The observation shelter at Inspiration Point

The finished shelter awaits placement on the layout.

On the Mt. Lowe railway there was a large, open air shelter at Inspiration Point. It allowed visitors to get out of the weather while they had a look at the spectacular views of the San Gabriel Valley, Los Angeles, and Santa Catalina Island in the Pacific Ocean. 

For reference I loosely based my shelter on the photo of the real thing found on page 192 of Mount Lowe: The Railway in the Clouds by Charles Seims.

Suitably inspired I set about designing a much smaller version for my little layout.

Preliminary sketches and working drawing for a small, S-scale observation shelter

The structure is built more-or-less entirely from styrene except for the corrugated aluminium roofing and 3x5 card roof flashing.

Speaking of the roof, that's where I started.

Roof panels in jig.

I made up a foam board jig for holding the roof pieces in alignment while the glue set up. Each roof piece is cut from 0.020" thick sheet styrene according to the dimensions in the working drawing.

It seems like a complicated structure, what with those intersecting angles in the centre, but appearances are deceiving. The trick is to first layout the 'straight' edges of each piece using the dimensions from the front and side elevations on the working drawings, then connect the remaining 'opening' with a line that will then become the edge of the angled side. No measuring of angles is required. 

The roof holds its shape once the glue is dry.

Once the glue has hardened the structure holds its shape without any additional supports. I did add rafters and trusses to make the roof look right, and they did firm up the structure even more, but the structure can be handled without them. Any inaccuracies in gluing can be sanded out at this stage to yield a rather uniform structure.

First round of roof trusses installed.

The roof trusses were built up in the same manner as those made for the Poppyfield Flats station to give the two structures something of a family look.

At this stage I wasn't sure how many trusses to add, and only glued in the minimum number. I was trying to decide if I should make the inside roof truss detail representative of a real roof, or just add enough to suggest everything was there. I eventually went with the latter. I think if this was an O-scale or larger structure, it would be necessary to add in all the detail for the sake of appearances, but S is still relatively small to just suggest it.

All trusses added. The ones second from ends have their bottom stringers thickened.

So, here's the roof with a few more trusses and beams added so that casual glances inside suggest structure. 

You may notice the trusses that are second from the ends have had their bottom stringers thickened. I discovered an alignment problem when I placed the roof on the support posts, and the easiest way to correct it was to add more stringers to the inside bottom of both trusses. Ideally I should have repositioned the trusses, but by the time a test uncovered the problem, it wasn't going to be easy to tear them out, so I cheated :-)

Roof is panelled with corrugated aluminum.

The roof is panelled with pieces of Campbell corrugated aluminum glued on with Weld Bond. Flashing is cut from a piece of 3x5 card and held on with 3M transfer tape.

Building up the front and back walls.

The walls are simpler to make than the roof. The posts are cut from 0.125" x 0.125" square styrene strips and sandwiched between two pieces of 0.040" thick sheet styrene that make up the inner layer of the half-wall. 

At first I thought the back wall would have openings so visitors could wander onto the rock behind the shelter. Well, test placements showed the shelter took up nearly all the area on Inspiration Point. Allowing visitors to wander out back was just an invitation to falling off the cliff! So, I changed the design and made the back wall just as solid and contiguous as the front. 

Gluing up the walls. Now it's beginning to look like something!

The stone surfacing is just pieces of stone-textured styrene sheet glued onto the styrene sub-structure.

Concrete capping for the stone wall is pieced together from styrene scraps.

The concrete capping is made from pieces of 0.040" thick styrene scraps. Once trimmed to size, any gaps were filled in with putty and sanded to give a uniform surface.

And that's basically it for construction. Before gluing the roof to the posts, both assemblies were painted. The white is Vallejo's cool white acrylic. The capping is a mixture of some old Model Master aged concrete and camouflage grey. The rock walls were painted with acrylics used to paint the mountains. Rock weathering and mortaring was added with Tamiya brown panel liner.

I'll likely need to do some colour corrections on the stonework once the shelter has been installed on the layout, but it'll be interesting blending it in.

