Scenes from the Alta Vista Transit Commission: An unworkable, unfinished, unlamented model railway, 2017 - 2021

Last of a series....I think.

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.

Thinking about the Alta Vista TC

Work on the Alta Vista TC has been stalled for a very long time. Everyday life has made its demands of course, but that doesn't account for the entire work stoppage. I think the layout isn't up-to-scratch in the simple pleasures department

Although the old Lost Ocean Line wasn't a layout in the standard sense of the word, it was a lot of fun to build and tinker with. And it was also a good place to stage photos. 

The AVTC was never meant to be an operational or classical setup. It was just a place to loop streetcars from time-to-time, stage photos, and let me shuffle buildings around. I need to think about what's missing before I get going on a round of construction in preparation for Christmas.

Nearing-the-end-of-summer blue

Low rise buildings on the Alta Vista TC

I've been sorting and taking stock of buildings for the Alta Vista TC. Quite by accident I noticed that I have a preponderance of low-rise buildings. Clearly there's some setting in my brain that prefers that size. It looks like the bank and Natural History Museum are almost exactly the same height!

Out-of-Service: Gone for coffee and a paper

I think that little roof over the side door needs a light. It's too dark there at night to make anyone feel safe.

Waiting for the evening bus

Street painting

For purposes of staging some photos of 47 Ocean Blvd, I decided to try painting a section of the roads and sidewalks at the corner of Ocean and Cedar Heights - which is near the Neville Park streetcar turn-around. The roads and sidewalks aren't looking too bad - the values seem correct - but they need some more work.  The layout's chaos right now, but I see that as a good sign since it means to me that construction has re-started :-)

47 Ocean Blvd: Kibri 38222 is finished!

Finally, after 7 months of on-and-off work, the apartment is done! I temporarily set it up at the corner of Ocean Blvd and Cedar Heights Ave to see how it looked. I see lots of opportunity for weathering, street furniture and other open air stuff, but it's not looking too bad. 

There's quite a number of parts in this kit, and it isn't a shake-the-box project like W. E. Snatchem. It could be built box-stock, but I've made a number of small changes to make it more at home in a Toronto-Ottawa setting.

The assembly instructions are good, so I won't go into a play-by-play of how I built it. But as you can see in the photo I still managed to install a wall component upside-down. It turns out that it didn't matter to the structure; although, if you're familiar with this kit you'll note something looks a little odd. I leave it as a test for you to identify the part :-)




As for changes I made to Toronto-Ottawa-ize it for the Alta Vista TC, here's a list,

1. Painted the walls a common bricky-red. Window and door frames were painted a contrasting green.

2. The store signs were changed to common ones I've seen here over the years and might make sense as the store-level on this sort of building. There's a dry cleaner, convenience store, five-and-dime, and cigar store. The kit's fru-fru window coverings were not used. Instead, pieces of white and off-white paper were cut and installed. They make the windows appear more like those you'll see in real life. Well, ok, a couple of the kit's paper curtains were used as well as some slices of gift wrap to provide a little contrast in the windows and account for human eccentricity :-)

3. The kit's base wasn't used because I wanted the building to sit flush with the sidwwalk. The base would have introduced a step that I feel would appear out of place. Some strip styrene had to be added to the foundation to fill holes left by the missing base.

4. The interior scenes are photos sourced from the internet and seem like ones I might see here. The interior pictures included in the kit are a little too sketch-like for my tastes.

5. A large air conditioner was added to the roof as were quite a number of items from Walthers roof details accessory kit, #933-3733. The items I chose to add had nothing to do with reality, and were stuck on to give the somewhat barren roof what I felt was an air of complexity and an interesting pattern.

6. The kit's exterior light fixture mouldings seemed a little too ornate and were left off.

Some extra work was done to add interior LED lighting so the stores don't look abandoned and the apartments seem lively at night. 

There are 4 light strips: 3 are inside styrene boxes, and the 4th was glued on top of the stores' light box, pointed upward to give some general interior light to the front windows. Window curtains and pieces of black card have been used to diffuse and block light to provide a pattern. 

