John, Earl, and Bert: An N-Scale Interpretation of Bert's Garage

Walls temporarily tilted up at Bert's Garage

I can’t say with any certainty what the attraction was that got me into making miniature buildings. I can only note that there were two small events that happened one summer that in retrospect may have marked the beginning of this lifelong interest.

My friend Rob and I were fanatically interested in slot cars. I think we were around twelve years old and he had a much older brother who worked at Eldon’s toy factory. They made 1/32 scale slot cars, and contrary to company policy his brother sneaked home slot cars that were rejected from the assembly line instead of tossing them in the trash. They came to Rob and we spent many happy hours restoring them to racing condition. Somehow Rob had also acquired a vast collection of Scalextric track, and one summer we decided to use it all and build the biggest layout we could. His house had a free-standing, wood frame three-car garage out back that was a relic from the time his parents used it to store the trucks used by their dry-cleaning business. The premature death of this father resulted in the business shutting down, and that left an old, empty wooden garage behind his house. Its floor was just the thing for hosting what we thought would be the world’s largest slot car race course. Naturally, it needed pit stops, garages, grandstands, timing towers and all the other buildings associated with the ‘60s and ‘70s racing scene. I jumped in with construction paper, glue, scissors and more ambition than talent and built everything I thought a race track needed. All of it crap, but great fun to build.

Sometime during that summer, when the race track was under construction, I stumbled across a copy of Model Railroader magazine while searching for the latest Detective comics at my favourite smoke shop. What grabbed my attention was Ben King's cover photo, but the article I found deep inside by some guy named E. L. Moore on how to build an HO scale model called Bunn's Feed and Seed was what set me up for a lifetime of building. I built a version of it in 1/32 scale, and even though it was cannibalized for parts before the fall was out, I eagerly awaited other issues and other model railroad magazines for more construction projects. I was hooked - hooked for life as it turned out.

But life being what it is, I more-or-less dropped out of making HO scale buildings once I started university and didn’t return until this century. If you're a regular reader you know I've written a lot about E. L. Moore, and to some extent about a few other model railroaders from his era whose speciality was building small buildings. I have to tell you that along the way I've developed a curiosity about the whole 20th century history of building little buildings. It looks like all the story's pieces are out there in plain sight, they just need to be stitched together, and once that's done, I'll bet the complete tale makes for some interesting reading.

Sliced from a larger image in the Dec '94 issue of MRJ

I'm not exactly sure where that tale should begin, or end for that matter, but it seems like John Ahern is the guy to start with. Unlike E. L. Moore, Mr. Ahern's story and legacy are well known. His Madder Valley Railway from the 1940s and 1950s, now housed at the Pendon Museum in England, is legendary, and his life's work with scenic model railways is well documented throughout extensive publications in the model railway press of the time. The Madder Valley showed what a scenic model railway was and what it could strive to become. Was his truly the first scenic model railway? I'm not completely sure. But, even if it wasn't, its impact was certainly significant. While reading my way through E. L. Moore's archives I had hoped to find some reference to John Ahern, or maybe some correspondence with him. I didn't, but it wasn't inconceivable, especially since E. L. Moore had a large personal library in the 1950s and appeared to be a voracious reader. The work of those two men seemed simpatico even though one lived and worked in the southern U.S.A and the other in England. Consider this: both loved building little buildings, both built model railroads that leaned to the scenic, both built plausible locomotives and rolling stock to meet their needs, and both had a similar humanistic approach to modelling. Well, I'll likely never know if there was a connection. The mystery is part of the fun.

Slice of screen-rip from Pendon video

Mr. Ahern's Bert's Garage seems like something E. L. Moore could have built had E. L. Moore been interested in automobiles - although, there are one or two Ford Model-Ts on his Elizabeth Valley RR, which seem out-of-place in its early 1900s setting. I thought I'd try and build Bert's in N-scale, using old-school methods, for possible inclusion on the EVRR tribute layout. And this being the 21st century, I thought I'd try some video along with the usual pictures and text. So, apologizes for the production values, but if it seems like a good thing, I'll keep going with it and try for improvements. That being said, get some popcorn, turn down the lights, and let's watch.

