Recently Updated: Explosion at a grain mill

Reader Christian Cassidy has done some great work and figured out where the exploded grain mill was located that my uncle went out to investigate in the winter of 1944. Scroll down to the bottom of the Explosion at a grain mill post for all the details.

One last facade

I've been doing a bit of work to finish up the facade of the central building in the Canadian Press complex.

Each of the floor drawers were painted with a sea grey, and window shades were cut from sheets of white paper were glued to the front of each drawer. Nothing exciting about those tasks, but necessary.

The main business that I'd been putting off for a long time has been building up the ground-level facade. Delay no more. One rainy morning I downed copious amounts of coffee and got to work.

I laid out a simplified arrangement of windows, doors, and framework on a thin piece of clear sheet plastic. Permanent ink Sharpie pens were used for the black lines, and some El Cheapo permanent ink, no-name pen from China was used for the silver framing. The silver ink wasn't as permanent as advertised, so I sprayed the piece with Testor's Gloss Cote. That fixed the silver smudging problem, but caused ripples in the black lines. Instead of discarding the piece and starting again as I should, I merely tried to strengthen the black lines a little more by relining them and continuing on. The black lines still have a little ripple, but I didn't want to lose my momentum by starting over. Live and learn. 

Acid-free construction paper was used to make the panels, which were stuck onto the plastic with transfer tape. Soloway's Hot Dogs isn't actually at this location, but I loved getting hot dogs at one of their outlets, washed down with a Dr. Brown's Black Cherry, with the guys back in days of yore, so I indulged in a little fantasy. The frame around the leftmost doors, the main Canadian Press sign, and all the doorhandles were cut from styrene.

To the back of the layup, strips of transfer tape were added. It was then just a matter of pressing the taped up piece to the ground floor clear acrylic wall, and presto! 

Construction is now more-or-less finished. I need to work out something for lighting the various floors as it's the lighting of the prototype that attracted me to it in the first place.

Let's fly. On a train!

Forget about malfunctioning LRTs, and let's time travel to Germany in 1902 and board the flying train. 

An upcoming LRT anniversary scarred by a pandemic and operational failure

Non-mask wearing, non-social-distanced inaugural LRT ride on 14 Sept 2019

September 14th marks the first anniversary of the inaugural run of Ottawa's LRT Confederation Line. At this time last year I was happily looking forward to that event. One year later things look very different. 

Almost from the time the system entered regular service it has been plagued by constant malfunctions and extensive service disruptions. As time has gone on, the list of problems has included: train doors that keep getting jammed, failures of onboard and system control computers, frozen switches, brake problems, wheel flat spots, track cracks, pantographs snagging overhead wires, track that won't withstand summer heat, and parts falling off trains. And as of this July, cracks in the wheels has been added to the list; a problem so serious that the federal government's Transportation Safety Board has had to be called in to investigate. In their latest story on the LRT the CBC reports that the promised complement of 15 trains still isn't reliably available during peak periods, and it's not clear when it will be. On top of these technical woes, the pandemic has caused a 70 to 90% reduction in ridership across the entire OCTranspo system, so revenue projections are seriously off, and it's not clear when ridership will again rise to pre-pandemic projection levels. 

Non-mask wearing, non-social-distanced station stop at end of inaugural LRT ride.

As a streetcar aficionado, and with the LRT's Alstom Citadis Spirit being essentially a new streetcar repurposed for LRT use, this has been an eye-opener, and a disappointment. Of course, nowhere near the same level of 'disappointment' experienced by the rider who has to rely on the system to get around the city. I was told there's a study out there somewhere that showed how a bus transitway that used all electric buses was far less economical than an electric LRT. I'll bet that study assumed both systems actually functioned as they should, which is not the case here. The double-whammy of a pandemic and a litany of technical failures have likely wiped out any economic benefits the LRT has over other means of transit for many years to come. Still, I hope the LRT's issues are merely teething pains - albeit ones that might last well into its adolescence :-) - but right now I'm not seeing signs that they are. We'll see what the fall has in store as the schools reopen.

Dominion Tack and Nail

Left: Tacks from Dominion Tack & Nail; Right: Scan from the Clyde Fans box.

I was going through some of my father's old tools and came across that little box of carpet tacks from the Dominion Tack and Nail Company of Galt, Ontario. The box's font looked much like that used by Seth in his drawings of the fictional town of Dominion, Ontario. Not to mention the Dominion connection. Art imitating life.

Video store set

The interior shots of the video store were done on a 'set', not inside the actual model. I did it this way so that it was possible to take unencumbered eye-level photos of scenes inside the store. I wasn't too sure how this would work, so I built a set of the easiest and most important section of the store, the main video wall that contains new movie releases as well as new American and British tv shows and a section dedicated to movies from the Criterion collection. The wall was photographed in sections: one photo for each rack and a few others for the posters at the top. These photos were then rescaled and pieced together - no doubt there is an app out there to do the hard work, but it turned out to be not too difficult. Set scene photos were shot with an LED light block held over the set to provide fairly uniform illumination. Is it cheating to use photos for the racks and models for the figures? Probably, but I find the contrast between the two elements interesting, and it's getting closer to producing the kind of feeling I'm looking for.

Wall 'o Videos

That's the new release wall of movies and tv series along with mucho discs from the Criterion collection. The wall is a photo composite of images taken inside Movies 'n Stuff here in Ottawa, and scaled to approximately HO - it's a little larger so the discs are a little more distinct. It's a great place.

