The Corner Bank

So far this year I don’t seem to be getting much pleasure from model making or model streetcar stuff. To keep my hand in I’ve been doing a lot of reading, some writing, photo rummaging, and a little bit of lightweight modelling here-and-there to finish up some projects to see if there’s any spark. One of those little projects was to add windows, doors, and a roof to the bank I started way back in Nov ’17. It took a few weeks, but the basic external features are now in place, and it’s ready for lights and internal detailing.

I need to fix up that facing corner - the wash is a little too blobby.

But, the walls that nobody sees much aren't too bad. See that long side wall, I didn't run out of brick when I faced it, that's more-or-less what one sees when driving by. You can see the block section sticking out above the neighbouring building. I used creative license to fill in the lower wall. I could have bricked the whole thing and ignored modelling the blocked section, but I see the real building a lot in my travels and not modelling the block section wouldn't seem right. I know this isn't much of an issue, but it gets to the heart of model making: if you deliberately leave out things that signal something to you, maybe you should question what you're doing.

It was last summer I painted the walls. Inside, they were painted a sky blue and the floor was made grey. I haven't decided if this building will be a bank or something else. Originally the prototype was a Bank of Nova Scotia, and when I was a boy in Toronto, that chain of banks was where my mum set up my first savings account, so their old school sign has some sentimental meaning for me.

The roof is removable. It's just a piece of 0.060 styrene with a sheet of coarse sandpaper glued to it. Colours are my usual loose wash of greys and blacks. Not very prototypical, but I like the look.

I was looking at the photo of E. L. Moore's workbench again and thought I'd post a picture of my table with this project and Bert's Garage on-the-go. The bank is in the upper left, and Bert's walls are just above the cutting mat. Given the type of tools and materials I use, for all you know this could have been shot anytime between 1960 and now :-) Well, except for the 1980s vintage calculator which I should have replaced with a slide rule :-) Oh, and except for those post-it notes....darn....

Well, I’m hoping I’ll get my mojo back when spring finally arrives. I think the whole ‘winter is a great time for model making while the days are short and the weather outside is bad' thing is a myth, or it is for me. I don’t feel like doing much of anything in the winter, and feel like doing everything when summer rolls around. And that includes model making.

Last week, while contemplating when our 260cm of snow is going to melt, I was reading through the Wikipedia entry on Railroad Model Craftsman and was stopped in my tracks by this sentence in the section about RMC’s change in editorial direction as the ‘60s morphed into the ‘70s: Koester and Boyd worked together to push more modern prototype content and fine scale modeling features in contrast to the more loose interpretations of the hobby previously published by Hal Carstens. I was stopped by the phrase, more loose interpretations of the hobby. Intriguing. Given the rest of the Wikipedia discussion, I think the intent of loose interpretations was to say we’ve moved on from those wild-west days. And we have. But I think along with the advances, a lot of good stuff has been lost. I rather like that term loose interpretations. I need to think about it some more.