

I realized I haven't posted in a while. It's been a crazy few weeks. I haven't gotten as much done as I'd hoped, but I have started on modelling the beachfront scene - I plan to have a detailed post on that later. I don't think the layout will be completed by Christmas, but trains will be running, the beachfront should be done, and maybe the major parts of the urban portion, as well as the rural, Moorian area, should at least be sketched out by then.

Card stock scribing techniques

2011-11-12T20:53:00.009-05:00

I came across this video awhile back when I found some videos about the Madder Valley Railway and the Pendon Museum. This video describes how Pendon model builders simulate brick using a scribed card technique. It strikes me as quite labourious, but the results appear to be well worth the effort. When I first saw this video it reminded me of the scribed siding on card technique John Allen used to construct his famous engine house back in 1948. I've been studying his article and I've got this feeling that I'd like to try and build that engine house using the same techniques he used. Sounds like a good project for the deep winter months ahead.

Last train to Stoufville

2011-11-11T04:53:00.005-05:00

This was inspired by last summer's Matchbox Jaguar Mk 10 photo, but with apologizes to the Monkees.

Skyline

2011-11-10T19:41:00.009-05:00

That painting teacher who was concerned about ‘two-ness’ also taught us that interesting paintings should incorporate different sorts of contrasts: colour, shape, shadowing, texture and so on. One way to make these things more visible while the painting is being painted is to look at it turned upside-down or sideways. This can make bland passages stand out because the eye isn’t as fixated on decoding what it thinks is the content. Well, I can’t really turn the layout upside-down - other than in a picture - but it’s pretty clear that its skyline is more-or-less dead level; hence, without much height contrast it’s a bit boring. I’ve got a small 6-storey high-rise under construction on my workbench, but I’m embarrassed to say it’s been there in a semi-built state for quite a long time. Regardless, I think I need to consider height contrasts a bit more to liven things up. Also, I want to make sure that some scenes partially obscure or hide the trains at times while they’re in motion for a little “now-you-see-‘em-now-you-don’t” contrast. I think many layouts achieve contrasts in height and visibility through mountains, bridges and tunnels. Since my layout is flat, I need to use some other means.

Scenes develop

2011-11-06T19:56:00.002-05:00

Progress is slow, but steady. Most of the recent work isn’t very photogenic: figuring out DCC and getting the various locos to operate, adding street overlays, adding a program track and fixing the ‘two-ness’ of the track plan, beginning to add the wild grass areas, and many other odds-ands-ends associated with just building. Things are also slow because I don’t have a master plan for the scenery and operations. I spend a lot of time just looking at things and trying out ideas. Fun, but slow.

The Saga of the Magic Time Watch

2011-11-04T06:33:00.005-04:00

The paragraph that accompanies this excellent video at YouTube says that it was created by Element X Creative as the sponsor reel for The Association of Independent Commercial Producers Southwest 2011 show. While you're watching this I'm going out for Cracker Jack. And while I'm gone keep a look out for the DeLorean time machine.

The teahouse and the saloon

2011-11-03T05:51:00.006-04:00

I came across this video while browsing at Micro / Small Layouts. In some ways it's an almost perfect layout. The second video was one I found browsing YouTube recommendations associated with the first video - I rather like the railcar.

Music inspired by the Gorre & Daphetid

2011-11-02T17:49:00.004-04:00

I recently stumbled across this musical composition by Joseph Sowa inspired by John Allen's Gorre & Daphetid model railroad.

Three palms and four cars

2011-11-01T18:46:00.009-04:00

[No, palm trees can’t grow outside in Ontario – not unless they were some sort of genetic hybrid that lets them survive a January -40C night! But I thought Grilles should have palm trees, so in they went. The parking lot planters are leftover tire halves from the Gran Turismo project – they seemed appropriate for a converted gas station. Also, while searching through my stash of model tires and wheels I came across some broken Hot Wheels wheels which I think should be useful in restoring some of the broken specimens I was taking pictures of last summer.]

I added a few details to Grilles as preparation for siting it on the new layout. First though the parking lot was cut back from its odd shape to a square so that it fit properly in its new location. The B/A sign is a reference to Grilles’ gas station roots (my father worked at B/A for many years so it’s also got nostalgic value to me). A Walther’s telephone booth was added to the parking lot in case Clarke Kent finds himself in town on vacation. The cars are all fairly modern and were all given license plates and a little black wash for highlighting details before being rubber cemented into place. When placed on the layout, the upper deck dining area will have a great view of the ocean, and being right next to a street car station and book store, this place should be a big money maker 

New beginnings

2011-10-31T18:25:00.009-04:00

This building has been sitting on my workbench for quite awhile. I was thinking of using it as a photo prop while I was taking the Hot Wheels pictures last summer – but the idea drifted away and it continued to sit there. However, it did kick-off some meandering thoughts about finishing it. And after awhile, looking for a little lightweight diversion, I started to pick at it and do a little here and a little there. Finally it started to come together into something interesting.

Before painting the building I washed it thoroughly with soap and water. Debra saw it drying by the kitchen sink and wondered why a mouse had nibbled on the walls. Well, it does kinda look like some hungry rodent mistook it for stale cheese!

Once dry, the actual painting I did on this building is much simpler than that shown on the box – I had to take into account my limited skills and patience with this project. I first painted all the walls with hull red, the doors green, and the roof a loose mixture of light and dark gray. Once the walls were dry I glopped on white paint and then wiped off most of it before it dried in order to just fill the mortar lines. Once they had dried, I dry brushed a little brown and rust on the bricks to provide a little colour variation. Then things got a little ragged. I proceeded to put on successive layers of loose mixtures of browns, grays and black to add weathering and depth. I stopped when I got to a point that seemed ok to me.

After all that the roof still didn’t look quite right to me. Some toy solar panels I had on the shelf above the work bench caught my eye and seemed to fit well on the non-bombed out section of roof tiles, so on they went. The windmill came in the same set as the solar panels and seemed to be a fit for the addition. I then rummaged through my stash of left-over detail items to see if anything else might fit this scene. I added a ladder to get up on the roof to maintain the solar panels and windmill. And inside I added an Airstream trailer for the home of the new resident. The walls and roof of the brick building act as something of a pre-buffer against the elements.

Even though it isn’t HO-scale it doesn’t look out-of-place on the new layout. I’m trying out different locations amongst the E. L. Moore buildings and it seems to fit in just fine.

Miniatur Wunderland

2011-10-30T07:03:00.008-04:00

A few weeks ago Debra went to Munich on a business trip. Among other things it got us to talking again about visiting the Miniatur Wunderland attraction in Hamburg. It's another place on our wish list of places to visit one day, but in the meantime the promotional video makes for a good 5 minute trip. I first heard about the Wunderland in the the spring from a friend who forwarded me a link to a video of its model of an international airport. It's incredible and I figured I wouldn't be doing the Wunderland justice without showing it.

Boston & Maine on Regional Contact

2011-10-29T01:00:00.013-04:00

After finding videos of the Madder Valley Railway and the Pendon Museum on YouTube I dug around to see what else I might find there. As luck may have it, I found these two videos of the Ottawa tv show Regional Contact's profile of Mike Hamer's Boston & Maine model railroad. I had the opportunity to meet Mike around a year-and-a-half ago, and he generously gave me an extensive tour of his layout and workshop. It's an excellent layout, and this show just gives a taste of the whole operation.

Will it go round in circles?

2011-10-28T18:26:00.004-04:00

Will it go round in circles? Yeap, it will – and on a modified dog-bone track to boot . Ok. Well. This is the first song that jumped out of my radio early Monday morning as soon as I started my car. A great way to begin the work week. An even better way to end it.

Puzzle city

2011-10-26T17:48:00.006-04:00

I decided to build the city section like a jigsaw puzzle. There are two types of pieces: 1) buildings on bases that aren’t glued to the board; and 2) landscape pieces that are glued down and butt against the building bases to hold them in place. For transport, the buildings can be removed so they don’t get damaged. The landscape pieces are held in place with rubber cement so that if I want to change the arrangement I can peel them from the board fairly easily. On the other hand, all the plastic track inserts used to make the snap track look like it’s embedded in concrete are superglued in place after some sanding and fitting to make sure they don’t interfere with the operation of rolling stock.

After looking at the evolving urban area on the left, and the Moore-ian country area on the right, I realized the train board was developing what one of my old painting instructors called ‘a two-ness’. This was a term she applied to paintings that had two objects front and centre without any connection to each other or other visual elements– it makes the painting look un-unified. Since I also need a program track for the DCC system, I plan on running a track from the right-side industrial area into the centre, ending close to the urban area. Along with the ocean front, scene transitions, and some careful placing of the track inserts in the straight section of the main loop, the passing siding and the new central straight, I think this additional track section will help join things up into a unified whole. This new track section will also create a switching problem which may add to operational interest: it’ll take two short locos to move cars into the central straight section. Certainly not prototypical, but it should add to the game play aspect.

[I’m cannibalizing the old layout for parts. I plan to salvage as many as possible and then disassemble the train board. I’m going to modify its wheeled stand a little so it can be used as a stand for the new layout when it’s in the basement since it won’t be permanently living upstairs. It’s sad to see the old layout go, but I’m liking the way the new one is developing. This blog was named because the old layout measures 6 x 5 feet and had 30 square feet of train space for what I then imagined was going to be a layout situated in Ontario – well, at least have many visible characteristics I associate with Ontario. Hence, the ’30 Squares of Ontario’ name for this blog. Maybe I’ll need to rename it. Maybe I’ll just keep it as a relic.]

Cloud Blimps

2011-10-25T18:31:00.014-04:00

{Passing Cloud sourced from Treehugger.com}

Any article that touches on both trains and airships is sure to get my attention. I stumbled across this one last week at TreeHugger.com. It was designed by Tiago Barros as an entry for the "Life at the Speed of Rail" competition. One might question the practicality of a vehicle that floats along wherever the wind blows it with all its passengers sitting on top, but I admire the out-of-the-box thinking.

