A look back at 2020

My mum and a lost tinplate train from Christmas '61*

This year’s wrap-up seems quite trivial and banal in light of events in the wider world, but maybe some inconsequential banality has its uses in temporarily resting the mind. I hope that 2021 is much better for all, and I wish you and your families good health, peace, and some sort of resumption of normality in the coming year.

And now for the inconsequential banality: some highlights from this year at the 30Squares Media Empire’s World Domination Headquarters :-)

This year I finally made a serious effort to build some HO scale modern buildings: here're the Thomson Building, and the Canadian Press Complex. I know, two isn’t many, but a start’s a start, and there was a lot to learn. The challenge for the coming year will be to figure out how I can build these sorts of models faster, and with the look and style I have in mind, as I’ve got a lot of projects on my list.

Progress was made on my HO-scale Ocean Park Loop layout. The fundamentals of all the modules were built and streetcars were run. Much fun was had building and painting the streets, constructing a subway entrance, and stringing overhead ‘wire’. Even though the ‘wire’ is actually just decorative cotton thread, it improves the look of photos staged on the layout. All layout related posts can be found under the Ocean Park Loop keyword.

I felt the need to read a lot this year. As well as much re-reading of old books that I haven’t cracked open in a long time, I read many new-to-me books. I particularly liked The Last Samurai, The Blind Assassin, Clyde Fans, and Whiskey Galore.  I’m currently reading Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch, and was surprised by an early delivery of a used copy of Robertson Davies’ Cornish Trilogy, so it’s next up**. I don’t know if I’ll read as much in 2021. I suspect the new year will have a different vibe, and maybe the compulsion will ebb.

The most popular posts made in 2020 were those on the construction of AHM’s Weekly Herald kit.

And with every year, I did a little bit of time travelling and found these kits :-)

Although I consider the E. L. Moore project to be more-or-less over, this year I learned a lot about his designs that were converted to plastic kits. There are still many open questions about E. L. Moore’s work, and with each passing year it becomes more unlikely they’ll ever be answered. I was glad to have many great conversations and exchanges with Martin regarding the world of plastic building kits, especially on the various releases of E. L. Moore's. The Machine Shop has been a kit of interest.

My favourite project this year was Cal’s Coastal Café. It had the right combination of pleasure, build speed, uniqueness, and story. A close second was the Hot Wheels Maserati Mistral restoration. The surprise factor, along with a relatively quick and easy restoration, made that one fun.

Model railroad cartoons popped up a lot this year. I was pleasantly surprised to find out about the work of Bill Baron, Gil Mellé, and Doug Wright.

In the summer I set up an Instagram account. Its purpose was mainly to post photos of finished scenes from layouts past and present. I was looking for trends in my work, and for clues about what needs to be improved to realize the feeling I’m after***. Although it doesn’t have many followers compared to most Instagram accounts, uptake and viewership is much stronger there than here at the blog, which lead me to wonder if I should continue blogging considering the effort some posts take. The jury’s still out on that question. I’ll see how things play out in the new year.

And that’s that. I’d like to thank everyone who came by and spent some time here! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

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* This year I scanned all my father’s 8mm home movies. The opening picture is an image I sliced from a movie of our 1961 family Christmas: it shows some sort of windup tinplate toy train scooting around a circle of track. I had no recollection of this toy - I was only 2 at the time. The train only makes a 2 or 3 second appearance, and isn’t the centre of interest in the frame, so the image is fleeting. Various types of real and miniature trains make appearances in several of the films, so I wonder if maybe train stuff was imprinted on my brain much earlier than my proposed got-interested-in-model-railroading date of summer ’73. Maybe I was subconsciously primed from an early age? Another question among many for Dr. Freud :-)

** I jumped ahead a bit and cracked open the first in the trilogy, The Rebel Angels, to get a taste. Among other things, the first few pages seemed to have an interesting late '70s, early '80s Toronto vibe that grabbed me, so this looks like something I'll be sticking with.

*** I must admit that none of my photos have yet to capture what I’m after. A few have come close, but there’s something missing in all of them. There’s a certain sense of being in the world that I’m looking to capture, but haven’t yet. It isn’t something that I can completely express in words, although I think that my photos need to consider things like surface textures, street accoutrements, figure placement and staging, signs and markings, spacing, sidewalk sizing, eye-level viewing, and lighting - especially lighting and eye-level viewing - to help realize what I'm looking for. What about detail? Detail is a fussy word. So much effort is spent on detail and relatively little on lighting. In a lot of photos I come across the lighting is so uniform and boring I often wonder what the people who take them are seeing. Maybe the lighting is done that way so details are clear? I'm also at a point where I dismiss any photo that doesn't look like it could have somehow been taken by a figure in the scene - God's eye views are leaving me cold. 

I don't think the conventional wisdom of weathering and detail are some secret sauce that will help me bring about the sense I’m looking for. The city I’m chasing is a living thing almost as much as the people in it. In a lot of model railroads and dioramas, cities or towns, and their buildings, are backdrops - just static movie sets to fill out spacial requirements. So, the usual kits, maybe with some unique signs, will do. Because I grew up in a vastly different Toronto than today's - one in transition with an extensive network of buses, streetcars, and subways that interconnected the whole thing - I have a particular sense of what a certain type of urban place is like - or maybe, more accurately, what I want it to be like. I’ve not seen it expressed, and I’m working on developing my impressions of it. I see a lot of North American urban modelling is of rundown and derelict places, or olde timey places if ‘trollies’ are involved. Did the modeller live through that? Just drive through it now and then? Learn about it from tv or a book? Is it all just made up from a mishmash of stereotypes? I don’t know, but it doesn’t capture what I’m thinking of. What I see ahead of me is trying to capture a sense of being in a certain type of city I have in my head by way of photographs.