Cal's Lumberyard is ready for business!

Over the summer I'd spend time here and there, as the mood struck me, working on Cal's Lumberyard. My last post in this series was back on 8 June. I was still working on the interior walls at that time. As I moved forward on the building I didn't keep a good record of construction progress, so I'm not going to fixate on describing assembly, but focus a bit on design.

The biggest design change I made was to open up the main building and side shed so I could look into and through the structure. However, I kept the complex's dimensions, shape, and composition the same as E. L. Moore's original. For comparison you can see some photos of Mr. Moore's model here.

Opening up a building for better viewing is a design strategy I'm rather partial to. Longtime readers may recall I used a similar approach on Cal's other business: Caleb's Cabbage Company. At the time I referred to this design approach as Selective Staging, but these days I'd reconsider that term. What I'm trying to do is allow a viewer to see into, and ideally through to the far end, of a building without resorting to taking the roof off, or removing some other component, Well, regardless of what the design approach is called, I was happy with what it delivered with Caleb's, even though that structure maybe wasn't the most receptive to more open viewing with long sight lines.

So, in this spirit, I removed the side shed's front wall so boxcars could travel completely through the structure. Same idea for the narrow gauge track through the main building. I added an opening on the front wall tall enough so my narrow gauge box car could go through the entire building (As a consequence I had to open the main building's sliding door to the left to accommodate this change). I felt these two changes would greatly open up the interior for easy viewing, not to mention enhance the 'play value' of the structure.

Well, ok, yes, now that I think about it, I did make some small dimensional changes to the shed. I wanted to get my old, Bachmann 40' box cars from the '70s into the shed, and to do so I had to make the shed ends a little bit bigger, and its roof a little bit flatter.

From the photo it looks like there is lots of room to accommodate the big boxcar, but in reality it seems rather a tight fit to me.

Studying the photo a bit I could probably add the shed corner braces Mr. Moore had in his model given there seems to be enough boxcar clearance in the shed's corners.

Accommodating a boxcar also raised another problem: I had to make the opening in the wall between the main building and the shed bigger to allow for unimpeded access when the boxcar's door was open. You see that white frame in the middle of the above photo? That's the new opening I hacked out of the wall. For reference you can compare it to my first attempt at the wall shown here.

As for paint, since this is an E. L. Moore project Moore Green was called for :-)

The office was painted with Revell Aqua Color Black Green, and the main building is Revell Aqua Color Sea Green.

All the walls were dusted with some white and light grey ground up chalk pastel. Very lightly dusted I should emphasize as I wanted a somewhat new look to the building.

Although the outside is dusty green all round, inside the office the walls are a cheery Tamiya Sky Blue. The wall decorations are paper cutouts included with an old Tyco Ramsey Journal building kit.

The office interior is looking a little bare. I think it needs some filing cabinets and maybe a guest chair or two.

You can find a bit more on how the office was built here.

The office doors into the main building  have been glued into a fully open position to try and let light through from the office windows and from inside the main building. Again, this is in accordance with the overall design strategy I've adopted for this model. In real life I imagine these doors would be closed all the time to prevent wood dust from entering the office.

To get a bit of an idea of what the viewing looks like through the building here's looking from outside the boxcar shed all the way through to the office windows. All light is natural sunlight shining through open doors, windows, the clerestory, and boxcar openings. In this view the main building's roof is on.

Here's another view looking inside in all natural light. I'm rather happy with how I can see all the way inside. Ok, when there're people and lumber and stuff in there we'll see how it stands up. 

Above is a view from just above the wood loft looking down into the narrow gauge unloading area. Instead of flooring the loft with a solid sheet of textured styrene I did it with individual styrene strips spaced rather dangerously apart. Although in real life this floor might pose a lethal tripping hazard, I wanted to maximize the chance for light getting through from the clerestory to the floor of the main building. I find that to have success with the through viewing design strategy I have to look for every opportunity to let ambient light into the model.

Here's a drone's eye view of the main building with its roof taken off. Although the loft floor is a tripping hazard writ large, and there is no guardrail to prevent Cal from falling into a narrow gauge freight car, the loft access ladders have been thoughtfully painted in safety orange.

Speaking of the main building's roof, here it is built in classic E. L. Moore style, but with styrene instead of wood. The trusses are just trapezoids cut from 0.040" thick sheet styrene. I toyed with the idea of building up the trusses from individual styrene strips to make them look more realistic and further improve light transfer from the clerestory, but I admit to losing patience by the time I got to roof construction and took the easy way out.

I should note that this roof and the boxcar shed's are panelled with HO scale Campbell Scale Models corrugated aluminum. Weld Bond was used to glue down the panels. On the other hand, the office and boiler house were 'panelled' with masking tape to simulate some sort of ersatz tar paper roofing.

Ah, the boiler house, it's snugged into a back corner made by the main building and the office. Mine is built up from 0.060" thick styrene sheet and panelled with with some styrene sheet brick. For the door and window I used Tichy Train Group items from my spares box.

I assume this little building would be used to power belt driven saws of some sort. Other than a little table saw in E. L. Moore's model, I don't see any such equipment. Maybe I should add an electric power pole to the model for juice and just say the old boiler house is now being used for storage. 

One more design modification I should point out. I like to try and consolidate the floor levels in buildings if it's possible. 

On this project I tried to bring the loading platforms and interior floors to more-or-less the same level. I like the smoother sight line flow this produces. So, in the picture above you can see I got rid of the separate loading dock on the front wall, unified the entry platform from the office to the boxcar shed, and tried to adjust the interior floor levels to make sense with this long, front platform. I did a loading dock levelling on Mr. Moore's Jones Chemical Co. to make it a little more understandable to my mind, but I should have gone further and joined the two loading docks at the corner. This is just something to think about if you're planning on tackling an E. L. Moore project.

This model has been something of a circle completion exercise as well as an interesting design project. Over there is what's left of my Cal's Lumberyard I built 50 odd years ago in late 1973 or early 1974. It's all balsa wood and paper and youthful enthusiasm. My eyesight was a lot better in those days, but some improvement has occurred in the patience department.

And lastly, I did use balsa on one important piece: the sign. It's pure, 100% balsa, enhanced with Letraset from the '70s.

Hey, would you straighten the sign on your way out?