A freelanced weed sprayer by George P. Landlow, Railroad Modeler Sept. '75
I continue to read my way throughRailroad Modeler of 1975. In the September issue I came across an article by George P. Landow called Homebuilt Weed Sprayer. In it Mr. Landow presents a background story to this fictional, freelanced car in a style highly reminiscent of E. L. Moore, and then proceeds to describe how to scratchbuild this handsome piece of 1881 vintage Maintenance-of-Way equipment.
I had a flashback - well, maybe it was a flashforward in this case :-) - while reading the article as I was reminded of this one....
City of Toronto Archive photo of a homebrew TTC weed sprayer car headlines an article by Vince Pugliese, with drawings by Ken Lawrence; Railroad Model Craftsman, Apr. 2012
... by 30Squares' head of research and all things technical and scientific, Vince. It's an in depth account of a home-built (aka freelanced) weed sprayer car built by the TTC in 1928, and an associated Baldwin-Westinghouse steeplecab used by the TTC to move this car around. The story is accompanied by an excellent set of drawings by Ken Lawrence so scratchbuilders could make either vehicle for themselves.
Articles about freelanced rolling stock still seem to be a thing in RM in '75 as it was in '74. I need to compile a list. Stay tuned!
A day or so ago YouTube's algorithm recommended this video to me. I was intrigued and watched it. It reminded my of the Full Observation post from a few years back, but had a lot of other interesting things to say.
So, I went and had a look through Sam Hamper's videos and thought the title of this one, Find Meaning Through Making, intriguing so I had a look:
There is a little self-promotion inside, but, hey, everyone's got to make a living, and it isn't obnoxious. Again, I found it quite intriguing, especially his discussion on trying to have a thoughtful and nuanced look at AI regarding art.
That lead me to this interview with the creator of the Chloe vs History videos, Jonathan Laramie:
Again, intrigued, because if what Mr. Laramie said is true, then it should be possible to recreate a 'functioning' E. L. Moore's Elizabeth Valley Railroad through the use of AI. There is enough reference material to do so. Regular readers may recall I made an attempt simply to colourize some photographs of the EVRR, but ran into some issues I didn't know how to resolve. This interview suggests the answer is out there, I just need to buckle down and do the work.
Ok, so after the interview I thought I should have a look at one of the Chloe videos and settled on I time travelled to Ancient Rome:
Entertaining as well as intriguing. Implications-wise, there's lots to think about. And, also, Majestic Studios is here.
It doesn't look like much, but this semi-circular piece of test track was a #$%#! to make.
One end of this little layout will have lunar landing pads for the Tintin rocket and fellow travellers. At this end I wanted to have a loop of track around the pads and a stop for loading and unloading cargo. I decided to build a test loop using the track bending methods I used on the community garden layout and associated test pieces. They worked with Peco code 100 HO/OO flex-track and I wanted to try them with Atlas HO code 100 flex as I have a stack of odds and ends lying around I figured I'd use up on this project.
The flex-track rails were carefully pried from their plastic tie strip. The rails were then curved to produce an 8" radius semi-circle.
It turns out the strips of Atlas flex-track are quite different than Peco's. On a piece of Atlas flex one rail has embossings on the bottom that make it impossible to slide out from the tie strip, so it has to be carefully pried out. Some broken spike heads do result, but not enough to render the tie strip useless. Those busted heads were later superglued back down once the curved rails were slipped back into the tie strips.
Since the curve forming technique I use requires the curved rails to be slid back into the tie strip I had to use my motor-tool to grind the embossed rail's bottom surface flat.
The curved rails are slid back into short pieces of tie strips. The tie strip pieces were sprayed with grey paint A truck is used to check the gauge.
The Atlas tie strip is also quite different from Peco's. The Atlas version as one side of its tie strip with just about all tie ends connected together, and the other side has ties connected in pairs, making that side quite flexible. I took a pair of sprue cutters and pruned the connections on the heavily connected side so it matched the connection pattern of the other side, making the entire tie strip quite flexible.
This may sound like a simple, albeit laborious, job, but in fact it turned out to be a major headache. I don't recall the similar test I did with Peco track for an E. L. Moore micro being this difficult. In the end though I did produce a piece of free standing, semi-circular track which the lunar loco has no problem navigating. I probably should have done things the easy way and bent a piece of track by hand and just stuck it to the foam, which is what I did on the Way Out Layout, but I wanted to see if I could make a free-standing piece with no internal residual stresses.
Other rockets that may appear on the layout.