Well, that's 2 of the layout's 3 structures done. The one remaining is the circular bridge. Before I step up to that challenge, I'll need to mellow out. While working on the shelter this version of the Foster Sylvers' classic Misdemenor by Admad Jamal came up on an 'Round Midnight show I was listening to and it did the trick and will no doubt do it again in the future.

It all begins and began at the Painted Post

No, the Painted Post Smoke Shop wasn't located between Coles and Thrifty's. They're just for scale

Over the years I’ve had a few conversations with Vince where I’ve lamented the fact that there seems to be very few layouts inspired by the TTC’s streetcar network. Maybe none. I’ve seen a few model railway layouts with some streetcar track added, prowled by TTC streetcars, and sprinkled with a few of Toronto’s signature buildings, but nothing completely Toronto and TTC and streetcar. Nothing that makes a statement or has a singular vision. I think Little Canada comes the closest, but it’s a commercial tourist attraction for children. Personal layouts, built by dedicated amateurs or folk artists, that focus on Toronto's TTC streetcars and environs, well, I haven’t seen any - if you have, please let me know, my knowledge is quite scant in this area and I'd like my strong statements to be wrong.

Memory drawing of the '60s / '70s version of the Painted Post Smoke Shop

I’ve toyed with adding features reminiscent of the Toronto I knew to my layouts. The Lost Ocean Line, the Alta Vista Transit Commission, and the Way Out Layout, all had some features, but they were always diluted with other very non-Toronto, non-TTC aspects. They never fully communicated what I had in mind. 

Walls are laminated from 3 pieces of 4-ply Bristol board + 1 piece of brick embossed styrene

As I’ve become familiar with micro-layout thinking, selective compression, observation, and abstraction I’ve tried to use those concepts to design a Toronto and TTC inspired streetcar layout, or at least come up with the broad outlines of one. In retrospect getting familiar with those concepts was crucial to making such a layout achievable. 

Testing wall fit before gluing.

Look, the TTC and its streetcars date back to 1921, and Toronto streetcar service in general goes back even further to 1861. So, you’ve got this streetcar system with a long history, a vast network of track, many types of vehicles that have operated on it over the years, and many, many different areas the cars rumbled through. To build anything you have any chance of completing you’re going to have to make decisions, and those decisions are going to reflect a personal view. There are no absolute right or wrong decisions regarding the layout's theme and design, which means there is no definitive Toronto streetcar layout. Any layout will reflect the concerns and interests of its designer. Given the TTC's long streetcar history there are conceivably many possible layouts in all sorts of styles, genres, and scales, so TTC streetcar system layout designs will be hard to exhaust.

1/16" thick clear plastic for the front wall. Walls are now glued together with Weld Bond

My layout won't be a micro, but it will be small, much smaller than what is considered small over here, and will focus on places and vehicles that have some sort of meaning to me. Operation isn’t a priority, but story is. Liberties will be taken to tell it, which is where micro-layout thinking, selective compression, observation, and abstraction come in, not to mention other things I’ve learned over the years. 

Front window framing drawn on a sheet of 0.010" thick styrene.

I’ve decided to stop scribbling and commit to building, beginning this year. It’ll likely take 2 or 3 - hopefully not 4 - years to construct, but I need more non-worldly, complex tasks to help take my mind off things now and then. The Toronto and Mt. Lowe layouts should do the trick as these are both layouts I’ve wanted to build for a long time. I figure if I can get the base built and track installed this year I’ll be doing well.

Transfer tape was stuck to the back of the window frame piece. It will stick the frame to the 'glass'.

Like I said, it isn’t going to be a big layout, likely only slightly bigger than the family room coffee table as far as foot print is concerned - cities are dense packed after. It’ll be roughly rectangular with Scarborough at one end and downtown at the other. My Scarborough includes the old Painted Post Smoke Shop where I’d buy my model building magazines and comics in olden days, so I thought I’d construct that little structure first to ease into things, and to provide some counterpoint to my ongoing Mt. Lowe layout work. 

Unfortunately the transfer tape resulted in a very rough cut that required lots of clean up. Next time I'll go back to individual styrene pieces for window frames.

I realised recently that when I lived in Toronto it was full of excellent bookstores and libraries - maybe it still is - and I had developed routes I would travel between them. Those routes varied with my age and circumstances over the years, but I was an inveterate bibliophile from my earliest memories - I still am :-) - so I would regularly travel my routes looking for treasure. Cars were rarely involved so I didn’t get chauffeured around - I didn’t have one as a teen - so it was always my own two feet, buses, streetcars, and subways that provided transport. Even when I did own a car, its only job on one of those trips was to get me to a subway station parking lot. My little layout will be inspired by those routes and modes of transport in some way. If you’re a regular reader here you’ll know I’m keen on using pathways as a design strategy, which will come in handy. 

I was still in denial about the rough window frames at this point. Sign is a printout laminated between 2 pieces of very thin, clear plastic using transfer tape as the bonder.

I wasn’t a snobby reader. I read whatever seemed interesting from low-brow to high-brow and all the brows in between. As a boy and young teen the low to middle brow magazine and comic book offerings of the Painted Post Smoke Shop, a short walk from our house in Scarborough, exerted a magnetic pull. I bought a lot there, and got kicked out a few times with a loud reminder that the store wasn’t a public library :-) That’s where I bought the issue of Model Railroader magazine that introduced me to the work of E. L. Moore, so naturally it needs a place on the layout.

Everything's glued in place. The end of the grey area marks where a false back wall will be added.

The model is just a rather elaborately decorated blue box with a removable lid for a roof. The prototype was a unit in a strip mall, but I've sliced it out from its brothers and so felt I had to panel the new exterior walls with the same mottled blue brick that I recall surfaced the façade. 

The roof is a removable lid glued up from 4-ply Bristol board. An LED strip is used to light the interior. That white piece of paper used for the ceiling diffuses the LED's light. 

I had the 4-ply Bristol board out from the Cape Breton Island FireHouse project and decided to use it on this build since I was on a roll. All the wall laminates of 4-ply you see in the photos were made with transfer tape, and Weld Bond was used to glue up the walls and floor into a single structure.

You can see the LED strip attached to the false wall at the back. There's a strip of thin clear plastic glued to the front of the LED's light box.

The prototype still exists, but it appears the only part that's the same as in days gone by is the metal window framing on the façade. So, I used that as a guide to layout and dimension the building. Everything else is from memory - you've been warned :-)

A hole was drilled in the bottom for the LED's wires.

The model still doesn't have an interior. I have some sort of mental block when it comes to them. I leave room for interior detail, but it's hit-and-miss as to whether I ever get around to providing any. Maybe in a year or so when the layout has some sort of rudimentary form I'll get some interior inspiration. 

The façade after a lot of scraping on the window frames to de-fuzz them. Results are mixed.

It looks a bit forlorn standing there empty. I know, I'm fixating on the window frames, but once posters appear in the windows, and shelves in the interior, I think my focus will shift. And then there's that old issue I have that digital cameras can make things look worse than in real life.

Hmmm. Some trim needs repositioning.

I don't recall what the building looked like out back. This is all minimalist guess work on my part. Some weathering will be needed when the time comes to place this in a layout scene, but until then I'll just contemplate its blueness. 

That's all for now. Coffee's brewing. To wind down, de-interiorize, de-fuzz, and enjoy the blue, here's the legendary Holly Cole, the 2013 winner of the Montréal International Jazz Festival's Ella Fitzgerald award, singing an equally legendary Johnny Nash song.

From the 'Time Marches On' files

1980, through November 2012, to 2014

October 2016

February 2025

2013 to ?

Some King St. streetcars in their natural habitat*

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*Observed on a anthropological field trip in late February 2025.

Delving into the Mysteries of Model Railway Illumination

It weighs in at a slim 59 pages

Back in January I was rooting around Abe randomly looking for unusual model railway books. I'm always curious to see what might turn up. I was not disappointed on this expedition. 

As soon as I saw the title of this book I knew I had to have it. It's not a subject you typically see an entire book devoted to. Especially when you consider its year of publication, 1955. It's written by E. F. Carter and published by Percival Marshall of London. An inside page tells me Carter wrote 15 other model railway books for this publisher.

Of the 15, Carter hints at this book being a little unusual in his preface:

"It may be said by some that Model Railways already give sufficient satisfaction in operation without any additions or complications, and, in one sense this may be in part true. Yet there must be an intense and added interest from watching railway operations in full scale being carried out after dark. There is a subtle fascination due to not being able to see all that is going on. An engine is then only recognisable by its running lights and the indication of a semaphore only by its lamps. There is an air of mystery over the whole railway scene.

"The running of a railway - real or model - during the hours of daylight is only half the story, and if it was only fully realised that as much, if not more, activity takes place on our railways during the hours of darkness, there would undoubtedly be a whole-hearted attack on the "night running" problems of our model lines.

"It is this end that the present book has been penned, and it is the writer's sincere hope that the reader will through its medium be tempted to explore a most fascinating field. The work involved is simple and not in any sense meticulous; moreover, the basic cost of materials is low, and the writer has - as usual - endeavoured to show how the greater bulk of the auxiliary apparatus can be made from "bits and pieces" usually to be found in the junk box or around the house"

An example of 'piping' light into a building via a tube or glass rod

So, in the junk box or around the house in 1955 - well, let's call it the early 1950s - there were no LEDS or fibre optic cables. And, they weren't for sale or in use on model railways. The internet tells me the first practical LED wasn't produced until 1962, and the first fibre optic cable was invented 10 years earlier in 1952. Without those mainstays of today's lighting systems, we're looking at lighting with small incandescent lamps enhanced with some interesting tricks, some of which Carter presents in this book.

I was particularly interested in the tricks discussed in chapter 2, On Lighting Station Buildings. Carter outlines three. The first is what he refers to as 'piped lighting', which one might think of as a rather rudimentary way to channel light in the pre-fibre optics era. Basically, a metal tube or glass rod is placed in front of a light bulb and pointed to where you want to the light to go, usually towards something that will disperse the beam, like the suspended clear glass jewel shown in figure 12. This allows light to be piped into relatively confined spaces with the bulk - and heat - of an incandescent bulb remaining outside the structure. Carter also notes the building's interior should be painted matte white to aid light dispersion, and the pipe, whatever its material, should be at least 1/4" in diameter. I suspect light losses, either in a tube or glass, would be considerable. 

Other examples of using light piping for various sorts of lighting fixtures

Carter also mentions that mirrors can be used to light a building's interior by mounting a mirror "at an angle of 45° to the underside of the baseboard, reflecting the light in "bulk" upwards through a hole immediately under the building to be illuminated, on to the surface of a faceted bead or beads hung by a wire from the roof, as well as to the white-painted ceiling of the structure."

Carter ends the chapter with a third lighting method, and one I certainly wouldn't recommend experimenting with: luminous paints that make use of strontium compounds and uranium nitrate. He gives recipes so you can mix your own! If I'm reading the text correctly these were available at the local chemist's [aka pharmacy for us here in Canada] at the time, although he mentions some might need to be special ordered :-) Different times indeed.

Overall it's a fascinating look at lighting methods in the immediate post war era prior to LEDS and fibre optics. 

The back cover and spine are blank! Cost saving I assume?

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The videos illustrating this post were sourced from the following three YouTube channels:

Havelock Yard

Eric Gagnon

Steve Boyko

All are excellent and highly recommended.

Trolley wire support post

I'm going to need a lot of trolley wire support posts as I did on the Central Experimental Farm layout. I was curious about what making these ones would entail, so I went ahead and built the one for the Poppyfield Flats siding to find out. It's location was hinted at in yesterday's test photo*. Here's a bit wider angle view of that image to get a better idea of where the post is located on the Flats.

The post has two wire support arms: one for holding the wire over the siding, and the other for the wire over the Flats perimeter track. The post itself is just a piece of 0.100" x 0.100" square-section styrene strip with floral wire for the trolley wire support arms. Some plastic bolt castings were used to provide a little bit of greeblie detail. The post was simple to make, but I can see that making a lot of them is going to be time consuming.

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*In my reading last year about Malcolm Furlow's work on the San Juan Central it was noted that he would light and stage scenes on the overall unfinished layout as construction went along to assess how things were shaping up for taking scenic photos instead of waiting til the end. This seems like a good idea and I find it's helping me develop the scenery on this little layout. I can see a number of places in yesterday's test photo that I want to fix up before I get too far along.

Where's the trolley?

Tunnel Vision, 1893

Tree factory

I need a lot of trees. Maybe 50. Lots for the Mt. Lowe layout. Some for that lumber shed diorama. A few to have around just in case. Right now I'm twisting up armatures for conifers. It'll take awhile to make 'em, but time's not an issue.

Getting my kit together

When I started this project a few weeks ago I thought I was simply going to write a post telling about how I customized Dapol's little Engine Shed kit (# C007) into a sort of back country engine house for an HO-9 diesel which, along with Cal's and Artz lumber yards, would complete the scene on the little diorama that's been bouncing around in the back of my mind for quite sometime.

But as the project proceeded I came to realize that what I should be telling you is "Don't buy this kit" instead of how to overcome its many problems as I set about trying to customize it. And I also realized that I should be telling myself to get off the old kits and old builds diversion I'm on and get back to the projects I'm really interested in, but have been avoiding properly committing to.

Brick Price's engine house in his book, Modeling Narrow-Gauge Railroads

But first, let's back up to where this story begins. I wanted the diorama to have a little engine house near the grounds of the lumber yards for the HO-9 engine that moves logs and lumber to the sheds. Logically the scene doesn't make any sense. It's just a flimsy excuse for displaying some favourite buildings on a coffee table sized layout. I had in mind a little kitbash Brick Price did where he converted the large, two-stall, standard gauge Revell Engine House into a small, single-stall, narrow gauge engine house. I've shown it in the above photo.

However, after studying the size of the 'small' engine house, I came to understand it would still be rather large compared to the lumber sheds. Too large really, and it would dominate the scene. I didn't want that.

After some humming-and-hawing and searching magazines and books and the internet I stumbled across an old single stall engine house kit by Dapol. The architecture is English, but not overly so that maybe it could be palmed off as something built over here in the late 19th or early 20th century by builders schooled in English building methods. 

And, most importantly, the kit was cheap and simple, so I ordered one :-)

Upon its arrival the adventure - and the soul searching - began.

In this example, the doors don't fit, requiring work on the panels and hinges.

As I worked on the kit, it seemed that every piece either had a problem with warpage, lots of flash, large, ugly mould ejector pins, or poor fit that had to be fixed up, and this work was in addition to the relatively minor changes I had planned to make to the model. It reminded me of the highly frustrating trip down memory lane I took with the Revell Gran Turismo.

Ok, to give the manufacturer its due, they do indicate on the outside of the kit's packaging there might be issues with the parts:

"Please note that whilst we strive for perfect quality, due to the age of the tooling, it is inevitable that some flashing and slightly mis-moulded parts will arise. If this is the case and the kit is unusable, please return the kit to your retailer with proof of purchase for a replacement."

The instruction sheet also mentions that softening warped parts by immersing them in hot water can help you get them straight. I don't know what state the parts need to be in to be deemed unusable given that guidance. The kit can be built, but for what on the surface seems like a straightforward beginner level kit, it strikes me as requiring a lot of work. 

 

The packaging mentions that the kit dates back 50 years at the time it was printed. The internet tells me it dates from the early 1960s, maybe 1961, so it has been in production a long time. I'm thinking maybe too long. I can understand the desire to keep it in production, being a cash cow and everything. But, who's it for? I think it would require an unusual amount of work for a beginner to produce a middling model, and a more experienced modeller might take more pleasure from a scratchbuild. Maybe a beginner might simply forego a simple kit like this and just tackle scratchbuilding an engine shed as a first foray into the field.*

I panelled the wall's inside surfaces with styrene to make them flat and uniform

And what were those customizations I had in mind? 

    1. Shorten the foundation brick course so the doors didn't leave an opening of a few feet above the track.

    2. Add a very simple interior so that casual glances inside leave an impression that there is an interior to this model.

Both changes were pretty simple. Some rows of bricks were sawn off the bottom of the building, which meant the opening for the doors on the rear wall had to be increased to compensate. No problem with this.

Some old Superquick brick paper was glued on.

The kit's inside wall surfaces aren't flat. I glued in scraps of 0.040" thick sheet styrene to level up the various interior projections and create flat surfaces for gluing on brick paper. No problem with this either.

I know, corner magnets are the on-trend thing to use til the glue dries, but I still use elastic bands.

However, I must admit, the walls do glue together alright. Although, what you can't see in the above picture is the curvature in the side walls. To straighten them out I scratchbuilt a ladder frame from styrene strips, and then glued that sub-structure into the upper perimeter of the walls, which you can see in the photo below.

Installing the upper ladder frame to reduce wall warping.

The ladder frame suggests rafters, but more importantly, I guess, is that sub-structure more-or-less gets rid of the wow** in the side walls. 

I have lots more construction photos than I've shown here, but at this point I stopped taking any. I had done so much fiddly work to correct wonky parts and get to this state, and could see lots more on the horizon, that I thought, enough's enough. No more photos. No more describing what I did. No more nothing. Just press on.

You're right, I glued the windows in backwards - deliberately!

But, it wasn't enough to make me stop the project. I took a perverse pleasure in finishing it, even though I'm not completely satisfied with the result. 

Yeah, that's right, I got some fun out of this build for all the wrong reasons :-) Besides that though the entire ordeal got me thinking about scratchbuilding. Given how simple this building is I probably could have scratchbuilt something similar* for about the same amount of work I put into this kit, but without the associated feelings of frustration. 

The signs were scavenged from the leftovers of a Ma's Place kit.

And it got me thinking about scratchbuilding and kitbashing in general. I realized I've spent a lot of time on other people's projects: Cal's, Artz, and this Brick Price inspired build. They were pleasant, and I certainly learned a lot, but if I'm spending this kind of time and effort on projects, they should be my own. I have stacks of notes and sketches and drawings of my own ideas for scratches and bashes - or mingles as the case may be :-) - that I'd get proper satisfaction from building. I've been on this secondary highway for awhile. Now's the time to get back to the 400-series and hit the gas.

Hey! Close that door on your way out.

Ah, I see the off ramp up ahead. Fasten your seatbelt ... ***

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* Last fall I stumbled across online mentions of a famous layout built by Vivien Thompson called Eastbourne. The posts noted it was presented in the January 1968 issue of Railway Modeller magazine, so I hunted down a copy. It is a great layout and I enjoy her writing style. In that issue there's also a 2-page article called Tetbury locomotive shed by Michael Farr on how to build a little, single stall brick engine shed that's in the same genre as the plastic kit, although it has a water tank on one end. 

Tetbury locomotive shed by Michael Farr, RM, January 1968

The model is a simple and straightforward project, made mainly from card, and Mr. Farr notes it was his first model of a prototype. The brick papers are dated, and there seems to be a problem with proportions, but otherwise, after some minor changes, this, or something like this, would be a good first project in scratchbuilding, that once mastered would be a good stepping stone to other builds. It might be better to try a project like this than spend time fixing problems with a kit.

One interesting thing about this article is that the term 'scratchbuilding' isn't used. The project is simply referred to as modelling. I'll go way out on a limb and suggest that scratchbuilding didn't come into wide spread use until building from kits dominated the common understanding of what it meant to build scale models. Until then there was just model making. That sounds like something I should look into :-)

Oh, before I wrap up this digression I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that the issue also contains a 1-page article by Jack Dugdale on how to model rabbits popping out of rabbit holes with the use of relays! Now that is scratchbuilding!

** My father used to refer to warps in wood as 'wows'. A wow had no associated quantitative measure. It could refer to any amount of unwanted curvature from a gentle, meandering bend to Stan Mikita meets Bobby Hull hockey stick wickedness. In this kit the degree of wow varies all over the place.

*** ... and turn up the radio: