Stop whistling at Coteau Station

No space hopper in .....

.... Montreal, or ...

... Coteau.

Grilles: 15 year servicing

Cleaned and repaired Grilles at its new home on the Way Out Layout

I'm cleaning up the Way Out Layout and getting it ready for showing off at Christmas. I want Grilles (yes, it's apostrophe challenged as is the sorry way in our world) to be on the layout, but over time parts have broken off, and it has accumulated a lot of dust in its 15 year life. 

Grilles in its sorry 15 year old, pre-cleaned, and pre-repaired state.

I collected up the loose parts, glued them back on, and then removed as much dust as I could. This low effort activity breathed some new life into the building, and it doesn't look too bad on the layout. So good in fact it shows its neighbours need some cleaning too!

Rail & Launch Control building shell done

It's been a very long time since I started on the Rail & Launch Control building for the Tintin 2001 layout. I had a good long look at the shell and decided there wasn't much detailing left to do, so I jumped in and had a go.

Interior for the garage.

The biggest job was to fill in the interior of the building's garage end. For this I built a little box from styrene sheet and stuck on some styrene pieces to give the walls a little surface detail. That big rectangular hole in the ceiling is for lighting.

Interior unit installed in garage end.

Most of that surfacing will not be readily viewable, but a little something was needed for visual interest.

Finally, I took advantage of some unusually fine weather and gave the shell a spray of matte white paint outside to help unify the look of the thing.

The next step will be to add windows and interior lighting. I'll deal with Moon dust weathering once it's on the layout.

TD Centre in Girder & Panel?

Left: A skeleton sketch for a TD Centre model | Right: The fire lookout tower frame

As well as the fire lookout tower, over the summer I also played around with the idea of building the TD Centre model in Girder & Panel. I was thinking it would be both an easier means of construction, and fit in with the vibe of creating the model with a construction toy made in Toronto during the same era as the TD Centre itself was built. Ok, well, that TD Centre frame shown up there is built from Kenner components. I'd have to find a lot more Peter-Austin parts to pull off this project.

It's an interesting concept, but as I framed out the structure it dawned on me it would be a much more difficult way of building.

Centre: A card sketch of a possible 'TD Centre' panel | Ends: Kenner box-stock panels

For one thing, I'd need 88 little, custom-made wall panels for covering the thing, plus some 'glass' ones for the bottom. Mass producing them is not something I'm interested in doing.

Although, I still like the concept of creating fictional construction kits of landmark Canadian buildings built in the 1960s from a Canadian construction toy from the same era.

As I dream on, I'll leave you with these silent movie clips of Toronto shot in 1978 I recently stumbled across. Watch for a glimpse of the TD Centre early on.