Left: Finished armature | Right: Leftover tree from Centennial Experimental Farm Layout.
I recently completed the armature for the first community garden tree. I had planned to model two rather large trees that are in the garden, but after test placing the finished armature of the first one I thought two such large trees would create too much shade on the plots, so I'm just going to model one, which is my favourite of the two. That second completed tree shading the picnic table is one I had leftover from the Centennial Experimental Farm layout. Right now the layout looks a little lopsided with two trees on one end and nothing on the other. I think balance will be restored when I add the little structure that will cover the loco at its charging station along with some tall shrubs. Stay tuned!
Large white arc on right is an 8" radius curve: minimum for the RDC-M. Small white arc on left is a 3" radius cure: minimum for my HO-9 locos.
I rummaged through my track spares and salvage box looking for pieces to sketch out the Inglenook Lake track plan with track. It turned out I had no more right-hand switches, but I did have suitable left-hand ones, so I changed the handedness of the plan. It also turned out the dual gauge crossing John made for me was a 30 degree one, not a 90 as I thought. So with these two changes I went ahead and made a mockup taking into account these new twists.
Overall I thought the layout became more interesting with these somewhat random changes. I liked how the non-90 degree crossing forced a diagonal into the design and gave it some life. However, the approach to the switch on the right needs to be longer as it must accommodate a loco and a coupled car for the Inglenook game to be playable. Also, the narrow gauge curve to the siding on the left doesn't need to be so tight and could be more sweeping, to give the plan a more flowing look and create a little more space for a building or trees.
I'm going to put the coffee on and then head down to the workshop to pick some new track pieces for the mockup. I'll leave you with AWB to set the mood:
Narrow gauge track is marked with a circled N A man-made causeway supports the track between the docks.
In between Twin Otter construction tasks my mind drifted to possible plans for a layout where trains pick up and drop off people and cargo to floatplanes in a remote wilderness area of Ontario.
The RDC-M would be small enough to provide direct rail-to-plane service!
The standard gauge track would have a plan similar to the classic Inglenook to provide some play value (if you were wondering, there is no town called Inglenook in Ontario, or lake named Inglenook Lake). Inclusion of a parallel narrow gauge line was inspired by the old Huntsville and Lake of Bays Transportation Company. On this layout the narrow gauge line takes passengers and goods back and forth to resorts and lodges in the forest.
The build table is also a handy sketch pad :-)
Will this layout ever see the light of day? Who knows. It's fun to think about though.
or How a Walk Down Memory Lane Became an Obsession ....
.... and a source of new ideas.
Back in May my mind started to drift back to the summer of '72 when I was 12 and obsessed with buying and building FROG brand model airplane kits from the Painted Post Smoke Shop. I recall building an Intruder, Bronco, Mohawk, and maybe a Vampire, but that one might have been an Airfix kit.
Anyway, I looked around for those kits online and didn't find any, but I did find a Sabre jet from a seller in Saskatoon that looked simple and interesting, so I bought it.
Looks fast and deadly.
It appeared to be safely cocooned in its original shrink wrapping, but maybe the wool was being pulled over my eyes.
After stripping off the wrapping and getting a strong whiff of 1972 that caused flashbacks, I opened the box and all the parts still seemed sealed in their original plastic bag.
The decals, instructions, and even a note on how to request missing parts (!) were still in there, although the decals were well past their best before date.
The instructions included some handy 60s or 70s vintage model making tips.
After opening the box and breathing in all that 70s goodness I then promptly put the kit aside while I worked on the Tintin 2001 launch + control building shell!
I picked up the Sabre jet kit again during a lull in the Tintin 2001 launch + control building work and spent some spare time assembling it. I didn't do anything fancy, sophisticated, or prototypical. I just built it box-stock with a neutral gray finish as if it were some factory test model, which I guess it was :-)
I'm not going to explain how I built it as it was just a nostalgia project, and expert model airplane builders would be horrified.
Ready for take off from a wooden landing strip in the backyard :-)
But, it was fun to just build it. So much fun that I looked for simple 1/72 scale model airplane kits at hobby stores and online sellers in hope of replicating that fun with some other project.
One of the ultimately 3 (!) Revell Twin Otter kits I bought.
When I visit my local hobby shop I like to wander through the entire store, not just the model railway section, to see what's what. On the airplane kit shelves I saw that Revell Twin Otter kit. For some reason it struck my fancy and I bought it. I didn't read any internet reviews, or watch YouTube videos, I just went with my gut :-)
I cut out the cockpit doors so I could make a dockside scene with open doors.
Rummaging around in the box I found out it could be built with either wheels, snow skis, or floats. I thought: yeah, floats! That word 'floats' triggered all sorts of thoughts about wilderness model railway layouts French, fictional, micro and MCM-7, float planes, forest fires, railway-based forest fire fighting equipment like CN's Poseidon train, and water bombers*. Carried away on waves of new ideas I merrily dove into building a Twin Otter float plane.
The box art leaves no doubt about what this airplane was meant to do.
I worked on the Twin Otter and kept searching for FROG kits I had built way back when. I found an online seller in Lindsay, Ontario, who had both a FROG Bronco and a Pioneer2 brand Beech C-45 Expeditor (I'll get to that one), so out came my credit card again.
Primer drying on the Bronco. All the weapons attachments have been stripped off for conversion to a float plane.
As I looked over the Bronco's parts and started in on the build I thought that with the high wing and high engines it could be converted into a float plane. It turns out the manufacturer had this idea too and built a prototype, or maybe just a mockup, that never flew. I thought, ok, and now I'm in the process of building a bronco on floats, with those floats kitbashed from a pair included in a Revell Twin Otter kit. An extra bonus to my overall thinking is that the Bronco is used by Cal Fire in California as a command and control aircraft; not on floats, but in a fire fighting role.
Wings are drying on the second Twin Otter
So right now I have several airplane projects on the go as I'm just doing whatever feels like fun to do. I bought a second Twin Otter kit because I thought just having one example on a layout / diorama would be odd. I'm currently getting ready to add its floats. I've also got two Beechcraft Expeditor C-45s waiting for me to get started on them.
An old RCAF Beechcraft Expeditor readies for takeoff at the 2025 Gatineau airshow.
I saw an old RCAF Expeditor at the Gatineau airshow last year and was immediately entranced. It turns out after WWII many of these airplanes became bush planes and had floats installed.
As well as the Pioneer2 version of the C-45 I bought a Hobby Craft one from that seller in Saskatoon. One or both will be equipped with floats.
So, right now I'm just following a passion and enjoying the ride. Whether the destination is a layout, diorama, or nothing I'm not too concerned about that right now.
Well, I'm near the end of this ramble and need to turn off the workshop lights for the evening. With all this talk of Saskatoon there's always one thing that comes to mind, so I'll leave you with this video favourite I've posted once before**:
Digressions:
* What about scale mismatches you might be asking? Yeah, the airplanes are in 1/72 and the railway stuff would be in 1/87. It might not sound like a big difference, but it is. I give scale serious thought as you know, and I plan to talk more about it in future posts if a layout starts to emerge from all this noodling.
**Yes, I did see The Guess Who this summer in Ottawa. And yes, age is catching up with Burton Cummings and Randy Bachman, but they can still play with a vengeance and put on a great show. LeBreton Flats was packed cheek-to-jowl with fans old and young. The Sheepdogs opened for them, so it was a fantastic event for Ottawa's 200th anniversary celebrations.
I've wanted to get my hands on the old AHM kit called the Repair Shop (kit #5815) for many years. It has such an intriguing look, what with that entire second storey completely panelled with windows. Back in January I finally came across a reasonably priced one on eBay from a seller in New Brunswick.
I'm not sure what sort of repairs were imagined to be going on in this building. The base has what looks like a track running through it from one door to the other, but those doors are too small to get anything other than a rather flat, flat car inside. Actually, all the doors seem too small to me. Maybe this building is actually in TT or N scale and not HO as implied on the box.
The parts were all present, nicely detailed, square, and cleanly molded.
Regardless, my plan was to repurpose the building to be part of the main drag on the Way Out Layout. It'll be some sort of gentrified restaurant, art gallery, coffee shop, or some such thing.
I've been working on this project on and off all this year since it showed up on my doorstep in the dead of winter. I've started on it again and thought I'd make a post about it to try and get myself back into a more serious blogging groove.
The side doors seemed too rural and industrial for the setting I have in mind, so I decided to fill in the openings with some sheet styrene with a molded on block pattern. I could have used brick sheet, but I didn't want the final result to appear as a failed attempt to match the kit's bricks.
Jumping a head a little you can see I just painted the blocked up door openings with a loose grey mixture. I'll do some weathering a little later during construction.
Those big door openings on the end walls will be filled with typical steel-framed doors and windows you'd encounter on stores in many urban areas. I cut some clear plastic inserts (those are the blue rectangles in the above photo - the blue is the anti-scratch film) for 'glass'. From 0.010" thick styrene sheet I cut frames for both sides of the 'glass'.
I recently started working on this again after parking it back in June. Up there is where the project currently stands: I'm attaching the window and door frames to the clear plastic with 3M Transfer Tape and getting the finished units ready for installing in the walls. Once the other windows have 'glass' installed I'll move onto working on the interior. My plans are for a removable roof and some inside lights.
Top: Enhanced image by Gemini | Bottom: My original that I gave to Gemini.
I was looking through my Havelock yard photos from this century and last, and when I came across the ones of the snowplow and crane on a flat car I took in the '70s I wondered if Gemini could fix up the composite image I made. It did quite a good job. I'm not sure if all the words on the snowplow sides in the enhanced image are correct, but overall it's not bad.
I've been doing some thinking and planning, although no work :-( , about the next step on this layout. The trickiest part might be the walls in the monolith pit as I'll need a lot of wall panels, and they could be tedious to construct. More thinking, more thinking :-)
I've been focused on books for so long I'd forgotten about video, so I decided to search YouTube for Kim Adams videos. I had some great luck and I found this excellent new/old one. It was posted around 10 months ago, so it's relatively new, but it's of a lecture Adams gave in 2010, so it's relatively old too.
It's long, around an hour and forty minutes, but if you've got the stamina, Adams himself will tell you a lot about his inspirations and work. Believe it or not, like any decent modeller, there's a lot of prototype inspiration. If you want to jump ahead to more model railway-like pieces, fast forward to around the 59:50 mark.
To get an idea of the box size, the table top measures 2' x 4'. According to the box it's a Level 5 kit, and they aren't kidding :-)
I'm taking a little break from model railway things. In my modelling time this summer I'm learning how to use the airbrush I bought last winter, and am using it on this giant Revell kit of the space shuttle's launch tower Debra gave me in the spring.
I started the project by building and painting the crawler. The kit will be built up more-or-less box stock, with no extra detailing other than some paint enhancements. I've got a lot to learn painting-wise, but so far so good.
It's the long weekend. Take a break. Go for a walk. There's a private garden at one end of the community garden that borders the pedestrian path, and everyday, no matter what the season or weather, there's a new sign of encouragement to greet walkers and gardeners alike. This is a detail that will certainly need a place on the layout :-)
Galen asked me in the last Havelock yard post if I could tell if any of the data markings on the HEAPZ hopper appeared to have been freshly painted over the graffiti. I took a few other photos of that hopper from some other angles so I thought I'd re-examine them for clues. I couldn't see any, and I was standing so far away in the grassy picnic area near the parking lot I couldn't make out any telltale signs.
But, after going through the photos again I thought I'd post some of the other black hoppers in the HEAPZ train.
These two ancient Boston & Maine hoppers weren't in the HEAPZ train, but I had to take their photos because there always seems to be B&M hoppers in the yard anytime I drive by, and I'm always surprised that these old things are still in service. If I ever finish my Havelock Yard micro there'll have to be some heavily weathered B&M hoppers on it.
Speaking of the past, a couple of weeks ago I went to see Steve Earle at Bluesfest, so I'll leave you with him while I figure out if this morning's coffee is too old to drink:
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