The stairwell light boxes have blue filters on front - made by inking some clear plastic with a blue Sharpie pen - to add colour. 

The roof is removable so I can add more lights or service those already installed.

In the end, like all kits I build, there were a few parts leftover that I have no idea where they are supposed to go :-)

What's the Intent?

I know, Boxing Day isn't until mid next week, but I was reading Galen's blog and he posed an interesting question about laying out the intent of a layout. Well, more precisely, he read this insightful post at Mike Cougill's blog about intent and model railroading, gave some serious thought to the intent of his own work, and kindly asked if I had any thoughts on the subject. I had to think about it a bit because I did, but haven't attempted to write them down. Fractured sleep has been my companion for the last little while, so I decided to put the demon to work and write down some thoughts on the intent of the Alta Vista TC. What follows doesn't apply to my E. L. Moore related activities, or the Elizabeth Valley tribute layout, or my interests in model railroading in earlier times.

Before we dive into the who, what, when, where and why, here’s my short answer: 

The Alta Vista TC is a slice of the Toronto-Ottawa-Los Angeles that lives in my mind.

The long answer isn’t so easy to state, but I’ll give it a try.

In this blog I don’t usually discuss things I’m not that interested in, but thought I should make an exception in this case. My guidance before going further is that if you read something below that you like but I don't, I'm not trying to insult you, I'm just trying to clarify what I'm not into so my intent is a little clearer. So, what follows are my interests – the building blocks of my intent – mixed up in a stew and seasoned a little with the chili peppers of discontent.

I’m not much of a model railroader. I like trains. I like travelling on them. I’m not interested operating models of them. I have no interest in simulating the railroad business. Timetables and rules and schedules leave me cold. Those things spell day-job to me, and I’m not interested in pursuing them as leisure. Yeah, business and profit, with all their rules and schedules and rigour, are the reasons railroads exist. I like model railroads. It's just that I don't care if they properly simulate something real. I just live with the contradiction.

I like streetcars much better than trains. I find the conventional advice about taking up streetcar modelling – the models are actually powered by electricity like the real thing, the track work is tight and constrained like the real thing, the models actually pickup power from an overhead wire like the real thing – irrelevant. If you like those things, I’m not dissing you; everyone should understand and pursue their own interests; I'm much impressed by people who pursue those aspects; I’m just saying those modelling interests aren't mine, that’s all. I like streetcars because I liked riding them when I was growing up and living in Toronto. I like the subways and buses there too. I like the light rail system here in Ottawa and the one in Los Angeles. I was primed to like them because of Toronto.

My favourite aspect of model railroading is making buildings, staging scenes and  taking pictures. As I said, I’m not much of a model railroader, and strictly speaking, I guess I’m not a model railroader at all. I like model railroads, but I’m not into modelling actual railroads. Model railroading is the gateway that lead me to what I do. Neither am I a model tractioneer - or whatever it’s called. Building complex street track and installing overhead has no intrinsic interest to me – well, maybe just enough to get the scenes I want to see; it’s just that it’s not my focus. Believe me, I find the work of others on those things fascinating, but I couldn't do it. Hopefully I've repeated myself enough on the subject of the traditional reasons to get into 'traction modelling' to get it out of my system :-)

I’m interested in the lost urban world. Lost to money and gentrification and the alternate universe we call the internet. There’s a lot that I’m glad is gone; however, much is gone that I lament. No internet browsing technology can replace the physical pleasure of riding a railed machine along a street to a remote place, getting off and walking the walk to wherever, scouring the books and records and movies and stuff on offer, finding unexpected things, meeting, looking, exploring, eating and talking, and taking home the bounty. And doing it again and again, year after year, with some new variation on the theme each time. But that’s all gone. Ok, just more-or-less all gone - I'm certainly not going to write about the remaining places where I can still find a little of it. The sterile seductive glow of the display screen can’t come close to replacing it. Maybe the new world is so drunk with efficiency that staring at a glowing slab in one’s hand is the only proper response to its banality.

I’m interested in places. I didn’t just ride the streetcars, buses and subways of the TTC for the fun of it. I had places to go. The TTC exists to take people to places. I focus on places. And they don't necessarily have to be real places, they can be speculative as long as they seem to fit the feeling I'm after. Real or imagined, places must dominate. And they must have the right vibe.

I'm interested in the feeling of a place. Or at least the feeling that comes to me when I'm there. With Toronto it's mainly nostalgia. The Toronto in my mind isn't exactly the one you'll find today when you roam its streets. With Los Angeles it's unrequited love. With Ottawa it's refuge and time travel to pockets of places that seem like things I recognize, but don't properly appreciate - I don't really understand Ottawa in it's own right and therefore have mixed impressions about the vibe it projects. Getting the feeling right on the Alta Vista TC is more important than the traditional desire for high detail and weathering. Those are parts of achieving the right vibe, but they are subservient and not primary. Paul Michael Smith's Elgin Park is the exemplar in my mind for modelling brilliance in the service of vibe. 

I'm interested in Noir fiction. Mainly classic crime Noir: Philip Marlowe, Lew Archer, Claire DeWitt, Mister X and their fictional brethren. Noir strikes a chord with me. Noir is the flip side of the good vibe of places and exploration the city has to offer. Noir seems to me an urban thing. There might be rural Noir and country Noir - I haven't studied Noir that closely to know. Raymond Chandler made Los Angeles the birthplace of what I think of as classic Noir. Toronto is Noir even though its residents might deny it. Ottawa isn't Noir just yet, but with the sharp increase in gun crime it's on its way. At present it's more Bureaucratic Gothic combined with doses of Techno Thriller. The Pale King meets Cryptonomicon. Some aspect of Noir should be present in the Alta Vista TC. I'm not sure how to accomplish it.

I’m interested in light. Have been for a long time. Light was just about the only subject in high school physics that I actually enjoyed. As a boy, one of my earliest memories is of walking to a local convenience store to buy a jug of milk for my mum, and along the way wondering why how the same light comes into everyone’s eyes, but everyone seemed to react differently to things. Crazy, I know, and I don’t think I summarized it quite like that as a boy, but that’s the modern gist of it. I knew light came into my eye, somehow did something in my brain and the world appeared. And that world didn't appear the same to everyone. Light was the key, but I didn’t know what to. All I can say today is that buildings and places must provide light and be shaped by it or they'll appear dead.

I’m interested in watercolour painting’s infinite ability to represent the effects of light. I don’t use light enough in my work and I need to. It’s something I want to work on. One thing that strikes me is how flat and uniform a lot of model railroad photos are. That’s good for studying details and such, but things aren’t illuminated like that in the world, or at least in the world I see.

I'm interested in being able to look into and through buildings and see things along the path from outside to inside to outside again. I once thought of this as Selective Staging. I don't want model buildings to always be opaque structures that you must look around. A bit of that is good, but not every building is a fortress.

I'm interested in walking. Streetcars are an aid to walking. There needs to be a network of interconnected sidewalks to reflect that reality. On the Lost Ocean Line I deliberately made sure that sidewalks connected all the places, and the same will hold for the Alta Vista TC.

I'm interested in spacing. That is, making sure the roads and sidewalks are wide enough, the gaps between buildings and objects make sense, the arrangements of people seem natural, and so on. And all that needs to be balanced against the confines of a small layout. 

I'm interested in water. Ottawa is defined by two rivers; Toronto by a great lake; Los Angeles by an ocean. Strangely, I'm an air sign. Although I'm trained in aeronautics, I'm attracted to water. So much for astrology. To me a layout needs a water feature, no matter how small. It could be just a fountain or even a puddle.

All of the above is a lot of intent for one little model world to carry. There's enough for several projects. The thing to note is that they aren't a list of deliverables, just a list of guiding principles.