Street car track beginnings

2011-10-22T20:22:00.021-04:00

I've started to place some buildings and begin the actual work of railroad building. I began with the urban area and simply used the spur on the left side as the place to begin. I did a lot of experimenting with different configurations, and eventually settled on that shown in the photos.

The street insets in the track are plastic items from Walthers. I bought them sometime ago and used a few to build the urban area surrounding the old Scarboro Square. I salvaged what I could from the old layout and supplemented with the leftovers I had on hand.

I made a few modifications to some building bases in order to get things compactly placed. I cut the parking lot off Scarboro Square Station, and Grille's base was squared up. I wanted all the building bases to be level with the street insets in the track. This meant using 0.080 inch styrene to boost all the bases. This gives a nice level and contiguous surface.

This work is quite interesting, but is progressing slowly since I'm spending a lot of time adding details as I go and thinking and playing with ideas for this and the other parts of the layout.

(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love And Understanding

2011-10-21T19:47:00.005-04:00

Early one morning on the drive to work this week I heard the Elvis Costello version of (What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love And Understanding on the radio. I hadn’t heard it in a very long time, and it sounded as great as always.

For some reason, when it finished, Train in Vain by The Clash popped into my mind. A browse through YouTube found what looks like this bootlegged video:

Further browsing dug up the later cover version by Annie Lennox. It’s on her Medusa album and I’d highly recommend it. It’s all covers, but I never found myself saying the originals were done better.

Ok, I admit the link to trains is tenuous, but ending the week with a little good music is hard to knock.

The part that got away

2011-10-20T16:04:00.009-04:00

Two years ago I had to replace my old, weather-beaten pumphouse – well, pumphouse is a rather regal term for what amounts to a big box that shelters a pump from the elements. After lots of humming and hawing and cogitating about what to replace it with, I finally settled on simply buying a small RubberMaid outdoor storage shed kit, cutting out the floor, and popping the whole thing, kit-and-kaboodle, over top of the pump on the foundation where the previous pumphouse stood (and if my wife is reading this, it should be noted that she did play a big role in figuring out which of the many shed kits that are on the market to buy when I couldn’t make up my mind  ). It worked like a charm and has been through two winters so far. It still looks and works as good as new.

And after those two winters I still had the section of floor I cut out stashed in my junk pile.

Well, this last summer I finally realized that my junk pile was going on forty years old, and was starting to make our place look like a candidate for an episode of Hoarders! I separated out some useable stuff, and carted the rest off to the junk-yard (10 trips and 3 Saturday mornings in all with our poor cars stuffed to the gills with ratty old junk).

My regret is that I took the floor section on one of those fateful trips and I have it no more.

Even though I was hauling junk to the dump I was also thinking about how to build the base for the layout. That scrap floor section was speaking to me. It was light. It was rigid. It had lots of interstitial spaces for plumbing wires through. It was plastic. All good things. But it wasn’t completely flat – if it was a piece of wood for sale in a store, I would have put it back on the shelf and selected another. In this case it went to the dump. My mistake. I now think I could have reworked it a bit to make it a little flatter, and maybe useable.

I obviously used a more traditional approach to building the layout base. It’s got the flatness and rigidity I want, but it weighs more than I’d like. Weighs way more. In retrospect, I’d try an experiment where the upper surface of the train board would still be made of 2-inch thick high density construction foam board, but the lower box frame used for stiffening and wiring infrastructure would be something like the floor scrap from the pumphouse.

Layout construction scrapbook 2

2011-10-19T16:47:00.008-04:00

{The basic box frame has a centre beam - as shown in the photo- and a shorter one perpendicular to it that is shown in some later photos. Again, the frame isn't warped as it appears in the photo. It's a distortion of the lens.}

{On the bottom I attached a piece of 1/2 inch particle board to improve rigidity and help keep the frame straight and true. However, it increases the weight of the board a lot. In a later post I plan to give a weight breakdown of the whole board, and show some areas where improvements can be made in future builds - live and learn :-) }

{I attached the hardboard substrate to the pine frame with 3/4 inch screws. Also, a number of holes were drilled into the frame for snaking wires through.}

{Almost all the substrate boards are attached.}

Layout construction scrapbook

2011-10-18T18:38:00.012-04:00

{I was totally old-school in layout planning. No fancy CAD programs, just laying out track on the back patio trying out ideas that seemed good.}

A few pictures from the construction of the layout board.

{After a while my back kept suggesting that I should work on the layout plans on the deck where I wouldn't have to bend over as much :-) I also worked on fixing the deck this past summer and it was partially finished when I took this picture.}

{That's the main frame leaning against the wall. It's made from 1x3 pine - as straight as I could find at the local home reno store.}

{The substrate is made from 1/4 inch hardboard. I used 4, 2x4 foot pieces mainly because they would fit in my car and a whole 4x8 sheet wouldn't.}

{This is an initial test fit of the frame and substrate pieces to make sure things were shaping up properly. The frame doesn't actually have a weird warp in it, my garage floor is far from level!}

Lost Ocean Line?

2011-10-12T17:42:00.004-04:00

I’m trying to shield this little project from creeping ‘job-ism’ with milestones and deadlines and such, so I’ve been mellowing out a bit on it and have instead been thinking about a name for the railroad. In the spirit of names like Gorre & Daphetid, and Enskale & Hoentee, my current candidate is Lost Ocean Line, or LOL for short. Ok. I’ll meditate on that for awhile :-)

Painted, tracked and powered

2011-10-10T06:31:00.008-04:00

[I worked on these tasks in the backyard since the weather was good. This picture shows the track just before I set to gluing it down. The board itself was spray painted with a variety of Krylon Latex colours. The track is mainly Atlas. The circular arc switch is a Peco item that was on sale at the local hobby store a few months back - I'm fascinated with curved switches so I bought it and figured I'd work it in somehow.]

As the title says, I finished painting the board (mainly to get rid of the pink foam colour), glued down the track, and installed the DCC system. The next task is cleaning up the workshop and getting ready for the next steps.

[This picture was taken just after taking a couple of laps of a test run of the DCC system. I bought a simple MRC Prodigy Express system. Works well.]

The Pendon Museum via YouTube

2011-10-08T05:31:00.007-04:00

While I was in the process of putting together yesterday's post about the Madder Valley RR, I came across these other two excellent videos of the model railways at the Pendon Museum - the home of the Madder Valley RR - in England. The first has a little more footage of the Madder Valley along with a highly enjoyable B&W film shot by the narrator in the '60s(?). It also goes into other layouts at the museum, but that mainly is the focus of part 2. The layouts of Pendon are odes to English village life in the 1930s. There's great stuff here and hopefully one day I'll have the opportunity to see them in person.

A lesson from the Madder Valley RR?

2011-10-07T06:15:00.011-04:00

I struggled a bit figuring out where to place the Madder Valley in the Museum / Gallery / Studio diagram. I think it goes in the Museum / Gallery overlap, but since it is after all now on display in a museum (and is a model of railroad operation), I weaselled out and placed it right on the Museum / Gallery boundary in the museum side. One thing that I think identifies this landmark layout as Gallery is, as the narrator points out, for Mr. Ahern doing what he wanted over-rode conventional consistency - for example, running locomotives he liked if they fit on the track and not worrying if they were a different scale.

And all this Venn diagram stuff aside, this is a fun video, especially the scenes going down the track taken from the front of the train.

Museum and gallery and studio

2011-10-06T19:31:00.012-04:00

My inner nerd likes to classify things, so I made this Venn diagram, in the style of those in Indexed, to show where my thinking is on this whole Museum and Gallery thing. I introduced a new subset, Studio, for objects that have some resemblance to model railroads, but aren’t, and don’t feature actual running trains. I think members of the Studio subset are mainly art objects. I put the Brugel-Bosch Bus in this group. It’s clearly art. It has tracks and trains. But they don’t operate. It’s not hard to imagine that they could be made operational, but that would change the nature of the entire piece.

I’ve only indicated placement of model railroads that I’ve touched on in this blog, so it’s in no way complete, and probably very debatable anyway 

Classification schemes are ultimately a losing game, and thinking too much about them usually degenerates into arguments about what goes where; what’s in and what’s out; categories to include and exclude. The list of problems is endless. All schemes have to be worn lightly to get the most out of them, and if not, discarded.

18 Oct update: I noticed today that the Boston & Maine arrow doesn't reach into the Museum area, which it should, so to reiterate, the Boston & Maine should be a part of Museum.

Mobile garden rail car

2011-10-05T18:11:00.012-04:00

I recently came across this - what looks like - a transit rail car chopped down to a garden on a flat car designed by Joe Baldwin at treehugger. There's lots of negative comments about whether or not it's eco-friendly and such, but, either way, it's an interesting rail car.

Channeling the spirit of the The Enskale & Hoentee RR

2011-10-04T19:56:00.012-04:00

[Ok, I got back to work and trimmed the foam back to the perimeter of the hardboard substrate and smoothed its edges with sanding blocks. Although it can be carried by one person, it takes two to safely turn it over. Thankfully Debra didn't mind helping me. Next step for the weekend is painting, laying the track, and getting the DCC installed.]

I knew that E. L. Moore had written an article (maybe even articles) on how to build an entire - but small - model railroad, and since I’m doing the same thing I tried to find out what he did. One thing I found out was that Mr. Moore published a three-part model railroad construction article in Railroad Model Craftsman called The Enskale & Hoentee RR, with the first part appearing in the October ’68 issue. Basically, the series explained how to build a small – 30 inch x 30 inch – N-scale railroad running through mountain scenery. Well, it wasn’t purely N-scale, it could also run HOn21/2 equipment (which uses N-scale track), and was populated with TT-scale buildings as well as N-scale ones, hence the railroad’s name. Also, in true Moore-ian fashion the cost to build it was low – Mr. Moore stated it could be built for around $50 in 1968, which is about equivalent to $325 today – and only required 2 ‘unhurried’ months to construct.

That first article in October started off with a little statement from Mr. Moore about his reasons for building this charming little railroad:

And on my pike, as though a mixture of N, TT and HOn21/2 wasn’t enough, we have a horse and wagon era into which contemporary rolling stock intrudes: and had that little beauty, Rapido’s old time gaily painted locomotive been available at the moment I bought my motive power, you might have seen a further scrambling of time. You can put me down as an opportunist rather than a purist.

As it stands. mine is purely a subsidized railroad, makes no pretence of industries nor is it scouting for any. Tourists, maybe, since it is little more than a scenic park railroad. True, there is an outside curve on the southwest corner where a mine structure could rear its ugly head and be placed extending over the track - could, but never will. For when I dropped my tools and picked up my camera I was through! No matter what writers and editors say about a railroad never being completed, this one is!

You might wonder why I built such a small pike in the first place, when the bigger they come the harder you fall for them. And frankly it was because I was suddenly smitten by this petite little N scale, and then too I wanted to see if my old love affair with HO might be rekindled to include N in a bigamous union. And too, I wanted to try my hand at scenery again; and being both too old and too lazy to put forth any great amount of effort, I confined myself to as small a pike as I thought practical.

This, of course, is strictly a pike for beginners or others who do not take their railroading too seriously; who are content just to own and run a couple of engines and a handful of cars, but still want something at which they can point with pride. Anyone can build this little pike, but if scenery happens to be your dish it can be made quite spectacular for so small a layout. If it doesn’t disillusion you too much, look at it this way. Just how much railroading would you expect from a space 400’ x 400’, or an area scarcely larger than a city block, and with less than half a mile of track? For, as I said, it is little more than a scenic park railroad. But somehow, as you look at it and the little train comes ‘round the mountain you sorta forget that aspect and your imagination takes over.

I can’t imagine an article like this being published today in the mainstream model railroading press, although it sort of fits with today’s micro-layout movement. I admire its good-natured stance and forthrightness in building something that seemed interesting to the author even though it was rather unconventional. Now, the practical side of me thinks RMC may have commissioned Mr. Moore to write an article on how to build a modest model railroad that a reader in October could have more-or-less ready by Christmas (which is my goal too). He could have easily chosen to build something in a single scale on a rectangular piece of plywood as is the convention, so they may have been rather surprised with the result. Although some might not classify the The Enskale & Hoentee RR as a model railroad – and even Mr. Moore seems to back away from that saying it’s not for ‘serious’ model railroaders - but I’d simply say that it’s in the Gallery school of thought rather than Museum.

Starting to trim the foam top

2011-10-02T18:47:00.005-04:00

I'm in the process of trimming the foam-board top to its final shape. I did some work last week, but we were away on the weekend, so no progress beyond that was made. Yikes! I gotta put the pedal-to-the-metal. Only 2 months left and I want to have something decent built up by the Christmas holidays.

Highly Unusual Trains

2011-09-29T19:52:00.004-04:00

Ok. I figured out how to do embedded YouTube video. This is the full promo for last night's episode of Top Gear on BBC Canada. Even more train goodness.

Jag on Rails

2011-09-29T05:25:00.008-04:00

Well, if it's possible to put an El Camino on rails, this Jaguar XJS makes perfect sense - a great segment of Top Gear I saw on BBC Canada last night.

Update 30 Sept: Since I figured out how to do embedded video yesterday I went ahead and added one here.

Marples saw

2011-09-28T19:48:00.008-04:00

These days when I’m buying stuff I try and make a point of finding what I’m looking for from Canadian or US manufacturers first, and if I can’t find anything suitable, then I’ll buy from other sources. So, it was quite an education when I went looking for a small handsaw with a thin, flexible blade that I could use to cut the buildings in Scarborough Square from their Plexiglas base.

{An aside: I stupidly thought when attaching the various buildings to Scarborough Square that I’d never again need to remove them, so I attached them with dots of superglue. Now that I’m building a new layout, I want the buildings, but have no need for the Square. I had read that acetone was a superglue solvent, but I was concerned that it might also eat away at the styrene used for the building bases. I figured if I had a saw with a very thin blade I could just cut the building bases free. It turned out to be true, and the bases survived virtually undamaged.}

The lowest price saws of this type were manufactured in China by major brand names. There was a very beautiful saw I came across at Lee Valley Tools that was made in Japan, but the price was a bit high for me, and I thought I’d damage it since it wasn’t really meant to saw through plastic. The Marples saw shown in the picture seemed to fit the bill: made in the US and reasonably priced at around $13 or $14.

It’s an excellent saw and I highly recommend it. I had no problem cutting the buildings free from the Plexiglas base (its very thin, sharp blade made this relatively easy), it was then used to cut the curved perimeter support pieces on the new layout board (it was quite impressive at this job as the blade had enough flex to not bind during cutting and overall it had that ‘knife going through butter’ feel), and has been used to cut the layout board’s foam upper surface (an admittedly easy task for any saw). It turns out from my unscientific searching for a saw made in North America it was the only one I found that was made here, so I’m glad it turned out to be a good buy.

Table for the new train board

2011-09-27T19:35:00.009-04:00

I was talking on the phone to vp last night about this and that. He mentioned that he saw some of the photos of the new layout and thought the workmate shown supporting the board in yesterday's post were its legs. No. Debra bought a nice little mid-50's end table at a thrift store a few months ago, and its been sitting in the basement ever since. It will be the stand when the layout's on display upstairs. Otherwise it'll be on shelf supports in the basement.

That little table looks like its had some rough handling from its previous owners. Its had paint dripped on it, someone signed their name on the top, there's a few gashes, and it's all loose and wobbly. In a few weeks I plan to fix it up a bit and hopefully return it to some of its former glory.

Foam top added

2011-09-26T20:12:00.010-04:00

[I used some interlocking paving stones for applying pressure while the glue was drying. I miscalculated on the number of clamps I needed for clamping down the foam at the perimeter - I could have used half-a-dozen more.]

Over the weekend I glued a sheet of 2-inch thick high density foam to the top of the train board. Last week I finished stiffening the 1/4-inch hardboard substrate with 1x3 pine perimeter pieces in preparation for attaching the foam. Although the hardboard is rather thin, once the perimeter pieces are added, the whole surface loses its flexibility. The glued foam / hardboard structure is very solid and doesn't exhibit any flex. Once the board is ready for track installation I'll post more photos showing more construction details. The board is back in the basement awaiting final trimming of the foam to the hardboard perimeter. From there it's painting and then track installation.

[This view shows some of the perimeter supports on the straight side of the board. They had to be installed at a higher density on the curved edge.]

Relentless change

2011-09-18T19:10:00.008-04:00

{The Hotel Kaladar two years ago}

We were away this weekend and I didn't get any work done on the new layout. But, we did drive by the closed down Hotel Kaladar that I mentioned awhile ago as being a candidate for an E. L. Moore-esque building project. Much to my surprise the old hotel had been converted to a 'chip truck'. All the windows had been boarded over. The siding was repainted in Harley-Davidson logo style colours and a chip stand had been set-up out front.

{The Hotel Kaladar today}

The layout starts to take shape

2011-09-12T19:22:00.007-04:00

{The layout is 7'4" long and the maximum width is about 38"}

The basic frame and table-top for the new layout are starting to take shape. I'll post some more detailed pictures once it's further along. I was fretting over getting it flat and level and square, so it took a long time to even get construction this far.

Oceanside

2011-09-05T20:06:00.017-04:00

As summers go, this has been a hectic one. I had planned to build the base for the new layout over a couple of days in July – no such luck. I’m starting to get back in the groove and make some progress since I’d like to have something decent ready by the Christmas season. The new layout’s design isn’t completely random :-) and I thought I’d list some factors that are going into it.

When I finally received my copy of the Con-Car TTC Air Electric PCC streetcar from George’s in the spring I realized it would be good to have a continuous loop on the layout for just letting it run. This kicked off a long think about my layout, and in the process I decided it needed to be scraped and a new one built that better reflected my interests. Some items that might be incorporated (in no particular order):

1. Continuous loop

2. Flat, lots of real estate for buildings

3. Buildings can be swapped in and out and re-arranged and don’t have to be ‘realistically’ arranged.

4. Portable, easy to carry, fits in my econo-box car

5. Easy to take upstairs from the basement for showing off at Christmas and such

6. Beachfront

{I finally picked up a copy of this Eric Clapton classic this summer. I was too young to appreciate it when the lp was first released, but since I've been hearing a lot about it lately, I thought I'd finally buy a copy. It's good. Mr. Clapton's hit I Shot the Sheriff is on this disc. To me it sounds like it's the most polished piece on the album - so polished that the other songs, although good, seem almost a little rough around the edges.}

7. Ocean

8. Streetcar to the beach

9. Offers a little switching, but not overly operational in a classical sense

10. Roadless

11. The smaller, the better, but not too small.

12. Urban idealization

13. Linear

14. Innocuous track

15. Lights and lighting and LEDs

16. Surfboard sized

17. Pedestrian

18. Lightweight

19. No corners

20. Retro-future, modern, re-purposed stuff

21. Eye-level views

22. DCC

23. Landscape view

24. Sydney-by-the-sea

25. Blue, green, sunny, open

26. Percherons

27. People, figures, easy living

{A couple of years ago one of our friends stayed with us one weekend. He was a surfer who, although based in Ontario, had travelled to a few famous surf spots around the world. As a parting gift he gave me a stack of old surfing magazines! They're odd and good at the same time.}

28. Streetcars, small diesels, trolleys, railcars and any other small rolling stock

29. Clean construction

{I've been thumbing through my collection of old Model Railroader magazines. This one is the March 1985 issue. I love the cover photo - uncluttered and straightforward. The article the photo refers to - how to make prairie grass with fake fur - is excellent too. There's a photo on page 65 where the author shows a Boeing LRV model on the WWII (?) era layout and the editors give it something of a thumbs down for being unprototypical. But it still looks good and I think that is an important key.}

As I mentioned at the top, the biggest problem with my current layout is that it doesn’t have a continuous loop anywhere for just letting things run. After I had ran a few switching problems I was bored, but didn’t want to admit it. But that was probably because I was busy doing what I liked to do: build buildings. Scenes too. I had a lot of fun building the Bookery, and that experience also factored into the new layout. I wanted a display space that could be taken wherever I wanted and not confined to the basement. There’s probably many Bookerys in my future and I wanted some place where it was easy to show them off.