This end of the layout isn't going to remain flat. I have some ideas for three-dimensionalizing it with an elevated launch pad, flame/dust trench, and overhead track cover. These days I'm finding myself becoming more and more interested in working on landforms whether it's for this lunar thing, the community garden, or other dioramas I have in mind. I was bitten by some type of landform making bug on the Mount Lowe layout, so, you might see a lot of terra- and luna- forming ahead :-)
An N-scale, 16" x 23" layout using Z-gauge track; Railroad Modeler, Jan '75
I was pleasantly surprised to see this charming micro-layout as I began my read through the 1975 issues of Railroad Modeler. There it was, only 32 pages into January '75, looking like a lost time traveller from 2026.
The layout is a tour de force of micro-layout construction by Jim Finnell, the owner of Durango Press.
The base was made from corrugated and artist cardboards. The track and turnouts were scratchbuilt from code 40 rail and HOn3 wood ties.
The "transistorized" power supply and controls were built into the base, so the entire layout formed a single unit. I was pleased to see a thick-base design (which I estimate to be about 5.5") that I am partial to even though it was probably used simply to accommodate the controller housing.
The scenery was made from plaster and rubber molds, trees were scratchbuilt, and the ground cover was a combination of natural and store-bought materials.
Even the locomotive was a custom job: a very decent looking wood and card superstructure built on a Marklin Z-scale chassis.
An exceptional 2-page spanning beauty shot of the layout
Besides the model railroad, the way it was shown to readers illustrates how Railroad Modeler pushed the boundaries of layout presentation in magazines in that era. Today this sort of page design and use of colour isn't unusual, but back then is was. And with such a small layout as the subject, the team did an exceptional job of showing it off.
The staff referred to the layout in the text as a "mini-layout", but with an area of 2.6 sq. ft., it was definitely an advanced ancestor of today's micro-layouts.
You may recall back in the post about building the lunar loco I discussed how to juggle relative sizes of things on layouts so that big things looked big even though they might be considerably smaller than their prototypes, and I also discussed scale considerations. After Debra finished building the Lego Tintin rocket I pulled out the lunar loco and the Tintin-ized Airfix astronaut to do a size comparison. Looking at the photo I'm thinking that proposing OO scale for the layout was the right way to go. The loco and astronaut do look small compared to the rocket, but are still recognizable and relatable.
I got "Ma" off the shelf, gave it a drop of oil on its gears, and took it for a spin on the Way Out Layout. After some break-in time from sitting on the shelf for so long I gradually turned the throttle on my power pack (a Kato Standard SX model) lower and lower. The video shows the lowest speed I could obtain and still do complete loops.
It turns out the switches were the limiting factor. The speed would get so low that the loco didn't have enough momentum to carry it over the non-conductive plastic parts on the switches. The loco is a 4-wheeler with only 23mm between axle centres, so it stalls out on those Atlas switches if it's going too slow. I could make it go slower down the switch-free main street, but as I said, it wouldn't do full laps of the layout.
To the left: Patient X, Vintage Classics 1:76 Airfix Astronaut; to the right: 3/16" diameter Acetal ball.
Warning: Those of you with a weak constitution may want to avert your eyes for the next bit.
With the head-dectomy successfully completed we quickly move on to the installation of the new helmet.
Success! The helmet was slightly flattened on one 'side' and attached with superglue.
The life support backpack was modified with styrene scraps to become Tintin-esque.
The patient is expected to make a full recovery and live a long and adventurous life on the moon tending the lunar railway.
The staff of 30Squares Labs extends its apologies to The Temptations and highly recommend listening to this classic while they prepare for the next breakthrough in figure surgery.
Left: Stub dead ends | Right: Stub suggestively leads to somewhere else.
After yesterday's post about adding road inserts to suggest a connection to a streetcar system in the wider world I got to thinking about the siding. The more I looked at it the more I thought it should extend to the edge of the layout to suggest it too connects to something in the wider world and shouldn't just be a stub.
Luckily I had a scrap of track left over and I used it to cut an extension. Yeah, I know, it's a small change, but it was one of those things that wasn't going to leave my mind until I did something about it. So I did and it did.
Suggestions of roads and sidewalks bounding the community garden were added to two corners. The road+sidewalk insets were built up from scraps of styrene.
I like my layouts to incorporate suggestions of a wider world beyond their boundaries. On the Loonar Module it was a spur that went to the shore, the Centennial Experimental Farm had the loop of track that went through the farm connect to a streetcar line on the main road, and on the Mount Lowe layout there was a road to a parking lot that lead back to the main mountain road.
Slices of foam were cut from the base to accept the road+sidewalk insets.
On this layout I've added little pieces of the two actual roads that bound the community garden. The job of the train is to move people and things from these stops to garden plots.