Well, that's the stew. If I could lay it all out precisely in text - properly describe the vibe - maybe I wouldn't find modelling so compelling.

Street repairs along the Alta Vista TC

We're thinking about resurrecting our annual Christmas Spike Party, but I'm not sure if the layout can be put into reasonable shape in time - we usually would hold the get together around mid-December, a week or two or so before Christmas. I've decided to try a few minor repairs to see if I can get in the groove for the work ahead. Some street track inserts I installed in the spring using transfer tape to hold them in place popped free over the summer. I reinstalled one using white glue this time, using a piece of board and a couple of hammers to weigh down the insert while the glue dried. Hopefully it'll stay in place this time.

Apartment construction on the Alta Vista TC

Not much happening in the streets of the Alta Vista TC these days other than some on-again-off-again construction of a Kibri 38222 apartment building. Assembly started in June a few weeks after the kit arrived from Germany. The walls were tilted up a couple of weeks ago, but there's still lots of work to go. It's a great kit and hopefully I'll do a full post when it's finished.

Double Sixes

I made a second, and slightly smaller, Imperial Six mockup. On the first one, the people appearing in the plane of the facade looked a little too large, so on the second I tried to get those figures reduced closer to HO size.

The second mockup isn't a lot smaller, but I think it'll fit in a bit better with its surroundings.

TD Bank Tower Mockup

I have a love-hate relationship with skyscrapers. On the one hand, they're pure expressions of power, but on the other, for some I have a grudging admiration for that expression. The Toronto-Dominion Centre is in that latter category.

The TD Bank Tower was the first skyscraper in what would be a complex of towers in Toronto's financial district. It was finished in 1967, and was the first skyscraper built in Canada. At the time it was the tallest in the world outside of New York City. 

That tower shook things up and the city would never be the same again. Look at that photo of Toronto's skyline sometime after the TD Bank Tower was built. There're no other towers there. It's presence dates and stodgifies every other building. It's as if that 2001 monolith plopped straight down into Toronto to move civilization forward from its neolithic beginnings. Transit-wise, the TTC was still running its streetcar fleet with those PCCs that were first designed and built in the 1930s. If the TD Bank Tower was where you worked, one could drop you off at your office. Talk about future shock.

There was nothing stopping that shock-wave from spreading to the sleepy Scarborough suburb where I grew-up. I was in primary school then, and we went on a class trip to ride the tower's elevator to the observation deck to cast our prepubescent, philistinic eyes over the city. We were going to see the future and the TD Bank Tower was the time-machine. Prior to the trip the elevator was a topic of much discussion and how strategic gum chewing would prevent ear-popping as the elevator sped to the top. I don't recall the elevator ride, or if gum chewing was effective, or what the view was like - and never will because the observation deck is closed, and a forest of johnny-come-lately towers now surround the monolith and its brethren. But the trip did leave a lasting impression on my tender psyche.

One problem with the Alta Vista TC layout is that its skyline is too even - it's too uniformly low-rise for my liking - and it's too easy to see from one end to another. I'm thinking a skyscraper or high-rise or two might solve this problem. I'm not going to use just any generic tower because the Alta Vista TC isn't just some 'traction' layout where the buildings are afterthoughts - no, that monolithic icon that's stuck in my mind has to make an appearance. 

Easier said than done. In HO, the real McCoy would be well over 8 feet tall - taller than my layout is long ! This is where I had to rummage around in my E. L. Moore inspired bag-of-tricks and pull out the one labelled Selective Compression. Warning to readers, open this one with care :-)

[No tower, looking toward the Neville Park Loop]

Yes, yes, go ahead and laugh, the absurdity of it isn't lost on me, but there is some method to my madness. I want to get the proportions right and later, when a model comes along, the important details. And, this is the really funny part, even though it needs to be small enough to fit on the layout, it still needs to be 'tall'. What I mean is, in relation to the other buildings on the layout it needs to stand-out tallness-wise, but not overly so, so that it doesn't seem wildly out-of-place. In other words, it needs to read as 'tall' in comparison to its neighbours, but doesn't actually need to be 'tall'.