Here is a snippet of the elevations Mr. Ahern provides for Bert's Garage in his book, Miniature Building Construction, along with his brief explanation about constructing the main building.

Bert's celebrated establishment at Much Madder is shown in Fig. 72. This is a timber erection with corrugated-iron roof. The walls are painted green; the lettering, barge-boards, and window frames are white. The doors are made to slide, the runners at the top being boxed over. When the doors are fully open, the windows in them come directly in front of those in the wall sections so that the light is not impeded. Diagram D shows how the front corner-posts project forward of the walls, so as to be flush with the doors. The lean-to at the side contains a tiny office, with stove-pipe, an even smaller store, and a lavatory. The lamp over the entrance is made of a glass bead and a pressed metal shirt-stud, the wires being secured in a block of wood glued inside the gable. The reader can let himself go to his heart's content in the matter of petrol and tyre advertisements.

The implication in not showing the back wall is that there're no doors or windows or any special whatnot on it. I decided to make the back wall the same as the front, with large doors for driving in cars. This allows for cars to enter one end and leave through the other. It'll add a little more work to the project, but I think it'll also add interest as it allows for scenes at either end. I'm also planning on having a removable roof a la E. L. Moore, along with an inside light and maybe a skylight, to show off the insides when the roof is on. Not too sure what'll do about gas pumps; maybe there won't be any. You know, maybe it would lend itself to 21st century updating: switch the name from Bert's to Elon's, slap some solar panels on the roof, install some charging stations out front, and you're ready for the electric car business :-)

Ok, enough with the jokes, let's get going. I drew all four walls in a continuous strip on a piece of the kleenex box card. The front and back walls are 22' wide, 10' at the eves, and 19' tall at the peak. The side walls are 25' long.

Then the window and door openings were cut out using a sharp blade and a steel edge.

Vertical boards were scribed on. I used a scribing tool that I forgot to show in the video :-( but one could use the back edge of the x-acto knife instead - I've done that many times. Board spacing isn't precise and I did whatever looked about right.

Next thing is to cut the wall strip free. 

I then chose to slice the strip into individual walls. On Dilly's I simply folded the walls into a box and continued on from there. On this project I'm going to detail the interior a little, and individual walls allow me to do that easier than if they were folded into a box. An alternative is to keep the strip and detail the walls before folding which is what I did on Cal's Cabbage, but that was in HO scale. There's no right or wrong way.

Here's what the inside surfaces look like. No worries, they'll be painted white once some framing detail's been added.

At this stage I sliced some thin strips from the sheet wood you saw in the video and used it, along with some larger stripwood, to build up some faux framing on the inside wall surfaces. Nothing is to scale or rigorously prototypical - the idea is to simply suggest framing so things seem to make sense if you were to glance inside when the lights are on.

While taking a break from framing, I cut the walls for the small office that's built onto one of the side walls. Those end pieces are just 4' wide, and the long wall measures 14.5'. I think there's supposed to be a toilet in there, so I'll have to figure out what to do detail-wise - if this were an E. L. Moore build, he'd have an outhouse strategically positioned nearby instead :-)

There it is, more-or-less all framed. The office is going to have a wood floor so there's a bit of space in its framing at floor-level to accommodate that. The ends on the main building need a little more truss work, but I'll tackle that when I work on the roof.

The walls were temporarily tilted up to see how things were looking. They'll need to painted, have window frames added, windows glazed and lettering applied before gluing them together.

I'm not sure when I'll continue this project once Christmas vacation is over. With this model I was interested in giving video a go, writing my 'secret origins' story on how I got into making model buildings, and trying a little something by Mr. Ahern. If I can find the time, I'll continue and post another instalment. As Mister X would say, so little time, so much to do :-)