Waiting for the night bus

I've been fiddling now-and-then with adding finishing touches to the natural history museum as sort of an exercise to easing back into model building stuff. I've posted some photos over at Instagram. When I set up an account there a month or so ago my goal was to post all my staged photos to see what sort of patterns appeared. I thought that the tiling arrangement they enforce on photos might be useful for seeing patterns. I'm still thinking about those patterns, and haven't yet come to any conclusions.

Improving the Badger paint stirrer

Long time board member, Director of Advanced Technical Research, and Zen Airbrush Master here at the 30 Squares Media Empire World Domination Headquarters, Vince, has an awesome article called Improving the Badger paint stirrer in the August issue of Railroad Model Hobbyist. Check it out!

Git yer papers here! Paper Mr. Armitage?

Last Friday the Weekly Herald kit I ordered on eBay finally arrived. It's a kit I've long admired, and was glad to find an unopened one in an AHM boxing.

The Weekly Herald, along with its sister the Superior Bakery, and their progenitor the Operating Engine House, are foundational structure kits in model railroading, more so than even the E. L. Moore designed kits. Yes, that's what I said :-) More significant than the E. L. Moore kits.

Those three were part of a collection of styrene structure kits that Revell produced in the late 50's and early '60s. Taken as a whole, the collection was one of the first, maybe even the first, to take commercial styrene structures out of the realm of toys and into that of scale models. And they were developed by the legendary Al Armitage, who through a number of articles in Model Railroader presented the case for styrene as a serious model building material.

I think the introduction of Revell's Operating Engine House and Al Armitage's MR articles are intertwined. Although I can't definitively prove this, there's interesting circumstantial evidence.  

Weekly Herald parts

MR reviewed Revell's newly released engine house in their Nov '59 issue, and in the review they noted, This month's story, "The Case For Styrene" by Alan Armitage, can give you a lot of good ideas for altering styrene kits. The Case for Styrene was actually a two-parter that ran in the Nov and Dec '59 issues, and even though it might not have been the first article that showed how to use styrene and extoll its virtues, it definitely was the most sophisticated. The modelling shown is first rate, but I guess what else could be expected from a gentleman who at that time had been a professional model maker for 13 years and was designing kits at Revell - all according to his mini-bio in MR's Aug. '59 issue included with the article, Diner on Railroad Ave.

And the MR review also noted, Two or more of these kits could also easily be arranged end to end to make a larger building.  And lo-and-behold, in the Sept '60 issue, Mr. Armitage does just that in the article Modifying the Revell Enginehouse. 

Let's fast-forward to 2001. In the January / February 2001 issue of the Narrow Gauge & Shortline Gazette, Mr. Armitage writes about the origin of the Weekly Herald in The Modelmaker's Notebook column, and in the March / April 2001 issue does the same for the Superior Bakery. Basically, he notes that when he was working at Revell, soon after the Operating Engine House was released, he was asked to come up with variations on the kit. The first one was the Weekly Herald, and that was soon followed by the Superior Bakery. I find it interesting that in those two articles he never states he designed the Operating Engine House, but he is noted as its designer in his obituary that appeared in MR's Dec 2001 issue. Maybe Mr. Armitage was just being modest. 

Like AHM's E. L. Moore designed kits, the Weekly Herald, along with the Superior Bakery, have been distributed by many companies (Revell, AHM, and Con-Cor, and there might be more), and have gone through many boxings. There're also N-scale versions, and both the HO and N versions have been used as a source of kitbashing material. Art Curren's Hardly Abel Mfg. Co. comes to mind, and there was a wild one by Robert Schleicher called Build A Four-Story Factory that required 2 Weekly Heralds and 2 Superior Bakeries- yes, 4 of these classic kits (!).

My kit was advertised as never-been-opened, and it did appear to be in its original shrink-wrap when it arrived. All the parts are present and accounted for with the only issue being that one decal sheet was pressed against some windows for too long and partially bonded to the clear plastic. I plan to build the kit and add it to the layout, but I'll likely modify it a little to make it fit into the overall scene. Stay tuned in the fall for exciting updates :-)

One floor down, five to go

I've been futzing around this summer, and my model building work has been scattered. In odd moments I've been adding details to one of the floor drawers. The walls are covered in pieces of construction paper, and the whiteboards and doors are drawn on white paper, cut out, and stuck on the walls. Lighting is from a piece of LED strip, and the conference room table is built up from Bristol board - it is actually glued down square, but the low angle of the photo makes it seem otherwise.

From dreams

I soaked the stick-on label off the box, ironed it out, ran it through the scanner, and that over there is the result.

No, not really.

There was a time a few years back where for several nights over a period of several months I dreamt about an elusive hobby shop. Each dream went something like this: I'd get a call in the middle of the night from a friend telling me the hobby shop was open from 2:17 am to 3:32 am, or some such crazy time, and to get over there quick. I'd jump in my car and race there. In each dream it'd be in a different location. Different city, different area, different store architecture. I'd get there and there'd always be a different organization to each store and I'd spend sometime looking around, but there'd always be a section with tons and tons of plastic spacecraft kits. Kits from companies that didn't exist of spacecraft that didn't exist. I'd always wake up while browsing those kits. Spacecraft kits? I don't know why, but it gave me the idea for fictional HO scale building kits that could exist in some alternate timeline. Calling Dr. Freud :-)

Hobby shop find

It was raining cats and dogs today so I decided to pull the cover off the time machine and go for a spin. I didn't go anywhere too contradictory, just dialled in a first variation on '77, and wound up finding a hobby shop with some interesting garage kits on the resale table. I couldn't leave this one there. Hopefully it won't cause a rip in the space-time continuum on my coffee table - they can be tough to clean-up :-)

Kit No. 5977