I'm finally back working in the base and hopefully will have some pictures posted soon.

Planning the new layout

2011-06-19T07:18:00.018-04:00

[The plan so far: about 6.5 feet long; far loop has a 30 inch diameter and the near loop is a compound curve with a 36 inch diameter.]

I've started to plan a new, portable layout to better match my interests. It'll replace my current setup. I've got a box of old track and thought I'd use it to try out some ideas on the back porch since it has a large flat surface and the weather is good.

[Trying out some different curves for the squeezed in middle section - I'm in the middle of replacing those rotten deck boards!]

[There'll be a passing track on the back so some switching can happen independently of the main loop.]

In a future post I'll go into some of the drivers for this new design - and have the deck all fixed up too!

Uncle Charley’s Bookery: Done

2011-06-07T19:26:00.021-04:00

Last weekend I finished reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. I finished Louis L’Amour’s The Daybreakers. I finished cutting the lawn. Finished getting the plumbing to work. And I finished The Bookery!

This last phase of construction was focused on building the courtyard and associated exterior detailing.

The base is cut from a sheet of 0.080 inch styrene that was sized so that it fit snuggly into the centre of Scarboro Square. This meant that the courtyard was considerably larger than the one shown in Mr. Moore’s article. He never specifies its exact dimensions, but it looks to be about the same square footage as the Bookery. Mine is around 2 or 3 times bigger.

The sidewalk and concrete areas on the base were scored with simulated expansion joints and then painted with a loose mixture of Polyscale concrete, gray and flat black. The courtyard lawn is simply a piece of Woodland Scenics grass mat cut to fit the area and glued down with superglue.

The courtyard’s perimeter wall stands 4 feet tall and is built up from pieces of 0.040 inch styrene covered with the same brick-paper used to cover the Bookery’s walls. I placed the outhouse in the far back corner because, well, it’s an outhouse, and it didn’t seem right to place it beside the public sidewalk  I also changed its roof to a slant-style to make it a little more outhousey.

One thing I should note is that I mixed a thin wash of Polyscale concrete, a little gray, and a dab of flat black paint to tone down the brick paper a bit. Be careful if you do this so as not to obscure the mortar lines and lose the fine brick detailing. Keep a tissue at the ready to quickly soak up any excess paint. The wash also helps to hide the white edges of the brick paper wherever they might standout.

I built a second ‘roof’ for the Bookery: a simple piece of clear plastic to allow the interior to be viewable, but help keep dust out. The ‘real’ roof –made from a piece of 0.060 inch styrene with a piece of fine sand-paper bonded to the outer surface – can simply be placed on top of the clear roof when a more realistic look is desired. The clear roof wasn’t glued in place so that the interior can still be accessed if necessary.

I figured the courtyard needed a few trees, and I decided to use some sold by Bachmann in their Scene Scapes line. I had used some of these for the Deroalow grounds, and was happy with them; however, I was surprised by the branch structure on these ones I bought last fall. I should have looked closer at them in the store because when I took them out of the box I was surprised by the flat, ribbon-like branches. The trunks are ok, as are the fine branches that connect to the ‘leaves’, but the internal branches are simply twisted, ribbons of metal. If you don’t look too closely, the foliage helps obscure them, but, overall, they detract from an otherwise nice product. Some judicious placing and orientation helps to come-up with an acceptable tree arrangement in the courtyard, so something was salvaged.

The bench outside the courtyard wall is built up from wire, styrene and balsa wood. It’s based on a bench design the city uses at some of its bus stops; however, mine isn’t an exact replica. The fire hydrant is a detail item from Walthers. I added a snow depth indicator arm because it is, after all, Ontario. The bookcase outside the Bookery’s bay window is built up from balsa scraps. I added some steps to the side-door because it seemed like a long drop to the ground without them. Also, I added a brick planter for the tree outside the front of the Bookery – it seemed that a tree was needed on the left to give some visual balance to all those trees in the courtyard. The planter is also built-up from balsa scraps. The nice little picnic tables in the courtyard are laser-cut kits I had bought awhile ago, but unfortunately I’ve lost the manufacturer’s name.

Well, that wraps it up for Uncle Charlie’s Bookery. Even though I flubbed a few things along the way, it’s been a fun project that I’d highly recommend to anyone looking to get started with old school builds.

Vintage Marklin Club

2011-05-29T18:22:00.008-04:00

A very dynamic Marklin ad from the November 1985 issue of Model Railroader. It's built on the diagonal much like the Bachmann ad.

New Canada geese

2011-05-28T18:46:00.005-04:00

Saw four Canada geese and all these goslings today. I shot the pictures through the windshield of my car since I thought getting out for a shot would spook them. Debra tried to count them and she thinks there are 20 goslings - not all are seen in the photos.

William Shatner meets the Railrodder

2011-05-20T19:22:00.010-04:00

[Image from the National Film Board of Canada’s The Railrodder]

A work colleague of mine, who is a big Star Trek fan, forwarded me this National Film Board of Canada link to William Shatner singing O Canada. It turns out that also embedded in the page is a link to a documentary about the making of Buster Keaton’s movie The Railrodder (a 25 minute short film featuring Mr. Keaton travelling across Canada on a rail scooter). I hadn’t seen The Railrodder in a very long time and it’s as fun as I remember.

Uncle Charley’s Bookery: Site

2011-05-18T18:44:00.007-04:00

I plan to place Uncle Charley’s Bookery in Scarboro Square. In some ways it seems like an odd location – being so close to the renovated Chapters store as well as being located off the main roads and accessible only by sidewalk.

I look upon the Bookery as a building that has survived generations of redevelopment with some combination of stubbornness, savvy maneuvering, and good luck. The neighbouring buildings from its era have all been torn down and replaced with gentrified retro-modern homes - except for the Chapters which is located in a renovated building from the Art Deco era. One of the reason’s Uncle Charley’s Bookery has survived is that passengers waiting for their train at the Scarboro Square Station can drop in to browse for a few minutes, and later rest in the side garden. It’s become something of an icon to generations of travelers and commuters.

As well as the Bookery, Scarboro Square is also going to be outfitted with many more trees to give it a more settled look. I’ve got around a dozen or so on the shelf waiting to be planted.

Vintage Bachmann Trains Ad

2011-05-16T19:26:00.007-04:00

I’ve been thumbing through old issues of Model Railroader magazine just looking for interesting things. I came across this super-graphics style ad for Bachmann locomotives in the May 1980 issue. It reminded me of this AFX ad. Both are cool, but I suspect as far as persuasiveness goes, this style may be better suited to slot-cars than locomotives.

Uncle Charley’s Bookery: Basic building finished

2011-05-15T08:16:00.009-04:00

I don’t particularly like vines and ivy on buildings. When we bought our house, the first thing I did was strip-off and kill the ivy growing on the garage walls. I was amazed at how well it had anchored itself into the stucco and it took a lot of effort to remove it all. But, some strategically placed ivy has helped to hide a brick-paper seam on the most prominent corner of the Bookery. From the looks of Mr. Moore’s article, he also used some ivy, so it’s in keeping with the spirit of thing, and it’s ostensibly an old building, so some ivy doesn’t seem out of place.

The reason I used this ruse is that I messed up applying the brick paper at this corner. I cut the paper on the side wall too short and it didn’t go all the way to the corner of the end wall, so you can clearly see where the piece ends. If you measure things more-or-less properly, as I did with the other three corners, the edges don’t look too bad. This is a good example where you shouldn’t give up when you encounter something that didn’t quite build-up as planned, but just change course a little to fix it up.

The roof is cut from a piece of 0.080 inch styrene. It has a piece of fine sandpaper glued to its outer surface to simulate some sort of gravel roofing. Mr. Moore states he simply let the roof rest on the top layer of books. I decided to add a rail above the top book shelf and around the inner wall perimeter for roof support – it’s made of styrene channel.

The half wall – which will eventually become part of the larger courtyard perimeter wall – was built-up from styrene and covered with brick-paper. The concrete caps are also cut from styrene. The decorative spheres are 1/4 inch diameter acetal bearings superglued to the wall caps. The corner seat is wood.

Well, that’s it for the basic structure. It was fun, and at times frustrating. The next step is to site it in Scarboro Square, and build the courtyard and outhouse (which is shown in the photos in the original article, and hinted at in the text, but not described in much detail – it’s more of an afterthought).

Uncle Charley’s Bookery: Furniture

2011-05-14T14:50:00.016-04:00

I’m starting to think that if you are going to build some of these old-school projects one thing that needs to be reconsidered is the story around it. On the surface that seems somewhat trivial – and maybe a even a non-starter because although E.L. Moore often had an elaborate fictional back-story for many of his projects, many other writers from that period did not, and their works were simply straight ahead miniaturizations of prototype structures – but it helps to bring these projects into the present, and also sort of help with thinking about how they might have changed and evolved in order to survive into our time.

This update-the-story idea developed when I started to work on the furniture and siting for the Bookery If the Bookery were mine, I’d change the furniture, and since it is, I did. I’d have a big library table to spread out reading and writing materials; so I built one. I’d have a couch so I could stretch out and read a book; so I built one. I’d need some ladders to reach the upper shelves; so I added them. Well, you get the picture. You certainly could rebuild the interior exactly as Mr. Moore pictured it in his article, but I didn’t want an exact period piece, but something that was old, but had been changed a little here and there to better fit with my view of the ‘retro-future’.

The library table is made from 1/32 inch sheet basswood for the top, balsa for the legs and some 0.010 in styrene for the table-top base frame.

The chairs started out as items from an HO-scale Airfix control tower kit to which balsa legs and styrene cross-bracing were added.

The end-table has a basswood top, and a base made from a bolo-tie component.

The couch is built-up from 0.100 inch and 0.080 inch styrene.

[Jet Scott and Tawney Potter chat in Professor Potter's library]

The lady-on-the-ladder-reading-a-book was inspired by this panel from Jet Scott, Vol.1 by Jerry Robinson & Sheldon Stark (published by Dark Horse Books)– which I highly recommend.

Well, a lot more detail could be added to the interior, but I decided to leave it at this. I’m in the process of closing up the Bookery by adding the remaining side-wall and the removable roof.

Ground Effect Train

2011-05-14T08:33:00.009-04:00

[An experimental ground-effect 'rail' vehicle; Picture sourced from the IEEE article linked to in the post.]

I stumbled across this story about a Japanese research team investigating the use of ground-effect flyers to build completely new concepts in ‘rail’ transportation. It’s still early days, but it’s amazing stuff. You know, with ground effect based vehicles a hybrid rail / water transport is a possibility – maybe something along the lines of some sort of Alexander Lippisch Aerofoil Boat ‘rail’ / water vehicle. The ‘rail’, or I guess land-based channel if you follow this Japanese line of thought, could lead the vehicle right to the water’s edge where it then flies out over the water towards another ‘rail’ on a distant shore. Wild stuff.

Train to the launch pad

2011-04-30T07:20:00.008-04:00

[Image: NASA/Bill Ingalls]

I was reading an article this week reporting that the Voyager spacecraft will soon be leaving the region of space under the influence of our Sun and heading into interstellar space. The article eventually led to a NASA photo archive site, and being a train person I decided to search on ‘train’ to see what would come up. Among the results were some great photos of the train used to roll-out the Soyuz spacecraft rocket to its launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. I’d recommend going to the NASA site directly to get all the details if you’re interested. There’s lots more photos other than these two I’ve posted, and they certainly provide some intriguing ideas for developing a freelanced launch pad layout.

[Image: NASA/Carla Cioffi]

Uncle Charley’s Bookery: Books, books, books, and more books

2011-04-29T20:03:00.027-04:00

1965 must have been quite a year for E.L.Moore. As far as I can tell, he published 6 articles about building structures in RMC, and I think that was the most articles he had published in a single year until then:

Ye Olde Corner Drugstore

Tonsorial Parlor

Small Manufacturing Plant

Major Hoople’s Brick Warehouse

Yard Blacksmith Shop

Uncle Charlie’s Bookery

I thought publishing 6 construction articles in one year was pretty impressive, but I later found out that Mr. Moore was just getting cranked up in ’65, because the following years typically saw 8 or 9 articles per year! An impressive legacy of fascinating scratch-building projects to say the least. I wouldn’t have time to build 6, let alone 9 in a single year. I find that his projects seem deceptively simple; and they are with respect to technology, but not in the number of steps and phases of construction.

Interestingly, 4 of the ’65 projects also had interiors of one sort or another, which I’m finding really adds to the total build time. They’re not all loaded up with HO-scale books, but they do have their unique construction challenges. I haven’t really built all that many interiors; in fact, I think it’s just one: the ersatz servicing area in the engine house – and that was many years ago! Well, ok, now that I think of it, there was the viewing area / interior in the Buddha’s Overlook project, although it’s far from a full interior.

The Bookery’s shelved books were rather pleasant to make. I followed the instructions in Mr. Moore’s article, but instead of painting the book spines with brush and paint, I used a selection of coloured, fine-point Sharpie pens. This made the task easier and faster. I also considered skipping the step of indenting the book strip at each spine edge with a knife. This didn’t work out because the indentation prevents the ink from bleeding between spines and gives you a nice sharp division between books.

Window blanks ready for trimming & inking.

Where the books gave some pleasure, the windows took some away. Well, the flat windows were a chore, but, surprisingly, the front bow window was rather easy. Mr. Moore stated he used commercial windows for the flat ones since he had some suitable ones around.

Inking a window on a template.

I tried to make the flat ones look sort of like the ones in his Bookery using his old-school inking method. My window openings weren’t quite square  so there was some fiddling and finessing needed to get each window to fit properly. The window beside the side door was particularly troublesome and required 4 attempts to get something that was acceptable - over enthusiastic trimming and sloppy inking on my part conspired to try my patience. On the other hand, the bow window was very easy to make and install, and went in on the first attempt. I made my version in 3 pieces; whereas, Mr. Moore made his from a single clear sheet with folds to make the bow. All my windows are held in place with Micro-Krystal Clear.

This poor thing donated the fireplace horns.

Mr. Moore’s Bookery has a clock above the fireplace mantel. The fireplace reminded me of the one in my father’s house, but his has a set of steer horns on it from a long ago trip to Texas. I liberated a set of horns from a donor toy cow leftover from a project in a larger scale, painted them a bit, and glued them above the row of oversize books on the mantel.

I think I’m in the home stretch now. I’m in the process of standing up the walls, attaching them to the base, and adding some furniture.

Uncle Charley’s Bookery: Beginnings

2011-04-17T09:15:00.022-04:00

I’m not familiar with E.L. Moore projects prior to his Cal’s Lumberyard build that appeared in the April 1973 issue of Model Railroader, so it was a pleasant surprise to read his Uncle Charlie’s Bookery article in the December 1965 issue of Railroad Model Craftsman.

I found both the article and the project charming. And, I caught myself smiling throughout the story, so it was pretty clear I needed to build this. It seemed like a simple and fun project, and, after doing a little measuring, it looked like it was going to fit rather nicely into a vacant lot in Scarboro Square - a unexpected bonus.

Repeated readings of the article started to make it seem a little like an archeological expedition. Mr. Moore had an unconventional style – well, at least by today’s standards – where the rather sketchy instructions are embedded in a fictional story. That’s ok with me, but if you’re not used to it, there does seem to be a lot of knowledge assumed of the reader as far as building structures goes, which the narrative glosses over a bit.

For example, he refers to a product called Northeastern yellow brick. I did a little internet searching and couldn’t find anything, but reading between the lines in the article it seems like some sort of sheet material made of 1/16 inch wood that has an HO-scale embossed brick pattern on one side. This was used for making the walls.

I substituted 1/16 inch balsa with Micro-Mark yellow brick paper glued to one side. The Micro-Mark brick paper is very nicely printed, and even though a 8 15/16 in x 5 7/8 inch piece cost me $10.99, it was well worth it, and I’ll probably get a few projects out of it.

Like I said, I cut the walls from 1/16 inch sheet balsa. I could have substituted sheet styrene, but I wanted the interior wall surfaces to have a little texture, and it is an E. L. Moore project after all, so sheet balsa keeps with the spirit of the thing. The foundation is another story though. I cut this piece from 0.080 inch styrene because I wanted a stiffer and more impervious base than 1/16 balsa could provide.

The inside floor – which is attached to the plastic foundation piece with thick super-glue – is still 1/16 inch balsa as per the article. Now, even though the balsa is superglued to the relatively thick styrene foundation, when I stained the floor, it still caused the combined structure to warp a bit as the stain dried. I had to carefully unwarp it back to flat with finger pressure. It restored ok; just something to keep in mind.

I was chatting with an old friend back in February and he commented that the way I laid out walls on sheet stock was old school in the extreme. The advent of laser cutting and CAD design had rendered this old method embarrassingly obsolete. All quite true. Laser cut kits have completely changed the landscape of building model buildings. But, I’m not sure if it’s economical just yet for one-off projects like I work on. Maybe I’m making the same assumptions that Mr. Moore made in his articles that readers just know how to do this stuff, and it can pass without being noted. Maybe this is a mistake on my part. Maybe these crafting techniques need to be illuminated a little. I think I’ll go into this in a future post (although it probably needs a short video), but here are some tips that come to mind that help me achieve an accurate layout.

Always draw the layout with a sharp pencil. I use an HB and keep two or three pre-sharpened at hand so I can replace the one I’m using with a sharp one as soon as the one in use becomes a little dull.
Same with the knife you use for cutting out the layout: always use a sharp knife. It’s safer because you don’t have to press hard as you do with a dull blade, and it’s more accurate. I buy blades in 100 count boxes so I always have a ready supply of sharp blades on hand. Yeah, it’s expensive since a box costs around $25, but compared to buying a half-dozen at a time, it’s far more economical in the long run. Also, when you have a lot around, you’ll be more inclined to replace dull blades right when you need to.
Use a steel ruler when you score the layout for cutting out the walls from the stock. Don’t use a wooden or plastic one – you’ll damage the edge and won’t get straight cuts. I like to use a steel ruler without an attached cork backer so the ruler will lie flush against the sheet stock and the knife blade won’t get under the ruler while cutting.
Whatever type of sheet stock you’re cutting, use several light passes of the blade instead of trying to make the cut with just one or two passes while pressing hard on the knife. There’s less chance of slippage and you’ll get a more accurate cut.
When cutting styrene you don’t need to cut all the way through the material. Cut around 1/3 to ½ through the sheet, then snap it along the scored line. Use a sanding stick to clean-up any rough edges on the cut piece.
When cutting balsa sheets, you’ll need to cut all the way through. Remember to use numerous light passes and keep the blade perpendicular to the ruler. Be extra cautious when cutting with the grain because it’s easy for the blade to catch a grain path and wander away from the ruler’s edge.
Check your measurements. Check your measurements. Check your measurements again. Always check the layout lines you’ve drawn on the stock to make sure they’re drawn as per the plan and they look right. If something looks wrong, or not square, check it before cutting. Check it again. Check it even if it looks right – maybe you’ve overlooked something. I know I do. Sometimes I’m extra lazy, skip checking and assume everything is fine, and then, lo and behold, I find I’ve made a cutting mistake and have to start over 
Keep practicing. Don’t give up. These seem like a lot of steps, but with a little practice they quickly become almost second nature.

Even after all this I still don’t always get everything right. I keep trying. I must admit that I find the early stages of building a model building old-school style – drawing out the walls and roofs on sheet stock, cutting and test fitting the pieces, and the initial gluing and forming – almost meditative.

Notes on the characteristics of Gallery

2011-04-17T06:51:00.006-04:00

In the back of my mind I’ve been trying to think of what things distinguish Gallery from Museum. I don’t have anything definitive just yet – and I might never will - but here are a few points I’ve been considering.

Figures interacting with each other are commonplace. The figures aren’t just isolated, mannequin-like props used to simply denote the presence of people. There’s lots of interesting figures, doing interesting things, and they tell some sort of story.

Many models or miniatures of things exist in the layout’s world that never existed in the real world, but seem completely plausible in the model world and fit seamlessly into its look.

Scenes are like novellas.

Gallery can be unsettling because on the surface it doesn’t appear to be a serious adult activity and looks more like frivolous child’s play.

HO-scale logging airships?

2011-04-16T09:38:00.021-04:00

I was going through some old files, and came across these MacPaint pictures for a track planning tool I created way back in 1985 with my friend vp.

I was a Mac zealot back then and was especially enamoured with MacPaint. vp thought MacPaint and the Mac’s capabilities in general would make for a great track planning tool. He was certainly more prescient about this than me. I thought model railroaders would prefer using all their spare time model railroading – I was wrong, there is a niche for these sorts of tools.

The tool didn’t undergo much development because I lost interest as other activities over took it. Initially, it was meant to help plan very simple layouts: flat ones that used snap track. I came across some Pascal code I had developed (unfortunately I don’t have a way to run it any more), but we also thought of simply making a track planning font where letters and keys were replaced with different types of track that could be later cut-and-pasted into position with MacPaint or MacDraw.

I only post these fragments because I got a laugh out of the above picture with the blimps and trains that I had done as a diversion while we were fiddling with more prosaic track planner issues. I’d completely forgotten about it. With the popularity of steam punk, it doesn’t seem like the odd combination that it did at that time. Back then I was part of a team doing research into hybrid airships that could be used in forestry, so to my inner model railroader, this logging blimps meets the railroads of John Allen and John Oslon motif seemed like a natural combination. Although, I can’t account for the motivation behind the Queen lyrics and the all-seeing eye 

Are functional, flyable HO-scale blimps possible? A late 1970s to mid 1980s vintage Goodyear blimp has an envelope that is 192 feet long and a maximum diameter of 50 feet. Its volume is 202,700 cubic-feet. In HO scale these dimensions would translate into 2.21 feet, 0.58 feet, and 0.31 cubic-feet, respectively. The lifting capability of helium doesn’t scale, so to figure out how much mass the model could lift is simply a matter of multiplying 0.31 cubic-feet by the static lift of helium, which is 31.5 grams/cubic-feet. It turns out the HO-scale helium inflated envelope can lift a mass of around 9.8 grams.

"Logging in steep terrain" - from the LTA-20-1 sales brochure

A similar calculation can be performed on a 1980’s vintage LTA-20-1 concept logging hybrid airship. The sales brochure states its spherical envelope has a 91.9 foot diameter. In HO-scale this becomes 1.06 feet, with a volume of 0.62 cubic-feet. Since it’s about twice the volume of the Goodyear blimp model, it also can lift about twice as much mass, which is around 19.6 grams.

"Heavy-lift emergency situations" - also from the LTA-20-1 sales brochure.

Building an actual HO scale radio controlled flying model will have its challenges given that the static lift of either of these two examples is rather small; however, if the power and control technology of this Carbon Butterfly were used, they seem to be within the realm of possibility. That indoor R/C model airplane has a total mass of just 3.6 grams, so we’re certainly in the right ballpark. Cost ? Well, I’ll swag it very, very conservatively at the cost of 2 Carbon Butterflies plus $100 for helium and some miscellaneous extras; that turns out to be around $420. Pricey, yes, maybe even too conservative an estimate, but in the zone of an expensive locomotive model; maybe it’s not too outrageous for a prototype HO-scale blimp of some sort.

Rail cars

2011-04-09T15:02:00.018-04:00

I was browsing through some old issues of Model Railroader and came across this one from February 1982 that kicked off John Olson’s series on building the Jerome & Southwestern.

The cover scene got my attention. I particularly liked that 1940s (1930s maybe? - I can’t say for sure) vintage car on rails. I don’t know if those sorts of things actually existed, but it got me thinking about building more modern versions. An El Camino seemed to me ideal for this sort of conversion – and it turned out to be dead easy.

El Caminos get no respect. The popular media certainly depicts them as down-market transportation. Unfairly so I think.

There were a couple of weeks last summer where I would see one particular 1970s El Camino almost every day on the highway during my commute to work. It clearly had been restored to factory-stock condition. I was surprised at how small it seemed compared to the modern pickups and SUVs - it almost seemed like an economy car. No doubt with today’s engineering, a re-imagined version probably could be one. But, is there a market for them? I have no idea.

I started with a Model Power 1968 El Camino and an unpainted N-scale Atlas hopper car I found in the re-sale bin at the local hobby shop for $4.95 – this turned out the be the cheapest way to get some N-scale wheels for replacing the El Camino’s wheels and tires. Simply pull the axles and wheels from both items, cut the N-scale wheel-sets in half, insert them into the wheel wells in the E Camino, adjust the spacing so the car sits properly on the track, apply glue to hold the wheels in place, let dry, and, bingo, you’re done. The N-scale wheel sets are all plastic. This makes cutting and gluing them easy.

I have a number of 1/24 scale El Caminos, and its Fordian cousin the Ranchero, in my kit stash. And I’ve actually built a couple 

The first one was the El Camino Estrella kit-bash that I submitted it to StarShip Modeller’s Gallery when it was done. It was posted, and to my surprise I received a number of complementary emails about it - it was the first and last time that happened  It seemed to have struck a chord.

The second build wasn’t an El Camino, but its little Dodge Boys’ cousin, the 1980s Dodge Rampage. This was an extensive kit-bashing project that really pushed my skills. It’s certainly not perfect, but I rather liked the results.

I did the same road-to-rails conversion on a New Beetle that had fallen on hard times. One day I was vacuuming dust from the layout with my Shop-Vac and got a little too focused on picking up dirt and accidentally sucked back this bug from its parking spot. I was only able to find the body and chassis unit in the dust bag. The front seats and a tail-light were nowhere to be found. Given that it was just a pile of parts on my workbench, I figured it was a good candidate for conversion.

I used the same process that was applied to the El Camino. The only difference being that I glued the New Beetle’s wheel covers to the N-scale wheel-sets, and cast the missing tail-light with some Micro-Kristal-Clear.

I guess the problem with these rails cars is just that, they can only be used on the rails. I have an idea for a truck conversion for transporting these things over the roads that hopefully I can start to work on soon.

N-scale layout-in-a-box

2011-04-07T19:41:00.007-04:00

I built this little N-scale layout-in-a-box back in 1978. It got stashed away around 1980, and has been in storage in various places until Christmas 2008. Around that time there were a number of clinic clients interested in model trains, so we thought it would make a nice conversation piece over the holidays. I had to do some refurbishment since it had gotten bounced around a bit during the intervening years.

The layout box measures 31 by 25 inches and has a matching lid that is connected with detachable hinges that allow the lid to be removed when the layout is in use. I made the box from 1x4 pine and ¼ inch plywood. It folds up like a briefcase for transport and storage, and has a handle for carrying it around.

This isn’t an original idea. I remember seeing a picture of a Z-scale layout built in a wooden artist’s box in an issue of MR at that time, and thought I’d like to do something similar in N-scale.

If I get the layout out this Christmas season I’ll need to buy a new locomotive, since my one-and-only ancient one finally seized up during the 2008 holidays. No big deal since it was a rather cheap one and I’m surprised it lasted that long.

Manual Training from the 1920’s

2011-03-22T18:59:00.009-04:00

Last Christmas I spent some time browsing through a few of my father’s old books. I came across the ‘manual training’ textbook my grandmother had used when she was in teacher’s college, which was called ‘Normal School’ in her time . The title page indicates the book was published in 1920, and that was also the year she began her training.

From the contents of the book, it looks like Manual Training wasn’t just another name for Shop Class, although successful completion might lead a pupil there. Basically it contains lesson ideas for designing and making simple things from simple materials. Its goals are honourable and they seem to be to instill basic 1920’s era spatial, design, geometric, and construction skills in children through projects that require them to work with their hands – in today’s parlance I think we might refer to these activities as fostering rudimentary ‘Maker’ skills. Quoting from the Introduction:

The old idea that education was entirely a matter of books has now almost disappeared; and a system which appealed almost entirely to the memory is being supplemented by methods which directly appeal to the interests of the pupil and which use his own activity and observation in the training process.

That statement sounds like it could have been written last week. Here’s a little more on what the authors think Manual Training is:

Manual Training must not be thought of in terms of processes only; it not only gives practice in doing, making, and originating; but, if properly undertaken, it is capable of being made to assist in the mental, manual, and social development of the pupil.

The lessons are graduated to take pupils from ‘Form I’ to ‘Form IV’. I’m not sure what modern-day grade levels these correspond to, maybe something in the primary grades from the looks of the projects.

One part in particular that caught my eye was a page in the Form II: Cardboard Construction section that featured two photos of town dioramas whose buildings were made from cardboard, nestled in simple scenery, and placed on small tables for display. They are quite charming.

{This newspaper clipping was folded into the book. I don't know what paper it's from or when it was published.}

Mr. Scott’s: Finishing

2011-03-20T18:12:00.008-04:00

Mr. Scott’s has been staring at me with a nasty look to get it finished. I had set it aside on the workbench while I worked away on completing the Barrel & Marble Works So, I finally took its not so subtle hints and finished it. Well, more accurately, I got it to a near completely finished state – one with window glass and view blockers. I’m still contemplating what final details are to be added.

Installing the plastic glass for windows was just a matter of cutting down the kit-supplied window stock and gluing it in place with thick superglue. Please be careful if you use superglue since it’s easy to get it on the clear surfaces given the tight inside clearances of this building. I used some spray accelerator to set it up once I had dabbed it in the places I wanted. Also, the bottom of the building needs to be propped up to let the glue fumes escape otherwise they will craze the inside surfaces of the windows. I left the bottom ventilated over night just to be sure.

I think I mentioned in some other posts that I plan on revisiting in a few months some of the buildings I’ve worked on over the past couple of years in order to add a little detail and tweek them a bit now that I’ve had a chance to look at them awhile. I think Mr. Scott’s will be in that group. Some roof details and maybe some external tanks and loading equipment might be added. I need to think about that a bit. But, for now, Mr. Scott’s is done.

Mr. Buschel’s Barrel & Marble Works

2011-03-20T06:08:00.005-04:00

{My beginning to a fictitious article on the Barrel & Marble Works project written in a pseudo E. L. Moore style – set your editorial-way-back-machine to sometime in the 1970s}

One day last summer Debra and I drove down to Prince Edward County to have dinner at Bob’s Truffle Hut. Her friends had been telling her great things about the place, so we went to see for ourselves. What they didn’t tell us was there was this great model railroad-able feed mill right behind the Hut. Debra went in and got us a table and I wandered over to the building to take a look before the sun went down.

Turns out it wasn’t a mill anymore, but a recyclery, barrel maker and marble works that had taken up residence in the old building. Luckily the owner’s grandson was on the loading dock to tell me some history about the place.

Apparently granddad bought the abandoned mill in the early ‘70s to house his barrel making business, He was a big fan of Evel Knievel and thought that Mr. Knievel’s exploits would inspire an upsurge in motorcycle barrel jumping, and that meant there’d be a big demand for barrels. Well, with that and the new wineries springing up in the County, it looked like blue skies ahead for the barrel biz.

The barrels-for-cycle- jumping thing never panned out, but barrels for wine, or repurposed for furniture and other odd things provided some steady income over the years. Granddad rented out the west wing to a marble artisan in the late ‘90s, and a deal with the County saw the recyclery tacked on just a few years ago. The sun was getting low, so I snapped a few pictures and popped into the Hut before the truffles got cold.

The prototype mill is big. Too big for my 6 foot by 5 foot model railroad, so building a model of it was an exercise in selective compression. That is, picking out the parts I liked, and squeezing the dimensions down to something that was just the right size for the railroad, all the while trying to maintain the vibe of the structure that attracted me to it in the first place.

Also, I didn’t want to turn this into an exercise in overly specialized construction methods and micro-detailing, but something that could be built with fairly commonplace model railroading building materials, and only about 2 weeks of concentrated work.

Some styrene sheets, Campbell scale corrugated metal siding, window and door castings from Tichy Train Group, plus a few scraps of styrene tubing and balsa are just about all you’ll need materials wise. For tools, the standard X-acto knife, scale, angle, thick super glue, pen, pencil, and a tube of styrene glue will do it. Also, you’ll need some bottles of acrylic paints, a few brushes, and some water for clean-up, but no sprays or air-brushes.

Costs? Well, if you were actually able to just buy the exact amount of materials used in this project, you could build it for about $20 to $30. Turns out, if you don’t already have a small stash of materials leftover from other projects, you’ll need to buy the materials in the pre-packaged amounts they’re commonly sold in, so it’s going to cost more – around $30 to $40 - but you’re going to have leftovers for other projects. Which is probably a good thing, because once you have a small stash of materials there’s less of a hurdle when you start new projects. I’ll discuss how to save some cash as we go through the building process.

Now, a bit of a disclaimer: I was way off on the concentrated work bit – the elapsed time for the build was roughly 6 months of only working an hour here and ten-minutes there and doing other projects in between and so on. I’m sure you’re not as lazy or disorganized as I am!

…. and on with show.

{resetting the time-machine back to the 21th century……}

Barrel & Marble Works: Painting and Finishing

2011-03-19T13:01:00.021-04:00

This last phase of construction has been about painting and detailing.

I was complaining in the first Boneyard post about all the paints Airfix recommended - 15 in total - that one can use to paint the European Ruined Workshop. Turns out I’ve used a lot myself to paint the Barrel & Marble works: 13 if I’ve accounted correctly. Looks like I don’t pay attention to my own grumblings 

All walls that were paneled with corrugated metal sheets were base coated with a thinned wash of Tamiya Neutral Grey. The wash was created by mixing the gray paint with Testors Universal Acrylic Thinner on my palette. I also dunk the brush I’m using to mix and apply the paint into some old, sludgy water I’ve used for brush cleaning to add some additional grot to the mix.

You may have noticed in some earlier photos that there were blue lines on a number of panels. I used a blue gel pen to mark up the panels prior to cutting, and I thought the base coat of paint would hide them. I was wrong. But, something interesting did happen that I hadn’t planned on. The stuff I used to thin the wash caused the blue ink to run a bit, and a little judicious scrubbing with the brush blended everything into a nice patina – well, I’m kinda partial to it anyway.

The recyclery was base coated with Tamiya Gray Green paint straight from the bottle.

{Mixing the rust coloured paint on the palette.}

I then went to work ‘rusting‘ the roof on the Barrel & Marble Works. Rust coloured paint was mixed on my palette using Testors Model Master Acryl Rust and Tamiya Deep Green with some Testers thinner thrown in. Gradually mix small amounts of the green into the rust paint until the rust paint loses its glossiness. Even when it reaches this state, I don’t like to make the mix too uniform. I like there still to be hints of loosely mixed green still visible because I like the way it looks on the model – you’ll see some green, but not large patches, just highlights here and there. The prototype has a thoroughly rusted roof; my model doesn’t replicate that intensity of redness.

{Another session of mixing the rust paint}

The recyclery roof was washed with a much thinned version of the aforementioned rust mix. I didn’t want to obliterate the base colour of the roof, just give a hint of rust and aging.

The roof over the mystery tank at the rear of the Marble Works was painted a blue colour mixed on the palette from Testors Model Master Acryl Maritime Blue and Chevy Engine Red (which looks orange too me) to give an aged, grayed blue colour. After the roof dried, it too was washed a bit with the thinned rust mix.

{No, that's not coffee - that's the gunk wash}

The corrugated metal panels – and the walls of the recyclery - were then washed with a thinned, non-uniform mix of Testors Flat Black and Tamiya Smoke. I apply this pretty liberally to the model and use tissues and a thirsty brush – one that’s a just a little damp that can absorb pools of wash if they collect along panel lines or at eves – to control the density of paint application.

The balsa wood loading docks and framing are painted with a very loose mix of the initial thinned gray wash used on the metal panels, flat black-smoke wash, and gunk wash residue from my brush cleaning jar.

All this painting and application of washes took some time. It happened over a series of days because I like to sit back and look at the results of each step for awhile to see if any corrections or additional applications need to be made before proceeding.

The sign on the recyclery is just an item printed from my computer and glued to a basswood backing. It was washed very, very lightly with a nearly dry brush that had been dipped in the gunk wash. It’s easy to overdo it and obliterate the letters, so I’d recommend erring on the side of caution and applying several very thin washes until the desired effect is achieved. This also helps prevent the backing board from warping. The recycling logo was downloaded from the internet and prepared in the same way.

I don’t yet have a good idea for the Barrel & Marble Works signage. I’ll add these later.

The roof-top pipes on the Marble Works were made from styrene tubing. The tube wall was fairly thick and had to be drilled out to thin it down to something more scale-like. I’m not sure what these pipes are meant to drain, but I mixed up some Tamiya Purple and Tamyia Yellow Green to create a sickly gray ooze that I painted on the roof at the pipe exits. These pipes could probably use a little support structure, but I think I’ll leave them be for the time being and maybe revisit that later.

I’ve mentioned in passing a few times that using the Campbell corrugated paneling and the textured plastic on the recyclery was rather un-E. L. Moore like. A more Moorian approach might have used the embossed paper method for the metal siding, and maybe scored wood for the recyclery walls. I think that if I had used those materials I couldn’t have painted the structure using the methods I did. The Moorian materials I think would have been too soft and absorbent, and may have disintegrated or warped during painting. The metal and styrene surfaces in this project can stand-up very well to repeated applications of paint, brush work, and washes, so they have at least that to recommend them even though they aren’t the most inexpensive materials to build with.

The last thing I did was add figures and props, and some plastic ‘glass’ to the windows. That’s it. I’m going to declare it done for now. There are a few buildings on the layout that I want to add a little more detail to, and I’m planning on coming back in a few months and fixing them up all at once. This one may get a little renovated then.

The Museum and The Gallery?

2011-03-13T08:37:00.004-04:00

I’m a casual reader of the model railroad press; I probably buy around a dozen magazines a year from newsstands. No subscriptions. No clear favourite either. I pick and choose from the available American and British titles on offer. One thing that is clear, there is a high degree of realism in the model work on display in those pages, and it has advanced a long way from what the magazines routinely showed in the 1970s.

The overall impression I get – assuming that the magazines cater to what the market wants – is that there is a strong desire for museum quality models, and layouts that behave, operate, and are representative of real railroads, whether present-day or historical. I know, this should be obvious – it is after all called ‘model railroading’. I’m starting to think of this as the ‘Museum’ school of model railroading.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean this in a derogatory or condescending way. This view has pushed the hobby to much higher degrees of quality and fidelity, and I think it’s also the jumping off point for other approaches. Not to mention that it’s amazing to look at.

From the post’s title you know the other pole I’m thinking about is the ‘Gallery’ school of thought. This one is harder for me to define since there aren’t any long running popular media that I can point to that consistently showcase this view. I use it as a catch-all for a more free form approach. It’s less about research and rivets, and more about expressing personal ideas you as a modeler or model railroader have. It doesn’t jettison the Museum approach, just picks and chooses whatever it needs.

I need to pull together some examples, at the very least, to clarify my own thoughts. The popular magazines show examples from time-to-time, but they don’t identify any of it as something called ‘Gallery’. It’s more seen on the web than in the press, and it’s more prevalent in older, mid-20^th century magazines than today’s. Some artists practice an extreme form of Gallery: one that uses the materials of scale model building as art materials, but isn’t too concerned with model building itself as hobbyists are. Gallery is not as dominant as Museum, and it may even be on the decline – hard to tell exactly.

Anyway, these are just ramblings – I need to get back to building  No doubt there are as many approaches to model building and model railroading as there are modelers and model railroaders.

Barrel & Marble Works: Finished basic construction

2011-03-06T15:33:00.007-05:00

After paneling the roofs, all that needed to be done was to add the small tower to the Marble Works, and the delivery chute to the Barrel factory. Well, I assume it’s some sort of grain or seed delivery chute that was used when it was still a mill, but now, it’s just an unused structure. As for the tower on the Marble Works, I have no idea what that used to do. I notice that it’s got pipes protruding from it that seem to have leaked something over the years.

The delivery chute and tower are made from 0.012 inch styrene sub-structures paneled with the same Campbell metal siding used on the walls and roofs. Dimensions are completely freelanced. The delivery chute also has some balsa braces added as per the prototype.

Once these were positioned and attached to the main building complex with thick superglue, adding flashing was begun. This was a rather finicky job. Strips of 8 to 12 inch wide metal strips were cut, bent lengthwise into right-angles, and then cut to fit the various locations that needed flashing: basically, wherever metal covered planes touched each other. Again, superglue was used for bonding things into place.

I added another post to support the porch roof on the Marble Works because the span looked too long. The porch roof span on the Barrel factory also looks too long for just one corner post to support. However, the prototype photos seem to indicate that there are cables attached to its porch roof that are anchored way up on the front wall of the main building. I’ll need to figure out a way to add those to the model.

That’s it for basic assembly. I can now see the homestretch for this project! I’m moving on to painting and adding some final details.

Broilin’ at the Boneyard

2011-03-06T05:46:00.009-05:00

A while back I mentioned that I’d try and camouflage the board-top track controls a la the example set by New WopiLand instead of moving them to a dedicated control panel. After thinking about what I had on hand, I decided to build something based on the idea of using Walther’s dumpsters as the camouflaging element. Basically, I’d cut out their bottoms and place them over the controls.

Well, as usual, I had to do a little more site preparation than I had originally thought to pull this idea together. Since the controls sit flush on the train board, I raised the surrounding area a bit with stacks of ¼ inch foamboard, and then laminated a sheet of 0.040 inch styrene to it for construction of the finished surface. I also added a new siding for bringing in car-loads of junk for recycling in the Boneyard, and adjusted the level of the Boneyard site to be roughly level with the floors of those cars.

I recently saw an ad for the Airfix European Ruined Workshop. This item is a basically a 1/76 scale model of a bombed-out building for World War II war gamers and diorama builders. Nothing really to do with trains, but I liked its look and the idea that you could look into and through it. Luckily my local hobby store had some in stock because I had an idea for using it in the developing Boneyard scene

It’s not a kit, but a one-piece resin casting of an entire building. The only parts to be attached are two window frames and a little clear plastic window ‘glass’. Other than adding those, all that it needs is painting. And the back of the box it comes in has a handy painting guide: recommending none other than 15 ! different colours of Humbrol paint.

The European Ruined Workshop is a nice piece: crisp moldings, solid construction, interesting subject – all and all it’s rather good. The down-side is cost: $28 + sales taxes + all those paints if you go for the advertising. Given my respect for E.L. Moore projects, it’s the anti-Moore as far as cost goes. Given its simplicity, something similar should be scratchbuildable for a third the cost at most, and probably less if I thought about it some more.

Ok, well, grumblings aside, the next step is to start assembling the scene.

Barrel & Marble Works: Roofs installed

2011-02-28T19:01:00.013-05:00

Title tells all I guess. I spent sometime cutting the substructures for the roofs and paneling them.

The roof pieces are cut from 0.040 inch sheet styrene. They are sized so that the overhang at the eves is about 1 scale foot.
Campbell Scale corrugated metal stock was also used to panel the roof. In this case though, I made use of the full 12 foot length of the stock and didn't cut the pieces down to 8 feet as I did with the wall siding - the width though is still 4 feet. It does seem weird: cutting up the stock into 4 foot pieces and them gluing them all down again on the substructure. The difference is that the individual pieces, when glued side-by-side, form slight ridges that help give the illusion of individual sheets - which should be enhanced when painted.

All the panels are glued down with thick super-glue. I'm moving on to adding the defunct mill substructures to the roofs.

Barrel & Marble Works: Finished wall paneling

2011-02-12T17:04:00.013-05:00

A couple of weeks ago I received my order of Campbell Scale metal siding from George's Trains, and I have spent some free time finishing the wall siding. The siding I bought was 12 scale feet in width, so I first cut 8'x4' pieces from the stock and used that to panel the walls. I used thick superglue to attach the pieces to the styrene substructure.

As I paneled the walls I added the window and door castings once paneling on a wall was finished. The castings were primed with Floquil concrete paint prior to installation.

If I were to do this project properly I would have panelled the substructure prior to assembly, but I decided to not do too much preplanning. The next part is to add the roof, but on this part I will panel it with metal siding before I attach it to the roof.

Ancient Egyptian house models

2011-02-07T04:58:00.010-05:00

Tucked in a corner of the vast ancient Egyptian display at the Louvre we happened upon this elegant display of model buildings. By the time we came across these little models we had already put hours on our feet touring the magnificent collections and were looking for some rest, so I unfortunately only did a drive-by photo and didn’t examine the labels. I’ll have to see what I can find on the internet. Maybe there is an ancient train set that goes with them :-) After seeing example after example of their incredible creativity and skill, I wouldn’t put something as simple as a toy train beyond these master craftsmen.

Mr. Scott’s: Painting corrections

2011-01-25T05:10:00.004-05:00

I did some work to tone down the colours on the upper level. Basically, all I did was apply a number of thin, loose washes of grays, browns and blacks to the hangar doors and the landing pad. It’s not perfect, but I think it’s improved. I think I’ll move on to installing the windows and internal view blockers.

Another Day, Another Town

2011-01-24T18:20:00.012-05:00

I was reorganizing my old vinyl albums on the weekend after they had to be shifted to make-way for a cable installer. I’d forgotten that this one had a railroad track photo on the cover (and I'm still wondering if it's model railroad track). It’s a little weird for a cover shot, but back then – believe it or not - I didn’t buy it for that reason. I was a big Jim Croce fan and a completist one to boot. I had to have every album he made, so when I stumbled across this one, I had to buy it. It’s a collaboration with his wife Ingrid. I’m certainly no music critic, but I’d rank it as ok. It’s enjoyable, but a little too folky for my tastes. Then again, I haven’t played it in probably 25 years, so I should give it another try.

Ok, while I’m on the subject of albums, this one, Moon Safari by Air, has even less to do with trains, but it does have this great idea for a VW van / spaceship conversion on the back cover of the CD. When I was building the E.L. Moore van conversion last year, it was vying in my mind with building this disco- hippy spaceship. Obviously, Mr. Moore’s conversion carried the day, but now that I’m considering a rebuild, maybe this time around I’ll try both.

Grille's: Patio & Parking

2011-01-23T15:14:00.015-05:00

Over the past week or so I've been working finishing the roof-top patio and the surrounding parking area.

Grille's will be located on a corner lot as were many old fashioned gas stations.

The parking lot base was cut from a piece of 0.080 inch styrene to fit the lot. It was painted with loose washes of flat black and gray paints. A fine-tipped art marker was used to line the parking spaces. The old British American Petroleum sign in the parking lot is an item from Penitentiary Products.

The roof-top patio lawns were cut from Woodland Scenics Forest Green grass mat and glued in place with thick super-glue. The Woodland Scenic grass mats are very different from the Busch ones used at Art Park. They have a much finer surface, and the backing is a plastic / vinyl type of material instead of a papery one. A set of steps was made from strips of 0.080 inch styrene to join the two patios. The railing along the back wall is a Grandt Line product. I suspect that if this was a real building a railing would be needed along the front as well, but I thought it would detract from the look.

That's about it for major construction. All that remains is to add a number of details to help bring it to life.

30 posts in 30 days comes to an end

2011-01-17T05:32:00.004-05:00

I’ve been posting a lot recently. And not by accident. I wanted to see if I could do 30 posts in 30 days (or less), and chose January to do it in because it’s the dead of winter and I had the time. Also, 30 seemed like a good number because over the past 2 years I’ve done about 30 posts per year. Some preparation was required for this test. I had a backlog of photos I had taken now-and-then throughout the fall and early winter so that I had some material to think about. I’m also working on three building projects (Grille’s, The Barrel & Marble Works, and Mr. Scott’s), as well as doing some work on the layout, so that stuff promised to provide some other sources of post-able material. Ideas for posts also just naturally arose during January, so I made use of those too.

Now that I’ve finished my experiment I’m going back to my usual haphazard posting although I’ve learned a lot about what it takes to be a serious blogger. Writing and photographing and preparing posts cuts into model building time, so I’ll go back to more building and less posting.

Cedar Heights Station in context

2011-01-16T19:28:00.006-05:00

I've added the street corner where the Cedar Heights Station will be located. It's just on the northern end of Art Park. The corner facing the street will get a bus stop and shelter so that it's easy to transfer from bus to train.

Switch control camouflage

2011-01-16T05:35:00.006-05:00

I stumbled across the blog New WopiLand and found a neat little photo showing how the authors disguised the switch control buttons that they had placed on their layout board as headstones in a cemetery. Yes, a little macabre, but quite ingenious! So ingenious that I’m inspired to do some sort of similar camouflaging of the track controls on my board. Probably not as headstones, but I’ll put my thinking cap on. I’ve been planning to move those expediently placed controls to a more traditionally styled control panel, but I like this idea much better. As for the power-pack, it’ll definitely be moved off the table, but to where is still a question.