After some fiddling with dimensions and proportions, I settled on a  mockup that measures 24" tall by 8" across by 4" wide. It's made from 3/16" foamboard: black sheets for the tower and white for the lower level. I haven't forgotten my E. L. Moore roots as the support columns at the four corners are balsa strips. 

[With tower, looking toward the Neville Park Loop]

Yes, it blocks the view. And it's 'tall' and towers above everything else like it's supposed to. Mission accomplished. 

More importantly though, when I placed it on the layout the scene seemed to pop. I had a satisfying feeling that things were heading in the right direction. There's a lot more pleasant playing ahead, but it's starting to feel right.

Imperial Six Mockup

Another one on my list of possible buildings for the Alta Vista TC is the old Imperial Six movie theatre. As with the A& A mockup, I was lucky with this one too, and was able to find a fairly good photo of the facade that doesn't have a lot of perspective distortion.

A City of Toronto Archives photo of the Imperial Six in its heyday.

It has a great look and is unlike most other movie houses. More importantly, it says 'Toronto' to me. 

These mockups are just boxes folded up from bristol board with an HO scale image printed from my computer taped to the front. When I look at the Six the people still seem a bit too large - they might be OO in the image - but the building itself doesn't look too bad. I'll have to ponder this one a bit more because I'm still a bit uneasy with the dimensions.

A&A mockup

I'm fiddling around with ideas for scenes and buildings on the Alta Vista TC. One of my bucket-list builds is A&A's Yonge Street store, which was demolished many years ago. I found quite a number of pictures online, and even one that seems to be suitable for use as a template for the facade.

I sliced the facade from the larger image, and fiddled with the size until some HO figures were just about the same size of the silhouetted figures on the sidewalk. I'll use the b&w image for creating the parts - although a number of the shapes will need to be straightened up - and I printed a colour version for a mockup to see how it might look on the layout and get an idea of its size. It's a little bigger than the prototype, but it looks about right, and the little extra height will increase its presence.

A hiatus from The Hiatus: Building Model Power’s Mercedes Car Agency

It’s hot here. In the mid-30s over the Canada Day long weekend with humidexes in the mid-40s. That’s over my limit and I decided to hide out in the basement until the temperature broke. According to Environment Canada, I might be here for awhile :-) While I'm down here, I decided to build the Model Power Mercedes dealership kit I picked up from George’s Trains a few weeks ago. It looked easy, and easy was what I was looking for. 

I’m always on the lookout for building kits that might be considered modern for the ‘50s, ‘60s or '70s. They’re part of the vibe I’m looking to build into the Alta Vista TC. Whenever I see one, if it’s not too expensive, I’ll buy it even if it’s not something obvious I need. Just because ‘Mercedes Car Agency’ was the name on the box doesn’t mean that’s what it’ll be. What I liked about this kit is that huge showroom and picture window. And along with the modern styling, it’s my kind of kit.

Believe it or not, I think kits like these primed me for being attracted to E. L. Moore’s works. One of my earliest memories from when I was probably 5, 6, or 7 years old was of a blue box with ‘Kibri’ written in big bold letters on the side. There was a plastic modern building kit in there. I don’t know what kind of building, but that memory of ‘Kibri’ and a modern building is strong even though I may have mis-remembered the details. I don’t know what happened to that kit. I speculate that my parents didn’t know it was a plastic model until it was opened and then it was discarded once it was realized gluing was required. But, like I say, that’s just speculation from the 21^st century. I also had a Kenner Girder and Panel set that I loved. Many a fine building was made with that toy. But, the Kibri is a mystery, and one that’s not likely to be solved any time soon.

Speaking of mysteries, stamped on the model's base is Pola along with Model Power, so I'm assuming this was at one time a kit marketed by Pola. But when? I don't know. There's almost nothing online about either this kit or Pola. At the Faller website I read that Pola was taken over by Faller in 1997, and today only G-scale kits are marketed under the Pola brand. Over at the Model Power site I don't see this kit in their current catalog, only farmhouse variants that look very similar to E. L. Moore's W. E. Snatchem kit. And on the dealership kit itself, I just find photos of some rather poorly assembled examples that don't do it justice.

Ok, enough with the history. I started easy and the first thing I did was glue-up the second floor components into a box.

Next, I worked on removing the sidewalk that was surrounding the foundation. Without it, the model will be easier to integrate into the Alta Vista TC's streets.

Once the base was ready, I cut the ground floor walls from the sprue and prepared them for gluing into a unit. The moldings are rather clean and only required some light sanding.

Everything fit together quite well. However, later I found that I didn't glue that top corner over the main window frame together very accurately and had to carefully pry it apart and re-glue it. 

There's an interior partition between the office and showroom. To help keep things square I used the bar clamp to hold the pieces together while the glued dried.

Time for a little test fitting.

Not bad.

All the parts were washed with dish soap in the kitchen sink and left to dry in the rack before painting. Luckily I have a tolerant wife :-)

The parts were taken out to the backyard for spraying. All were base coated with Krylon white. The ground floor was painted over a couple of days with mists of Krylon black and silver. Prior to final assembly all the exterior surfaces were given a light wash of thinned reefer grey to knock back the new paint shine just a bit.

On Canada Day, in between painting sessions, we set up the meat smoker and put it to work.

After a ten hour stint, this is what emerged: a beautifully cooked organic turkey. No basting, nothing fancy, just some veg in the cavity with water and wood chips in the smoking pan. Tender and juicy and a great way to end Canada Day.

Ok. Suitably stuffed, let's get back to work. 

All the ground floor window frames were brush painted black. Tamiya masking tape was applied to help me make a clean job of painting

The second floor window frames had to be installed once they were sprayed with Krylon black paint.

The foundation was painted with some Poly Scale aged concrete colour. Prior to window installation I test fit everything again to see how things were looking. Not too bad. I figured I wasn't going to glue the two floors together so that I could change showroom scenes as the mood struck.

The kit's instructions say, hey, don't worry if you break a piece because you can always glue it back together. I broke the main window and you can't glue it back together :-( The window is attached to the sprue by a length-spanning slice of plastic that I carefully - but not carefully enough - tried to cut through. I applied too much pressure. It didn't work.

With that piece broken I didn't even try to free its mate for the side wall.

After a cursing free-for-all, I settled down and cut two new windows from some clear sheet plastic from my scrap bin. Up there is the result. It's posed on the kitchen counter as there's no fridge with cold beverages in the basement.

I love the lights that came with the kit. Screw-in bulbs!

The fixtures are inserted into holes in the showroom's ceiling.

I think the leads are meant to run to the outside, but I decided to solder a 9v battery holder to them so I could easily move the lit model anywhere on the layout for photos.

Yeah! They work!

And that's more-or-less that.

How about some beauty shots to wrap-up?

Yikes! There's a giant hand in the window. It's tough making sure unwanted external reflections don't show up when I'm taking pictures - note to self when this thing's on the layout. I haven't decided on what sort of business this building will house, so the circle where the Mercedes logo is to go is still blank.

This is the end wall on the office side.

And the back wall. I like that row of window blinds. They're paper cut-outs that come with the kit.

The corner joint on the window is not too bad. It took a bit of cutting and fitting to get the two 'glass' pieces to join up without a noticeable gap.

The rooftop air conditioner is a Walther's item. The kit supplied a brick chimney for that location, but it seemed out of place on this building. Also, since the roof is removable in order to access the light's battery, it acts as a handle to help remove the roof. The a/c is attached with super-glue and a self-tapping screw for extra strength.

Speaking of a/c, the heat-wave is supposed to break tomorrow, so my self-imposed exile will come to an end and I'll rejoin the world of above ground-level dwellers.