The road+sidewalk insets are a maximum of 5mm thick. Painting and weathering will be revisited once more scenery is in place.
Yes, those rails embedded in the road are supposed to be for streetcars. No, there are no streetcars servicing the real community garden. This is all wishful thinking on my part :-)
Check out the entries to the 'Back to Basics Model Railway Challenge'. You may recall I was inspired to give it a go and build a model of the Community Garden shed in response. That shed makes an appearance at around the 7:13 mark. There're lots of interesting contributions in the video, and it looks like the challenge was well received.
After some considerable thought the solution I settled on seemed quite simple: I glued pieces of 0.060" thick styrene into the ends of the shell, drilled a pilot hole into each piece, and used a self-tapping screw to tap the holes for securing the chassis with screws.
Screwing the chassis into position was easy.
There's still a considerable amount of painting and detailing ahead, but the biggest structural and mechanical jobs are finished.
As I worked on the lunar loco I thumbed through all the pages of the April '78 issue of Model Railroader in which it appeared. Near the back I stumbled across a 2-page article called Noitcart Traction by Eric Bronsky, the legendary traction modeller.
Noitcart Traction is closer to a typical humorous April article than Cerny & Hayden's both in style and content, even though it's about an actual 'layout' that actually runs. I draw your attention to it because one might think of it as a micro-layout before there were micro-layouts.
It's simply a long strip of O-gauge track for running Mr. Bronsky's fine-standards O-scale traction car. It's noted that the layout "...rests upon three separate planks of 1/2"-thick plywood wide enough to accommodate the single track and line poles." and "The three roadbed sections butt together like sectional track. All six line poles, the wire and all, are stuck into a block of Styrofoam for storage."
No dimensions are given for this portable 'layout', just a drawing that says it's drawn to 1" = 1'-0", so I got out my ruler and made some measurements. What I find is that when it's assembled it's about 108-3/4" long by 3-3/4" wide. That gives an area of about 2.8 sq. ft., well within the micro-layout range.
Mr. Bronsky clarifies that the 'layout ' isn't just a test track: "What little scenery I had room for is best described as "changing roadbed", but it is sufficient to keep NT slightly above the test track category." It's true, the car runs through street track and varying natural ground cover.
A minimal traction 'layout' indeed, and a micro-layout ancestor.
I asked Gemini to replace the bland, black background in the opening photo to the Lunar loco construction post with a lunar environment. Up there is what it generated. It's not bad, although a tad stereotypical with the frip-frap in the background. I guess further prompting could have eliminated all that.
Next I asked Gemini to take this scene snippet from the lunar loco test run video and remove the southern California style environment and replace it with a lunar setting and futuristic lunar buildings:
I could see that things weren't moving in the right direction from the get-go, and after a couple of prompts to try and steer Gemini to something plausible I gave up at this stage of image creation:
It looks like a strange desert scene, but I'll give it high marks for injecting more Way Out into the Way Out Layout :-)
The Lunar Loco goes for a lap on the Way Out Layout test track. There’s a little hesitation on a dirty switch at the yard entrance, but the loco has 4-wheel power pickup so it easily runs through.
A lunar locomotive inspired by Cerny & Hayden's Apr '78 MR April Fool's project.
A couple of weeks ago Steve was telling Debra and me about Lego's upcoming release of the moon rocket from Tintin that was featured in the albums Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon. This lead to a fairly wide ranging discussion, and me being me, I started to wonder about the feasibility of building a small, maybe micro-sized, futuristic lunar model railway. And with April coming up this lead me to again think about the article A lunar railroad you can modelby Alan Cerny and Bob Hayden that appeared in the April 1978 issue of Model Railroader.
Once a scale was settled on I started to work out dimensions to fit the drive unit, and look right when an astronaut stood beside it. The loco is unmanned.
After that initial discussion I started to think long and hard about a freelanced little lunar layout that would incorporate, and maybe showcase, Lego's Tintin rocket and the Cerny & Hayden train. To make a very long story short, I eventually settled on a layout that included the rocket, elements of the C&H train, as well as the excavation site in the moon's Tycho crater where the monolith is discovered in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Yes, you read that right: Tintin, C&H, and 2001 in a single layout :-) If I can get the locomotive, train, and track to pass various layout feasibility tests I have in mind, I'll post the layout plan, but until then it's all highly questionable as to whether it will work. Regardless, this gave me a good excuse for trying my hand at making an operating version of the C&H loco as I've wanted to do for 48 years!
These figures are molded in some hideously soft plastic.
The first question that needs to be dealt with is scale. I won't keep you in suspense: I chose OO, 1/76 scale. Why? Well, there are two reasons: one technical, and one artistic.
The technical one is easy (although not completely separable from the artistic one): I have 2 boxes of Airfix OO scale astronauts, and an HO motor bogie from BD Concepts (16.5mm gauge with a 34mm wheelbase).
And then there's the artistic reason, which gets down to questions of size and viewer relatability.
Let's start with the Tintin rocket. It sure isn't OO scale. The Lego website states it's 49cm tall, and the official Tintin site states that according to Tintin canon the 'prototype' stood 75m tall. So, this puts the Lego model at 1:153 scale, which is in the range of the various N-scales that are used throughout the world: 1:148 to 1:160. If the Lego rocket was in OO this would put the prototype at 34.7m tall, considerably shorter than 75m.
Does this height discrepancy matter? As you know I've posted a lot about Selective Compression over the years (for example, see: Selective Compression [alternate], Selective Compression [alternate #2], Use small to seem large, and Selective Impression) and its application to make big things still seem big on a layout even though rigorous adherence to scale is violated. Recall that I'm still trying to build a TD-Centre replica for an HO-scale micro layout, and if I was rigorous about scale an HO scale model would stand nearly 8 feet tall! So, the answer is, the rocket needs to seem a lot taller than surrounding elements, especially people, even though it is considerably shorter than its 'prototype'. Given that the Lego rocket stands 490mm tall, and the astronaut figures are around 20 to 25mm tall, that relative height requirement is meet.
Also I should point out that the rocket itself makes it easy to play this game with scales because of its lack of visible size markers like windows and hatches. There is a lower hatch on the fuselage, down near the fins, but when closed it disappears into the red-and-white checker board pattern.
If I had stuck to N-scale I think the non-rocket elements on the layout, especially the people, would be too small to be relatable to viewers. There'd be a giant rocket and everything else would be teeny-tiny. As well, I don't know how I'd build a C&H train that small.
So, compromise and judicious balancing of layout element sizes is the order of the day.
The BD Concepts motor bogie used to drive the lunar loco
The article states the C&H loco is built to 3/8" scale, which is roughly 9.5mm = 1ft. OO-scale is 4mm = 1 ft, so my model is considerably smaller than theirs, and my model's size is driven by the size of the BD Concepts motor bogie I used: their 34 mm wheelbase unit. They have smaller ones. I used their 28mm unit in the Spumoni Flyer. I only had the 34mm one on hand, so that was that. My choice makes the loco longer than C&H's.
The loco is built up from 3 styrene boxes cut from 0.020" thick scraps: a rectangular box that covers the drive unit, a box with trapezoidal ends that sits on top, and a funny shaped 'nose box' that's stuck on the front.
Ok, you're at 30Squares, and you know I'm interested in the backstories to old model railroading projects, and this one had a strong pull :-) I've wanted to build it for a long time, and looking back, 1978 was a rough year for me, so there's a little bit of nostalgic retrospection going on in me with this project.
I got a little confused when I started searching for Cerny references in the Model Railroader archive because there was mention of an Elmer Cerny and an Alan Cerny. It turns out Elmer was Alan's father. Elmer was an exceptional draftsman, and had a career in the pages of MR as a contributor of highly detailed drawings of locomotives, rail cars, buildings, and other structures.
Two nuts from my cast-offs box were glued in for weight. The hatch panels are cut from scraps of 0.010" thick styrene.
It appears Elmer's first contribution was a letter to the editor in the December 1952 issue. From what I can tell his first full length piece in MR was an article called Build the Bartlett Building Materials Warehouse in the September 1970 issue.
State of construction at the end of day 1.
From then on Elmer Cerny was a fairly regular contributor of exquisite mechanical and architectural drawings until the October 1978 issue. MR had very high drawing standards, and Mr. Cerny's work was one of the cornerstones of that tradition. By my count it looks like he contributed 13 articles and/or drawings throughout the 1970s.
The top of the rectangular box is made from 0.040" (about 1mm) thick styrene. The opening is sized to accept the drive unit mounting clips. I explained how to attach one of these drive units here.
Mr. Cerny contributed a number articles of a type of what I might call, building profiles. In these articles he'd present photographs of a building that caught his interest, describe it and talk about it, and include fine architectural drawings that would allow a modeller to build an accurate replica. So, in some ways, MR was at times playing the role of an architectural historical archive.
Jumping ahead in the build sequence: here is the drive unit clipped into the opening. I haven't decided on how I'm going to couple cars together, so no couplers yet.
Alan Cerny, Elmer Cerny's son, was a MR staff member in the Art / Layout department. His first appearance in MR's masthead, under the Art / Layout heading naturally, was in the February 1976 issue. His name continued to be listed there up until its last appearance in the January 1979 issue when it looks like he left the magazine.
State at the end of day #2. The nose box was also built of 0.020" thick styrene. The bumper is a piece of 0.060" x 0.060" styrene strip.
His name is listed as a collaborator on a few technical drawings that appeared in MR over the years, but his splashiest bylined contribution during his tenure I think was the lunar model railroad article.
The other side of the shell at the end of day #2 The greeblies came from various kit leftovers: The antenna, front lights, and camera are from a Moonscope kit. The lifting hooks are from a Sikorsky Skycrane kit. The lifting handholds are from some long forgotten airplane kit.
The article seems to have gotten a lot of play.
It was mentioned in Russ Larson's April editorial. Reading that editorial all these years later makes we wonder if MR okayed this project to capitalize on the excitement created by Star Wars, which was released the previous year, and since they noted that Cerny was "caught up in the current space fantasy craze" maybe he was just the guy for the mission :-)
Rare behind the scene view of 30Squares' scrap and greeble bins located deep in the bowels of 30Squares' secret construction facility :-)
The Bull Session column in the May '78 issue has a lengthy note in the tradition of those book and magazine articles that were published in that era that had titles like The Making of 2001, The Making of Star Trek, and the Making of Star Wars. This bull session note was their The Making of The Lunar Model Railroad. The author mentions the idea of lunar railroading was kicked off by Bob Hayden on the afternoon of 28 October 1977, which would indeed put it in the midst of the Star Wars craze.
State at the end of day #3: A horribly bungled paint job that had to be stripped! I was giddy with joy at being able to spray paint outside on a day with summer-like temps. It was windy though, and I held the spray can too close for too long to the shell and.... blobby paint resulted.
And there were other things going on in the culture that may have also fuelled interest from MR. The lunar model railroad article notes Stewart Brand's book, Space Colonies, which was published in September 1977, as a reference. Also, Gerard O'Neill's highly influential book, The High Frontier, was first published in January 1977, and in paperback in January 1978. Star Wars itself was released at the end of May 1977. There was a positive space vibe in the air at the time, so maybe MR was looking for a little piece of the action.
State at the end of day #5, the final day of construction. Day #4 was spent repainting the shell with a brush! And doing detail painting and decaling. On day #5 all that was left to do was snap in the drive unit....and voila!
The June and July '77 issues contained a number of positive letters from lunar railroad fans in the Railway Post Office column. One correspondent, a Mr. Thomas G. Levy, noted: "If the lunar train concept and modelwork had been in existence before 1968, it would have undoubtedly been included in the lunar surface footage of the motion picture "2001: A Space Odyssey." It would be an excellent idea to be included in the upcoming movie "Star Wars, Part 2"". Challenge accepted :-)
The paint stripping wasn't perfect and left a rough surface. I rather liked it and just painted over it. Maybe it's some sort of thermal coating that's been eroded by moon dust :-)
Another correspondent, Mr. Dan Swearingen, noted that some of the components used looked like those in his old Erector Set, and one proposed shipping container looked like a sardine can. Mr. Donald L. Ward commented that: "...the lunar railroad was excellent! Previous attempts at "April foolery" have been just foolishness, but here is an article filled with creative imagination." Overall the response, well at least those published, was quite positive.
I think that greeble on the right is a starter motor from a car model :-) I haven't figured out what to do about couplers. And weathering, that'll be much later if a layout comes to pass.
There's a brief biographical note about Alan Cerny in an article that introduced MR's then current staff in the August '78 issue. It notes he had a longtime interest in model building and art, and that he studied at the American Academy of Art in Chicago. The article also says he regarded model railroading as "a renaissance hobby in which you can learn about the world and yourself - "about your skills and limitations.""
Looks like the Dodge boys had a hand in this thing. Ugh, I see areas that still need touch-up.
It appears that Alan Cerny's last 20th century appearance in an MR article was in the March 1983 issue as the winner of a MR layout planning contest. The intro to the article notes "Many MR readers will remember Alan's byline from his imaginative article, "A lunar railroad you can model", in the April 1978 issue." It also notes he was then employed at Signode Corp.
Out for a spin on the Way Out Layout. It runs well. I need to post a video.
Well, that's that. Next I'll either try my hand at a couple of lunar freight cars, or try some tests to figure out what the minimum curve radius is this thing can handle and what sort of grades it can climb.
While you're waiting for me to make up my mind, I'll leave you with the Deodato hit from '73:
