Buddy, do ya got a light?

Added LED strip.

Added interior box.

Empty interior box.

Worn sign.

Foundation leaks light.

Down on its luck.

When's the next streetcar get here?

The Toronto Three

E. L. Moore's Carolina Foundry in paper

Left: E. L. Moore's original | Right: Clever Models kit

Galen alerted me to this very decent paper model of E. L. Moore's Carolina Foundry by Clever Models. I couldn't resist doing a side-by-side comparison with Mr. Moore's original.

Design Notes on Sight Lines: Roads, Paths, Sidewalks, and Track

Main street on LOL II, aka the 'Way Out Layout'

Photographing the Red Car Barn revived my thinking about an organizing principle I like a model railroad to have: lines I can sight down. Along with buildings one can see into and through, I consider interesting sight lines essential. I like to have a sun roof in a car too, but that's another story :-)

These lines can be provided by roads, paths, sidewalks, and of course track. It was on the LOL that I first played with lines, mainly through the addition of roads and sidewalks to connect the different parts of the layout. I'd look at various areas and think, could someone walk or drive or cycle there, or if they took the train or streetcar, how would they get around when they got off? I made physical changes in answer to those questions.

I think when I had developed the layout to a certain point sight lines became obscure, and that was a contributing factor to me taking the LOL apart. Looking back, when I added a shelf extension for the World's Biggest Bookstore I inadvertently changed a long, open view of the main street into a canyon that was harder to look into. Some interesting pictures resulted, but in the end it was limiting.

Ocean Alley

The follow up to the LOL, the never finished Alta Vista TC, was a sight lines disappointment. I didn't learn from bad sight lines created on the LOL. I built a main road on the Alta Vista TC for the streetcars walled in on both sides by buildings. I focused too much on having open real estate for buildings, and not enough on looking at them and the streetcars once everything was in place. I'd have to look over the back sides of the buildings to watch the streetcars. Eventually it seemed to me that as well as being far too big for my workshop, it didn't have enough possible views, and was going to become a boring exercise in making buildings simply to fill in open spaces along the main drag. The main drag was a going to be a drag.

So, on LOL II, the main street (still unnamed) is built up on just one side so I can get as many long views, or sideways panoramas, as I can dream up. There're no buildings 'on the other side' blocking my view. The one way street, Ocean Alley (name still up in the air), is a quasi-canyon: buildings on one side and a broken edge of trees, buildings, rocks, and small buildings on the other, but there's a long, so far interesting sight line.

Then there's the sight line from the parking / unloading track that starts at Ocean Alley and sticks into the pad where the urban buildings are located.

And there's the view down the track that runs along the edge of the beach. You can also see the parking / unloading track that intersects Ocean Alley that I previously mentioned.

The last long sight line runs along the dirt path that starts around the Red Car Barn, snakes past the surf shop, beachside cottages and the Ocean View Hotel, and ends at the Barbecue off in the distance  

The bird's eye view shows dense packed buildings in the urban area. From above it's certainly not realistic, but there is method to my madness.

A few months ago I was cleaning up the workshop and moving things around. I collected up all the little buildings I could see and randomly set them on the layout just to get them out of harm's way. All of the Toronto buildings went upstairs and were placed on a shelf.

After I'd done a bit of tidying up I glanced over at the layout and rather liked the jumble of structures. It had that packed in feel I was looking for. Organizationally it was wrong, but it felt right.

The next day I started to slide the models around, looking for sight lines and opening walkways to the sidewalk along Ocean Alley. This created a number of secondary and shorter sight lines out to the ocean. I also found many of the buildings were in need of minor repairs, so maintenance was done along with urban planning. 

Planning a downtown Toronto micro layout

I also realized that my Toronto buildings were going to need their own little layout to properly capture the feeling I wanted to get across with them - that's something else I wasn't able to accomplish with the Alta Vista TC. 

While in an urban planning mood I did a bit of fiddling with those buildings too to see if a micro-layout would suffice. It turned out a layout a little larger than micro sized might work, but development of that is for another time.

I'm not done fiddling with the LOL II's organization, but I feel it's heading in the right direction. Maybe it always will be just heading somewhere and never really arriving. That's ok as long as it keeps heading to interesting configurations. 

I know this isn't model railroading. It's just me creating a layout based on what I like and want to look at. It's just playing around.

Getting back to the LOL II, this is one of the secondary walkways that connects main street to Ocean Alley. At the entry is the Towers discount store on the left and the Chapters on the right. You can see one of the tall beach spotlights off in the distance.

There are 4 of these secondary sight lines branching off the main street.

I made sure the little Centennial Experimental Farm, LOL III, layout also had a main sight line: the pedestrian gravel path that runs the entire length of the layout from the street .....

... to the apex of the turn around loop. The visual implication is that the path crosses the road and leads to the farm's other facilities.

There's also a secondary sight line along the gravel path that is used to lead the cows from an off site barn to the pasture on the layout. It crosses a road and the streetcar has to stop at the crossing.

So the paths lead the eye into the layout and are used to imply there's a surrounding world of which this is a piece.

 

Establishing sight lines on the Loonar Module was tricky, and I wasn't completely successful. I think it's because the layout is basically a circle.

In this case I tried to establish two leading into the centre of the island. One runs from the end of the dock and up the concrete steps to the shed at the top...

... and the other extends from the end of the causeway, across the circular test track, and up the gravel road to the parking spot.

I think in this case the visual interest is created by the 4 separate scenes - which blend into each other as one walks around the layout - carved out by the tall trees, which create an effective visual barrier. The Toronto layout will also use tall elements - skyscrapers instead of trees - to separate scenes.

EVRR's valley beyond the long dividing trestle

I'm not sure if E. L. Moore's Elizabeth Valley RR had any distinctive or signature sight lines. It doesn't look like it did. Maybe along the trestle that divided the layout in two?

I think what it was famous for was it's level of completion. Being a rather small layout at 4'x6' it was a good showcase of what a model railroader of modest means could achieve. The level of detail and finish that went into the layout was impressive, even by today's standards.

If it did have dramatic sight lines they would be difficult to photograph as it's my understanding that E. L. Moore used a Graflex press camera. Even a 35 mm SLR would be difficult to maneuver in and amongst the layout's features for dramatic perspective photos. The N-scale tribute layout and a digital camera might uncover some interesting views.

Red Car Barn

Last Sunday I was looking around for a small, simple kit to build to take my mind off things for a little while. I considered a few projects, but settled on AHM's Village Smithy. I had bought this model a few years ago with the goal of using it as a donor for refurbishing the one I built in the '70s. I figured, what the heck, just build it, refurbishment of the old relic can wait some more.

I decided not to go crazy on modifications as I wanted to finish it fast. I wanted to see if I could create a sense of flow by not prolonging construction. Considering my track record, I built this one dead fast: started on Sunday and added some finishing touches Friday. And yes, I entered that state of mental flow a few times and found the experience of building this barn quite pleasant.

At the outset I also decided it wasn't going to be a blacksmith. Since my very first E. L. Moore build back in '73 was a version of Bunn's Feed & Seed converted to an automobile garage I settled on this being a garage too. I think I'm fixated on garages these days, but it is what it is.

I'm not going to describe the barn's construction in detail as it's pretty simple. I'll just note a few minor changes.

I cut open the back wall where the little addition attaches to the main barn so that one can look all the way through the big front doors to the window in the addition's back wall.

The second storey hatch door on the front wall was replaced with an N scale Tichy Train Group window casting from my spares box. 

The base was cut away from the barn's floor and discarded. I should note that the floor was cut in such a way that it fit inside the barn and was surrounded by the walls instead of having the walls sit on top of it, which is the way the kit was designed. This meant the roof opening for the chimney had to be opened up a little so the chimney would properly sit on the floor.

Speaking of the chimney, it was moved to the back so that it didn't block the front entrance. The roof panels are symmetrical so flip-flopping the chimney to the back is no problem. Now, whether it is advisable to park gasoline powered cars near an open flame is entirely another sort of problem :-)

But, maybe the fire is inoperable these days because I didn't include the coal shed in the build.

Given this is the 21st century, and the neighbourhood the barn's located in, and the expensive cars inside, security cameras were called for. Well, at least signs indicating there were security cameras watching.

The barn was painted red to take it back to its roots. Green, being E. L. Moore's favourite colour, was used for the trim to give the kit's designer a tip of the hat.

I didn't have any plan to use this building, just construct it for purposes of mind soothing. However, while looking for a place to snap a beauty shot I absentmindedly plopped it down on the Way Out Layout where you see it in the drone view and instantly thought it belonged there. In fact I immediately had a mental image about how I wanted the large field between the road and the ocean to develop. All that from one careless placement of a building done in a carefree manner. I see lots of things to work on in the aerial view. Maybe they'll be next.

[Mid-morning update]: As seen outside the Red Car Barn early this morning:

[Mid-afternoon update]: A B&W in B&W:

Grilles kitbashed from Walthers Al's Victory Service

Late night rooftop concert at Grilles

I was chatting with Galen about this year's Walthers 2024 NMBRO. I was surprised to see that Walthers HO scale Al's Victory Service Gas Station was one of the base kits in the Kitbashing category. I was surprised because I had used that kit for a kitbash of sorts back in 2011. I'm not eligible to enter, but if you want to, um, "borrow" the idea, go right ahead :-) Here're the instructions. Good luck!

Looks like nobody was in any shape to drive home and wisely took the streetcar instead

The Blasphemy of Bill Schopp

 In It Ain’t Railroading, But ... it’s a lot of fun, RMC, July 1960, Bill Schopp describes a model trains game he and a friend played. He starts his story with the outcome:

The Result

“…I hadn’t had so much fun with a model railroad since 1944.”

Then he goes on to outline the frame of mind you need to play the game:

The Precondition

“…you must not regard your trains, or at least the trains you run in this ‘game’ as sacred…”

Then, if you want the result, and are ok with the precondition, you’re ready to play:

Layout Schopp used for the game; RMC July '60

The Game

1. “…start a fast piece of motive power…out just ahead of…” a loco that is a lot slower.

2. Since “…the track, altho shaped like a water wings, is essentially a big oval,…” it “… was not too many laps before the faster…” loco “…got pretty close behind the slower...” loco.

3. “The idea then was, with the aid of the two passing sidings drawn, to run the faster engine around the slower one without stopping. You’d have to get just the right distance behind the slower one coming down the homestretch toward the entrance switch to the passing siding to be used. This sometimes entailed grabbing it with the hand and holding it, wheels spinning, until enough space had been opened up. There was stopping or holding sections along the track but not quite as many as drawn on the plan, so that unrailroadlike tricks had to be used.”

“Back about fifteen years before that I recall doing similar running wild with tinplate engines on various layouts we would set up.”

Any chance on the Way Out Layout?

The Summary

“What it requires is a layout with some chance of doing it, as well as a recognition on your part that all model trains are not sacred.”

If the letters-to-the-editor column is anything to go by, this piece of sacrilege appeared to pass without comment from RMC’s readers. Not so a much more seemingly benign Bill Schopp article called, Stalling at Switches, that appeared a year and a bit later in the Nov ’61 issue. In it Schopp discusses various approaches for fixing the common problem of having locos stall at switches - the summary is in the article's title :-) - that a friend of his was having on his layout. He lists 4 points that could alleviate the problem. The 4th deals with a finicky directional slide switch on the layout’s power pack as being a potential problem since these little switches had no centre off setting. He goes on to tell about an operational solution to get around the lack of a centre off position:

“This means [JDL: having no centre off that is] once you choose your direction with the slide switch, you start and stop the train by means of the speed control knob. Very realistic you may say, “just like real trains.” But also, I say, very annoying when switching. I much prefer to have toggle switches (short or bat-handled) with center-off position on my power packs. Then I can turn the speed control full-on [JDL: full-on is bolded in the text] and control direction and stopping of the train with the reverse switch. If the train is too fast, as rubber band diesels would be, I cut the speed control down to 3/4 or 1/2 speed and leave it there except for very finicky operations.”

Maybe it was the term full-on appearing in bold that caught John Allen’s eye, but the operational recommendation got him to send off a letter to the editor. In RMC’s January ’62 Safety Valve column he had this to say:

“It was a sorry surprise to read on page 43, November RMC, that a modeler of Bill Schopp’s skill and experience would say, and I quote, “… Then I can turn the speed control FULL ON and control direction with my reverse switch.” This must sound like blasphemy to each modeler who tries to run his trains in a realistic manner. An engineer would find himself quickly removed from the job if he followed this advice, on most of the model railroads with which I am acquainted.”

A couple of reflections on the above. With the benefit of looking back 60+ years, Mr. Allen failed to note that Schopp did say that if full-on was too much, then try a lower setting. I think the point Schopp was trying to make was to leave the throttle in a fixed position, but the bold text presentation of  ‘full-on’ undermined the message. More importantly though, these two excursions from orthodoxy further strengthening my thought that Schopp was model railroading’s amateur scientist. Any truly creative scientist, amateur or professional, is going to try some things now and then that might be fun and interesting but look odd to the establishment. I wonder if he played bongos?