Gang o' Trees

With this talk of trees I thought I'd post a picture of a scene that got me thinking about how trees and forests appear on model railroads, or maybe don't appear on model railroads.

It's this kind of dense, unruly forest that I'm used to. I realize that if a railroad were making its way through this, it would all be cut back quite extensively from the right-of-way. However, it's this kind of scene that I think of when I think of a forest: lots of trees packed tightly together, many scraggly, thin, misshapen, or broken, surrounded by dense undergrowth. Stately centrepiece trees are few and far between. 

That tree in the centre looked like it was about ready to reach down and grab me - I skedaddled before it had a chance :-)

Four Feet Below

Galen alerted me to this magnificent piece of household engineering. I too have a crawlspace here at the HQ, and some yellow hardhats, although sadly none with pickle embellishment. Watch and be amazed.

Entrance to the HQ's unrailroaded crawlspace

'Tain't broken no more, McGee

Lumber stack fixed and new leg added

While photographing the diorama base it was clear to me that I'd have to replace the missing front corner loading dock leg on McGee Lumber, and try to do something about the broken stack of lumber.

Replacing the missing leg sort of goes against my do-the-least restoration philosophy, but that long, unsupported stretch of loading dock would be front-and-centre to any viewer and look odd. I found a suitable piece of balsa strip in my scrapbox and cut it to fit. It was finished by rubbing with a 4B pencil, and then glued in place with some Weld Bond.

Lumber stack before repair

I was a little more concerned about repairing the broken lumber stack because it's even more visible than the leg, which could be obscured by some strategically placed weeds. It turns out I needn't have worried as I was able to find the broken pieces along with some others included with the collection. All I had to do was glue them back in place. Once that was done I applied a thin wash of raw sienna watercolour paint, followed by some lightly applied graphite scrapped from a pencil, to blend the repair into the lumber stack.

Cabin roof touch-up

There are two backwoods cabins in the E. L. Moore collection, and when I received them they each had a roof shake missing. On the large cabin on the left you can see where the shake is missing by the light coloured area along the lower roof edge, and on the small cabin on the right, the missing piece is on the right roof edge, about three-quarters of the way up.

In accordance with my do the least restoration philosophy, I decided not to make replacement shakes, but just reduce the colour of those two light areas so they weren't so noticeable.

With a moderately sharp 4B lead pencil I lightly coloured in the areas where the shakes are missing.

On the little cabin, the result is pretty good, and the area has almost disappeared. On the big cabin, because the roof shakes have a browner shade, the area of the missing shake is still visible, but not as prominent - it now looks like some kind of weathered understructure. Hmm, it might need a need a little more work with a soft pastel. In real life it isn't too bad, but the digital image is another story. Stay tuned!

The only road leads to the lumber shed

I surfaced the road leading into the lumber shed with fine grained ballast from Woodland Scenics. It's hard to tell from the photo, but I did weather the surface with thin washes of browns and black to tone down its colour. I think I'll need to have another go because it doesn't look quite weathered enough.

The front edge will be panelled with a 1/32" sheet of balsa stained green. In the photo I've just tilted up a piece for testing the look. I'm going to hold off attaching it until detailing the base is done.

At this point I'm going to set this base aside now that basic scenicking is done and move onto creating the next one, as well as buying and creating the various detail items these things will need.

A thing about trees

As well as looking out for the elusive Space Hopper, this summer I've also been taking a close look at trees wherever we've gone. I'm thinking this winter's layout projects are going to have some better looking trees than the store bought things I've always used - now that I've closely looked at lots of real trees, those hobby shop things seem rather crude.

I've also been reading about building tree structures from braided wire. That's my first attempt using my neighbour's maple as a model. No, my wire structure isn't an exact replica, but I feel using an actual tree as a guide has pushed even this first attempt to look more like an actual tree than if I had just used some stereotype dredged up from my memory.

I used 26 strands of 0.58mm diameter florist's wire to bend up the trunk. I shot lots of pictures of trees over the last few months, so I've got lots of material to practice with.

Eric LaNal on Hugh Boutell’s role in the development of HO

More discussion with our crack 30Squares Director of Research, Vince, has turned up a little more about Hugh Boutell. In the very first issue of The HO Monthly, published in May 1948, none other than legendary model railroader Eric LaNal, aka Uncle Eric (who in real life was Dr. Alan Lake Rice, professor of German at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania), penned a humorous, although factual, article called The History of HO Gauge where he makes a brief note on Hugh Boutell’s contribution to HO’s early development,

So, by the end of the Twenties there were in England two scales, Naught-Naught (OO) and HO, both using the same (16.5 mm.) gauge.

Early American HO Layout

A pioneer or two in the U.S.A had caught the midget-gauge fever too, and a pretty little line called the “Marysport & Diddystown” was built in the mid-twenties by Hugh G. Boutell. This is the oldest American line I know of in this pint-size scale. I hear Mr. Boutell is still going strong and wish him well. He is a Model Railroad artist after my own heart.

I think artist is a good assessment given Boutell’s sophisticated scenic railroads. His layouts were right up there with those of peer Aldo Cosomati, an actual artist whose hobby was model railroading, and who likely developed the first OO scenic model railway in England.

Nothing on model buildings of course, but the article is an early indication that Boutell likely had the first known HO layout in the US, and from the picture it was a scenic one.

Hugh Boutell's 1934 layout

Hugh Boutell and his attic railroad circa 1934 - Pop Sci Aug '34

Vince sent me some interesting information in response to yesterday's post on Hugh Boutell's 1925 HO scale layout.

First, in 1994 the NMRA named Boutell a NMRA Pioneer, and noted that he had the first HO Bing layout in 1925. I interpret this to mean that Boutell built a layout based on the small scale, electric-powered toy trains the German company, Bing, started producing in 1923, and it was the first in the US.

Second, Vince pointed me to a brief article in the August 1934 edition of Popular Science that showed a photo of Boutell with a model railroad he built in the attic of his Washington, D.C. home. Among other things the article notes,

Boutell's system is housed in his attic, in Washington, D. C., where Boutell, an engineer, is in charge of the Bureau of Standards' public information section. His railroad system serves a toy community, pierces papier mache mountains, bridges imaginary rivers, and operates crossing gates, all made by Boutell. Depots, roundhouse, and shops make the model system complete.

Several things jump out at me in that photo. It's clearly not an HO scale layout. So what happened to his 1925 HO setup? However, this new layout, like his HO one, is clearly a scenic layout and not just a Plywood Pacific. Note that the buildings don't appear to be sprinkled here and there just for ambience. There are lots of buildings, and they seem to be grouped together in some sort of logical fashion. The same emphasis on building a railroad in scenery was taken by Aldo Cosomati in the early 1930's with his Alheeba State Railway, which was a groundbreaking layout in its day. Finally, some of Boutell's buildings look like Pretty Village items - which I've marked with A and B in the photo.

I can't yet confirm that they are indeed from the Pretty Village line, but from what I can see they exhibit three key characteristics: the sizes are about right, the dormers are flat tabs that stick up and hold the roofs in place (the dormers aren't three-dimensional), and there seems to be large human figures printed on the sides of some walls (Pretty Village items have oversize children printed on the walls). 

Some further sleuthing is called for. Stay tuned.

Pretty Village structures on Hugh Boutell's 1925 layout

I was going through some scans and came across this one of Hugh Boutell's 1925 layout, which I believe is one of the first - maybe even the first - known HO scale layouts in the US.

(I can't recall which magazine I scanned this image from, but when I do I'll update the reference information)

What caught my eye this time around were what looked like two buildings from the McLoughlin Brothers Pretty Village play set - I've marked them with A and B in the photo. 

Engine House snipped from C&Z

Item B is I believe the 'Engine House', which in this case is a fire engine house. There's an image in Cooper & Zillner's book of the assembled model, and to me it looks like the structure on Boutell's layout. This model is included in the Dover reprint of the Pretty Village structures.

Item A also looks to me like a Pretty Village type structure, but I can't find a match in either Cooper & Zilner or Dover. Maybe that new fangled thing called The Internet might have something. 

The search continues.

Bungalows in scale

Plasticville | Plasticville | Walthers | Plasticville

To get a better idea of how small the Plasticville bungalows are here's a comparison with Walthers so-called Ranch Tract House. I say so-called because here that house would be called a bungalow, and a ranch house would be considerably bigger while remaining single-storey. 

I think the picture gives one a sense of why the Plasticville houses are too small, even when the 1/8" scaling is discounted - the built-in garage itself takes up about 1/3 of the footprint leaving little living space. Yes, comparing models from eras that are 65+ years apart is somewhat unfair, but I was wrestling with this scale issue earlier in the year while working on a side project.

I live in a neighbourhood built just after WWII. Smaller houses, many similar in size to the Walthers house, are still more-or-less the norm, although gentrification via monster houses is making inroads. However, the city is now changing its zoning bylaws to allow 4 and 6 storey multi-unit towers - some with ground floor retail - to be built cheek-to-jowl with the older houses. The city's promotional material about these changes has been quite deceptive in its communication of how big the towers will be. To help counter those perceptions I prepared some models and took some photos for a local group to clearly show the sizes involved. I had those Plasticville models on hand, but they were just too small, so I used the Walthers model, which better represents the size of the houses involved.

I built the Walthers kit box-stock. No painting, customizations, improvements, or changes of any kind. For my purposes, it looked fine as is, and speed of construction was important. Believe it or not, I built it in a single session of about 2 hours - something of a record for me :-)

It's a good kit, and I think with some painting could be made to look more realistic and settled. So, if you're looking for post-war houses for your layout, you might want to consider these.

Fie on the towers, if the city is going to change things, I recommend new construction be limited to the Deoralow :-)

Ballast and test photos

 

Photos taken outside ....

I added ballast to the track and applied some weak washes of flat black and Tamiya smoke to tone down the ballast's rather bright grey. I also applied some test tuffs of grass, but the colour seems a little too spring-like, and I think I need to use some darker summer grass colours. I still haven't decided what sort of material should cover the road into the lumber shed. My thinking cap is applied. Stay tuned !

... to see how the colours looked in sunlight. I like the shadowing.

Just right for the Christmas garden

It looks like the term 'Christmas garden' was still in circulation in 1952 if this Bachmann Brothers ad that appeared in the September '52 issue of Model Railroader is anything to go by.

I also found it interesting that the scale of these items is listed as 1/8" = 1', which is just a tad smaller than HO scale. I have a few of those bungalow models shown on the left, and have felt that they were much too small for HO. I don't think it's because they're made to 1/8" scale, but simply because they're too small to seem like credible houses. The ad implies that they were deliberately made on the small side (... occupy a space 1/4 of that required for ordinary size train accessories ...) as this allows more time and space for actual railroad operation.

Regardless, those houses can be quite useful when a little mid-century forced perspective is wanted.

From Christmas display to HO layout

Snipped from MR August 1965

I was doing some reading about one time Model Railroader associate editor, and friend of E. L. Moore,  Bill Rau and came across an interesting structure construction article of his published in the August '65 issue of MR, Crosby's Mill and other structures. As part of the story he discusses how one of the models, the titular Crosby's Mill*, a grain elevator, started life as an item for a Christmas display in the late 1920s or early 1930s, and then describes how he later made use of it for an O gauge layout, and then recycled it again for an HO gauge setup:

The basic structure was built more than 35 years ago (JDL: probably in the later 1920s). It was one item of a set of structures I bought in Woolworth's for use on a Christmas display even before I turned to scale model railroading in 1930. The group included three village houses, a school, a drugstore, a grocery store, a station, and the sole industrial structure, a printed-side grain elevator. The models went together with tabs and slots and they could easily be set up and taken down.

When I set up the O gauge Buffalo, Allegheny & Pittsburgh RR. in my home in the early thirties, the grain elevator was installed as background scenery. Sometime during its life on the O gauge pike I cut off the tabs and slots and cemented the parts together, at the same time adding internal bracing of 1/16" thick photo mounting stock.

Came then marriage, a family, and a shift to HO gauge. A check revealed that the old elevator was close enough to HO scale to remain presentable on the new HO BA&PRy layout.

He then goes into the details of converting the Woolworth's Christmas item into a credible HO scale model grain elevator using 1930s modelling methods. Overall I found the article an interesting direct link from Christmas yards and gardens to scale model railroading. And there it was buried away in what from a casual reading of the magazine's table of contents would lead one the think was just another 1960s vintage construction article. It's always amazing to me how much history is stashed away in rather ordinary places.

*You might be asking, is Crosby's Mill named after E. L. Moore's friend Bart Crosby? It's possible. Both Bill Rau and Bart Crosby were high profile model railroaders from Pennsylvania, and both had equally high profile careers in the model railroading magazine business: Rau at MR, and Crosby at Model Trains, which  MR's parent company bought in the mid to late '50s. So maybe Crosby of Crosby's Mill fame is Bart Crosby.

Track planning with the Druids

When Sophia came by the house last week she asked if I was building a Stonehenge on the patio. Although it may look that way, it turns out I'm not.

A few weeks ago I decided to roll out a large sheet of kraft paper, around 9'x4', on the patio to draw a full-size track plan for the new layout. After awhile it started to look like rain, so I quickly gathered up the sheet, took it inside, and left the stones I used to weigh it down in place so they'd be there when I worked on it again. In the meantime I worked on renovations and the stones remained in place awaiting my return.

I decided to resume planning while the ballast dried on the E. L. Moore diorama. This time though I've moved inside.

I cleaned up the workshop a bit and decided to piece together the track on the floor in front of the layout stand. I see some problems, but resolving them is the fun of planning. Now, where did I leave my robe :-)

First layer of ground cover

I dug out my scenic materials and had a go at laying down the first layer of ground cover.

I reviewed E. L. Moore's Turn Backward, O Time article for some guidance regarding colour and texture, but all I saw was that the area looked like it was covered in some sort of level, light coloured dirt. 

Halfway through gluing down the sand mix

I mixed up some light coloured sand with a little darker dirt from the garden and some brown Woodland Scenics ground cover with an eye towards keeping the overall colour fairly light. The darker constituents are to add a little variety. This mix was bonded to the base with a thin coat of white glue spread over the brown painted areas. I covered the base in two sessions. 

Next up: ballasting the track and surfacing the back road to the lumber storage shed.

Track & painting

Over the last few days I've done a bit of work with my paints and brushes. And a little with track too.

Instead of using old sectional brass track I decided on pieces of Atlas nickel-silver code 100 flex. The ties look better, and the dog-leg piece looks more uniform than being built up from 4 pieces of old sectional track. However, even with the flex, all the ties and rails were painted to make them look a little more realistic. The base was painted with a random mix of acrylic earth tones. Most of that colour won't be seen once covered with scenic material, but for the odd area that does show through, I wanted the base coat to not be overly uniform. That grey streak at the top is the road that leads into the lumber shed.

Next job: applying the base scenic material and ballast.

Canvas for an HO Space Hopper

I was out making the rounds of the hobby shop, art supply store, and Canadian Tire shopping for supplies for the E. L. Moore dioramas and stuff for the new layout when I stumbled across this HO-scale Trinity hopper on the resale table at the hobby shop. It's a Walthers item, a bit beat-up, and it looks like an attempt at painting was made, but it's in good enough shape to see if I can turn it into a Space Hopper. Watch this space :-)

First base

The track plan

I was going to present a detailed step-by-step tutorial on how I built the first of the E. L. Moore diorama bases, but I won't. I was so keen to make some quick progress that I rushed, lost patience, and bungled things. I recovered, but it wasn't pretty, and much cursing accompanied getting things together properly, so I'll just summarize a bit.

Back view

I made a base by gluing together 2, 1" thick pieces of pink insulating foam board cut to 9" x 24". Originally I had planned to make the bases 27" long, but since the raw material came in 24" widths, I figured smaller was better, and 24" seemed to work just fine. The sides and back edges of the base block are finished with 0.040" thick styrene sheet, which will be painted black when done. The front edge will be sheeted with a piece of 1/16" thick balsa wood painted in some shade of Moore Green. The base's top surface was painted with acrylic raw sienna in preparation for scenic work.

The flat car doesn't look out of place

The track is some ancient brass rail that won't ever get used again on an operating layout, so I figured it would come in handy for these modules. My guess is E. L. Moore hand laid the track on his module, but that's beyond me at present. I think with some appropriate paint on the rail and ties, this track won't look too bad, so the next job will be to have a go at track painting to test out this idea.

Opening space

The last two modules were removed from the layout frame and have become wall art in the office - didn't have the heart to trash them, and they might get used as photo stages in the future. Now there's space for the new - and still unnamed - layout. Things are ready for fall layout construction and building E. L. Moore dioramas once the cold weather, or another lockdown, arrives. 

Casual flats

Over at Gallimore Railroading, Galen has been running an interesting series called Four Flats where he is revitalizing some Ulrich flat car models that were released in the early 1950s. It got me thinking that I should try a little spiffing up of some toy-like Bachmann freight cars I bought in the '70s and '80s to see if they might be usable with the E. L. Moore dioramas. I have a couple of 'old style' - era indeterminate other than 'old' - flat cars, so I thought I'd take one and see what I could do with what I had on hand.

Before and after

That one on the left is what the one on the right started out as, but it had three nondescript vats glued on its deck. I didn't use the one on the left as the stakes are glued into the pockets and refused to pry out, and it's missing the brake wheel.

Vats that were pried off

This is a work of casualization if there ever was one. The brake wheel, truss rods, foot straps, and so on are all too thick and crude scale-wise. I didn't worry, as I figured I'd just take the car apart, repaint it, and change out the wheels and couplers from the stash of better ones on the shelf (bought in a fit of betterment years ago when I thought I'd update everything I owned, but in the end didn't). 

The car was painted a green I thought might be some sort of Moore Green. All the other components were painted with a variety of dark and dingy washes. The rub-on EVRR lettering is decidedly an anachronism, but that's what I had on hand. I'm hoping that by sticking to using on hand materials, I can create an eclectic little fleet that at least captures something of the spirit of the EVRR.

Carstens' '52

Aunt Teek's from RMC May 1952

1952 was a big year for Railroad Model Craftsman magazine. The May issue was volume 20, number 12, the end of the magazine's first 20 years. Well, ok, the magazine started life as The Model Craftsman and covered a wide range of model building subjects, not just model trains, but 20 years in business is an accomplishment, especially when those 20 years spanned a great depression and world war. 

The RMC team took the May '52 anniversary as the opportunity to begin introducing a series of changes to up its model railroading game. Among other features, '52 saw the introduction of Frank Ellison as a regular contributor with a big series on the fundamentals of model railroading, inclusion of a monthly blueprint supplement, Lloyd Giebner started his long run as RMC's de facto structures writer, and Harold H. Carstens, aka Hal Carstens, first appeared in the May issue's masthead as Associate Editor.

Mr. Carstens, who years later would buy the magazine and become its publisher, had written articles for RMC prior to joining the staff, so he wasn't an unknown quantity to readers. Of all the pieces he published in '52, two of his structure articles made me sit up and take notice: Aunt Teek's Furniture Factory, in that May '52 issue, and The Home of Shake's Beer in June '52. It wasn't so much the projects that caught my interest, but how they were written up: both included background stories in which I heard echoes - echoes from the future :-) - of E. L. Moore.

Here's the preamble to Aunt Teek's Furniture Factory:

Ephaim and Ezekial Teek didn't have an easy time of it when they first set up their wood working shop in the hinterlands of Paramsippus. Indeed, if it hadn't been for the kind words of their plumpish aunt, Obediah Teek, they may well have given up and gone westward. As it was, Aunt Teek was hard on her furniture and required new chairs so often that the two nephews were kept almost constantly busy. While this kind of business was fine for experience, it was hard on profits.

Nevertheless, their business grew as news spread that even Aunt Teek couldn't collapse their new rugged Teak Wood furniture and soon they had to look for larger quarters. They found them in the hastily vacated stone building of Colonel Bourbon Carstairs (no relation to the author although they might possible be from the Scotch side of his family). After the government revenue agents took the Colonel away the boys moved in. The Hudson River Traction Co. laid in a freight siding and the fame of their wares spread far and wide. In fact, their products became so well known that an extra win had to be added. It is this factory that we see in the photographs and which will be described in this article.

And if that weren't enough, The Home of Shake's Beer, a brewery project of course, includes an extra dose of bad puns and cornball wordplay:

There were tears of rejoicing as Colonel Bourbon Carstairs greeted his old buddy, Bacchus Shakes, whom he hadn't seen since they once sold Indian Kickapoo Joy Juice years before in the West. Old Bacchus had sent for the Colonel in hopes that the Colonel could do something to pep up business for Bacchus' Mineral Spring Water Co. Things were in a sad state indeed. Old Bacchus had done his best, floated bonds, watered stock; anything to try and boost sales and increase revenue but, alas, it seemed as if nobody cared to drink water anymore!

But the Colonel had an idea. The water here in Boiling Springs was excellent but why waste it just to drink. Make beer out of it and they'd both clean up! Quickly they formed plans for the new company. A partnership was formed called the "Great Pard Brewing Co." and their product was to be named in honor of old Bacchus, "Shake's Beer".

There's more, including a story about Bud the brewmaster having a barrel of beer fall on him that didn't cause injury because it was full of light beer, but you probably get the idea.

Including these sorts of tall tales in what today would be a serious and pragmatic article wasn't unknown back then, but given the extensive and good natured correspondence between E. L. Moore and Hal Carstens in the years to come it made me wonder if E. L. Moore imitated Carstens' style to get noticed, or maybe adopted that style because he liked it. Or maybe there was nothing premeditated because he and Carstens' were simpatico, and their writing styles were just examples of that - Carstens maybe just recognized a kindred spirit when he came across E. L. Moore. Of course, maybe this is all just a coincidence, and I'm reading things into commonalities of the past that just aren't there. Nevertheless, it's interesting.

Left: Shake's Beer RMC June '52; Right: GNBCC HQ by Seth

One last thing. It seemed like the techniques Carstens used to build his O-scale Shake's Beer produced a model that looked rather similar to the models Seth builds for his city of Dominion. While reading though RMCs from 1952 I was also reading Seth's The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists, and his model of the Brotherhood's club HQ seemed similar, in style and technique, to Shake's Beer. Both are built from heavy cardboard; both are decorated with inked on wall blocks; both have doors and windows drawn on card or paper and pasted to the structure; both are more caricature than 'fine-scale' . They aren't identical of course, but Seth's Dominion buildings do have the vibe of how models of this sort were built in the '40s and '50s, as well representing buildings of that era and earlier. I'm not saying Seth knowingly used methods of the Carstens' era, only that the similarities are nevertheless interesting - although there are probably a limited number of ways to build structures from cardboard.