Bristol board and card and paper and balsa and watercolour

After riding The Ocean to Halifax last year I toyed with the idea of building a model onboard if I were ever to take that trip again. I thought I'd build a small structure using a few simple tools, and materials that weren't messy, toxic, or had a bad smell. Classic cardboard and balsa construction came to mind. The idea was I'd start and finish the build in the time it took the train to go from Montréal to Halifax. Upon arrival I'd box up the model and mail it home before beginning my Nova Scotia travels. 

Well, I'm unlikely to ever ride that train again, but I kept wondering if such a build were possible: a simple model, built with simple materials and tools, taking no longer than 22 hours - well, 25 if you include delays :-)

The FireHouse Iron Works as seen in May 2024, Whycocomagh, Cape Breton Island

During the trip an old, somewhat dilapidated, and repurposed firehouse located in the town of Whycocomagh on Cape Breton Island caught my eye. I quite liked the size and shape of the building, so I thought this would be the one I'd try for a 22 hour classic card build. 

Well, I might as well fess up right from the get-go: although it was a fun project in classic style, it took much longer to build than I thought. Ok, it didn't take 22 hours to build, probably only a handful of hours if you add up all the dots and blots of time, but they were sprinkled over a period longer than 22 hours. There was time waiting for glue to dry, waiting for paint to dry, and my usual humming-and-hawing about how to proceed with certain parts of the build. It all adds up. This was further complicated by the fact that there are basically three little buildings in this project, making it a more time consuming project than I had thought because of the number of parts to be made. And on the train I would have been diverted by sleeping, eating, and general lolling about and gawking out the windows for long stretches. I think a more feasible 22 hour project would be a single box structure with just four walls and a roof - maybe something like Marmora station.

As you can see I made a few changes to the building's look. All the fine detailing is simplified, or simply left off. I wasn't much interested in the prototype's distressed look, so I changed it to something a little cleaner, brighter, and more colourful with basically little to no weathering. Instead I wanted to make use of watercolour's ability to create flowing, variegated colour to add interest to the surfaces. Watercolour paints would also be easy to use on a train as there's little fuss or muss with preparation and clean-up.

I figured if I was to build this on the train I'd have to had drawn the plans before departure. You may recall I created drawings for this project, as well as few others, over the Christmas holidays and that lead to a sharpener crisis :-)  I'd say a third of the work on this project was associated with figuring out the elevations from my reference photos. I wouldn't want to do that on a train with time pressures looming.

Using the plans, the walls for all three buildings were drawn out in contiguous strips on pieces of bristol board. I used 4-ply, 500 series Strathmore bristol board that I bought a few years ago at an art supply in Pasadena. You may recall I also used it for Thrifty's and the Art Metropole projects. 

Once the walls were laid out I scored in the board separations with a scribing tool. This gives a little three-dimensionality to the surfaces and helps keep the individual siding boards from being lost as they're painted.

Painting these wall strips is easy. I can simply mix up some paint, stroke on some loose washes, and in a minute or two the painting is done for all a building's walls.

One way to build up the wall strips into boxes is to scribe the corners and then fold. You may recall I used that technique on Cal's Cabbage Company. I didn't use it here as the bristol board is considerably thicker, and I'm not good at angling out the inner bends to get a smooth corner. Instead, I cut each strip into individual walls and assembled them with balsa strips to reinforce the corners - similar to the Mike Gill approach. 

Even though the interior is a hodgepodge of leftover balsa strips, it's surprisingly strong. I used Weld Bond on all joints, and to attach the balsa. After a few days though I noticed a little concavity with some walls and added a few cross-braces before gluing on the roofs. 

You can see the additional cross-braces in the above photo. 

I consider getting the walls stood up to be a construction milestone. At this point the pieces start to look like a building. 

And the walls are looking pretty square, so there's some extra happiness to be had at this point.

So, I sat back and basked in square wall glory for a bit. Next up was framing the windows, doors and corners, which I find to be a little tedious when done as a marathon, but not unpleasant in small doses. Meaning, being somewhat compelled to frame everything in one go on a train could try my patience. 

All the framing was made from strips of 3x5 card with 3M transfer tape applied to the back. This meant the frames would instantly stick to the walls when applied, which sped up the building process a bit.

Doors were cut from scraps of the 4-ply bristol board and painted with watercolours. Doorknobs were made from dressmaker's straight pins.

Glass for the windows was cut from the clear plastic lid from a box of Christmas chocolates I had stashed away for just such a job. Again, Weld Bond was used to glue the 'glass' in place.

The metal roof panels were made by embossing the pattern from a piece of corrugated plastic onto scraps of printer paper - this is similar to the good, old paper metal technique. I used a toothpick as an embossing tool. These pieces were bonded with 3M transfer tape to roof panels cut from the 4-ply bristol board, and then painted with a loose mix of Paynes Grey and Raw Umber watercolours. No attempt was made at realism regarding colour. I just wanted something that looked interesting.

You might ask, why not just use the piece of corrugated plastic? The answer is I wanted to keep the roof stylistically similar to the walls. That is, I wanted a rather flat 3-D surface with a papery finish. The plastic would be too strongly 3-D, and watercolour couldn't be used on it.

And that is that.

So, would I build something similar in one of these overnight compartments on the Ocean (there's a fold-down table somewhere in that pile of stuff) ? Maybe, if it was a simpler project. 

But, it also depends on the smoothness of the ride. I don't think it's up to 1972 Mercury Marquis Brougham standards :-)

ST 2's true identity

ST 2 on page 13 of Kibri's 1965 HO & N catalogue

It turns out ST 2 is a Kibri kit and appeared in their 1965 HO & N catalogue. 

From the picture you can see that mine is missing a few parts, which includes a low-rise extension and a roof-top railing on the main building. I'll likely add the railing when I get to restoration, but the rest of the work will focus just on cleaning up the model, and probably adding a strip of LED lighting to that greenhouse.

ST 2

Today we took a drive out to Smiths Falls, and stopped in Merrickville on the way home. There's a model train store in Merrickville I haven't visited in nearly 2.5 years, what with the pandemic and all, so I popped in for a quick look around. 

There were a lot of assembled HO scale buildings for sale, likely from a few estates. I saw 7 (!) fully assembled E. L. Moore Machine Shops, which must be some sort of record for the most completed examples of that kit in one place. Well, in amongst those relics I saw ST 2 and couldn't resist buying it. It's clearly European, but whether it's a kit or kit-bash, I can't say as there're no identifying markings. But, it's cleanly assembled, not a glue-bomb, even though the paint job is a bit rough. So, it'll be restored, or at least spruced up. At any rate, that office furniture in the skywalk greenhouse is worth more than I paid for this intriguing structure, so no loss whatever happens.

Big waves from the ocean lookout

Cleaning up the workshop has a few upsides other than the obvious: I found some long lengths of styrene ladder stock, which meant I could finish the ocean overlook without having to buy any more stuff.

A suitable length was cut and painted a messy yellow, and, voila, it was done.

Would I want to be up there, 30 scale feet in the air, on an old, repurposed, rickety and tilted elevated gate tower? Especially after climbing that ladder. No way. 

But, it looks like there's a party going on, so maybe I'd need to make an exception. Where's my sunscreen?

Another variation on Atlas’ elevated gate tower

Images snipped and assembled from here

The last few weeks I’ve been scanning the internet for photos of highly scenicked slot car layouts. I was interested in seeing how the other half lived :-) It was on one such expedition that I ‘discovered’ that photo of Pretty Village models on John Swartzell’s model railroad. 

As well as being primed to see E. L. Moore buildings and Pretty Village models, I’m now apparently primed to see Atlas elevated gate towers. While on another slotted voyage of discovery yesterday I spotted this slightly modified Atlas elevated gate tower being used as a race observation station on the corner of this slot car layout. In this version everything above the building’s belt line has been cut off to produce an open-air observation stand. It looks like a few of these were used around the layout.

Ocean lookout

I have been doing little model building these last few months. We're making the most of the good weather while it's still here.

However, now and then, in spare moments, I've been trying out an idea for converting the classic Atlas elevated gate tower kit into a freelanced ocean lookout. It's getting close to done. I'm at the point where I need to work on weathering, and adding a very long ladder from the beach to the little building.

The Lost Ocean Line Mk II will have coast, and along with an Apollo Lifeguard Module or two, there'll be this thing to keep an eye on the surf.

I need to find a figure holding binoculars up to its eyes, scanning the horizon for trouble. Sharks, maybe? :-)

Bungalows in scale

Plasticville | Plasticville | Walthers | Plasticville

To get a better idea of how small the Plasticville bungalows are here's a comparison with Walthers so-called Ranch Tract House. I say so-called because here that house would be called a bungalow, and a ranch house would be considerably bigger while remaining single-storey. 

I think the picture gives one a sense of why the Plasticville houses are too small, even when the 1/8" scaling is discounted - the built-in garage itself takes up about 1/3 of the footprint leaving little living space. Yes, comparing models from eras that are 65+ years apart is somewhat unfair, but I was wrestling with this scale issue earlier in the year while working on a side project.

I live in a neighbourhood built just after WWII. Smaller houses, many similar in size to the Walthers house, are still more-or-less the norm, although gentrification via monster houses is making inroads. However, the city is now changing its zoning bylaws to allow 4 and 6 storey multi-unit towers - some with ground floor retail - to be built cheek-to-jowl with the older houses. The city's promotional material about these changes has been quite deceptive in its communication of how big the towers will be. To help counter those perceptions I prepared some models and took some photos for a local group to clearly show the sizes involved. I had those Plasticville models on hand, but they were just too small, so I used the Walthers model, which better represents the size of the houses involved.

I built the Walthers kit box-stock. No painting, customizations, improvements, or changes of any kind. For my purposes, it looked fine as is, and speed of construction was important. Believe it or not, I built it in a single session of about 2 hours - something of a record for me :-)

It's a good kit, and I think with some painting could be made to look more realistic and settled. So, if you're looking for post-war houses for your layout, you might want to consider these.

Fie on the towers, if the city is going to change things, I recommend new construction be limited to the Deoralow :-)

Building of Interest

You're right, I've been spending too much time with miniature buildings. In this composite image, the building on the left is a screen grab from an episode in Season 3 of Person of Interest, and on the right is a cropped box-top photo of Walthers' HO scale Bralick Building kit. The similarities are similar :-) Years ago I used the kit as the basis for Mr. Scott's Dilithium Crystal Factory and for The Oceanview Hotel. Interestingly, the kit includes a roof-top water tower, like the Person of Interest building, but it has been apparently airbrushed out of the box-top image. No doubt the architectural style of the Bralick kit is common, and I wouldn't be surprised to find similar looking real buildings in many locations.

Looking for some tacos amongst the Eagles

Eagles at the Beach

It's summer. Soon it'll be the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. What better time to get the Apollo Lifeguard Modules out of storage and on the backlot for some photos.

Painting the Elevator Building

In the last instalment I had started to mask the Elevator Building in preparation for painting. The idea was to spray it a brick-like red, and then coat the window and door frames with an aluminum coloured spray.

First, I finished off masking the windows. That sliver of a window down in the lower right was a little tricky. 

Tamiya masking tape was used throughout. It's great tape, but a bit on the pricey side, so the initial cost of $1 for this model is starting to climb. I didn't buy any spray paints for this project; I just used colours from the leftover sprays I have in the workshop.

The first thing was to spray it with Tamiya's fine white surface primer. I use that on all plastic projects. It is indeed fine and doesn't clog detail. And it's also tops at revealing imperfections that require correction before final colour coats. I did see a few little flaws after spraying that I took the time to sand and fill.

I don't have any action shots of the box being sprayed red, but you can get an idea of what the red coat looked like from this photo taken during the application of more masking tape and plastic wrap in preparation for spraying the window frames. I let the red dry about a week before applying the second round of masking.

Krylon aluminum coloured spray was used for this layer. Several light coats were applied over the course of an afternoon. When done it was left to dry outside for a couple of hours. This year I'll be getting an outside spray tent to contain the overspray from reaching the garden.

And there it is prior to peeling off the masking. It looks a little grim at this stage, but, as you can see in the opening photo, I was pleasantly surprised at how things turned out. It's important to have a little faith :-)

A long time ago Galen posted a comment here noting the direct way a coat hanger was used as a paint stand. I think I replied with something like: "I've always painted this way". Well, I'll spill the beans, I got the technique from this book published by Revell in '73. I bought my copy back-in-the-day from the toy department at Simpsons Cedarbrae. 

The coat hanger as spray stand was item #14 in the opening chapter called Basic Modeling Procedures. My mum was not so thrilled with what I did with the coat hanger she lent me, so I had to make sure I didn't lose it because there wasn't going to be another :-)

Dollar architecture

Ok, well, only that thin apartment on the left was $1; that squat thing on the right, that might have once been part of a motel, was $2. This is more than I usually buy at most swap meets, but I was pleasantly surprised at today's finds. There are no manufacturer's marks on either, but I suspect they're both German - and that 8150 may help with identification. With a little enhancement they'll fit right in on the Alta Vista TC.

John, Earl, and Bert: An N-Scale Interpretation of Bert's Garage

Walls temporarily tilted up at Bert's Garage

I can’t say with any certainty what the attraction was that got me into making miniature buildings. I can only note that there were two small events that happened one summer that in retrospect may have marked the beginning of this lifelong interest.

My friend Rob and I were fanatically interested in slot cars. I think we were around twelve years old and he had a much older brother who worked at Eldon’s toy factory. They made 1/32 scale slot cars, and contrary to company policy his brother sneaked home slot cars that were rejected from the assembly line instead of tossing them in the trash. They came to Rob and we spent many happy hours restoring them to racing condition. Somehow Rob had also acquired a vast collection of Scalextric track, and one summer we decided to use it all and build the biggest layout we could. His house had a free-standing, wood frame three-car garage out back that was a relic from the time his parents used it to store the trucks used by their dry-cleaning business. The premature death of this father resulted in the business shutting down, and that left an old, empty wooden garage behind his house. Its floor was just the thing for hosting what we thought would be the world’s largest slot car race course. Naturally, it needed pit stops, garages, grandstands, timing towers and all the other buildings associated with the ‘60s and ‘70s racing scene. I jumped in with construction paper, glue, scissors and more ambition than talent and built everything I thought a race track needed. All of it crap, but great fun to build.

Sometime during that summer, when the race track was under construction, I stumbled across a copy of Model Railroader magazine while searching for the latest Detective comics at my favourite smoke shop. What grabbed my attention was Ben King's cover photo, but the article I found deep inside by some guy named E. L. Moore on how to build an HO scale model called Bunn's Feed and Seed was what set me up for a lifetime of building. I built a version of it in 1/32 scale, and even though it was cannibalized for parts before the fall was out, I eagerly awaited other issues and other model railroad magazines for more construction projects. I was hooked - hooked for life as it turned out.

But life being what it is, I more-or-less dropped out of making HO scale buildings once I started university and didn’t return until this century. If you're a regular reader you know I've written a lot about E. L. Moore, and to some extent about a few other model railroaders from his era whose speciality was building small buildings. I have to tell you that along the way I've developed a curiosity about the whole 20th century history of building little buildings. It looks like all the story's pieces are out there in plain sight, they just need to be stitched together, and once that's done, I'll bet the complete tale makes for some interesting reading.

Sliced from a larger image in the Dec '94 issue of MRJ

I'm not exactly sure where that tale should begin, or end for that matter, but it seems like John Ahern is the guy to start with. Unlike E. L. Moore, Mr. Ahern's story and legacy are well known. His Madder Valley Railway from the 1940s and 1950s, now housed at the Pendon Museum in England, is legendary, and his life's work with scenic model railways is well documented throughout extensive publications in the model railway press of the time. The Madder Valley showed what a scenic model railway was and what it could strive to become. Was his truly the first scenic model railway? I'm not completely sure. But, even if it wasn't, its impact was certainly significant. While reading my way through E. L. Moore's archives I had hoped to find some reference to John Ahern, or maybe some correspondence with him. I didn't, but it wasn't inconceivable, especially since E. L. Moore had a large personal library in the 1950s and appeared to be a voracious reader. The work of those two men seemed simpatico even though one lived and worked in the southern U.S.A and the other in England. Consider this: both loved building little buildings, both built model railroads that leaned to the scenic, both built plausible locomotives and rolling stock to meet their needs, and both had a similar humanistic approach to modelling. Well, I'll likely never know if there was a connection. The mystery is part of the fun.

Slice of screen-rip from Pendon video

Mr. Ahern's Bert's Garage seems like something E. L. Moore could have built had E. L. Moore been interested in automobiles - although, there are one or two Ford Model-Ts on his Elizabeth Valley RR, which seem out-of-place in its early 1900s setting. I thought I'd try and build Bert's in N-scale, using old-school methods, for possible inclusion on the EVRR tribute layout. And this being the 21st century, I thought I'd try some video along with the usual pictures and text. So, apologizes for the production values, but if it seems like a good thing, I'll keep going with it and try for improvements. That being said, get some popcorn, turn down the lights, and let's watch.

Here is a snippet of the elevations Mr. Ahern provides for Bert's Garage in his book, Miniature Building Construction, along with his brief explanation about constructing the main building.

Bert's celebrated establishment at Much Madder is shown in Fig. 72. This is a timber erection with corrugated-iron roof. The walls are painted green; the lettering, barge-boards, and window frames are white. The doors are made to slide, the runners at the top being boxed over. When the doors are fully open, the windows in them come directly in front of those in the wall sections so that the light is not impeded. Diagram D shows how the front corner-posts project forward of the walls, so as to be flush with the doors. The lean-to at the side contains a tiny office, with stove-pipe, an even smaller store, and a lavatory. The lamp over the entrance is made of a glass bead and a pressed metal shirt-stud, the wires being secured in a block of wood glued inside the gable. The reader can let himself go to his heart's content in the matter of petrol and tyre advertisements.

The implication in not showing the back wall is that there're no doors or windows or any special whatnot on it. I decided to make the back wall the same as the front, with large doors for driving in cars. This allows for cars to enter one end and leave through the other. It'll add a little more work to the project, but I think it'll also add interest as it allows for scenes at either end. I'm also planning on having a removable roof a la E. L. Moore, along with an inside light and maybe a skylight, to show off the insides when the roof is on. Not too sure what'll do about gas pumps; maybe there won't be any. You know, maybe it would lend itself to 21st century updating: switch the name from Bert's to Elon's, slap some solar panels on the roof, install some charging stations out front, and you're ready for the electric car business :-)

Ok, enough with the jokes, let's get going. I drew all four walls in a continuous strip on a piece of the kleenex box card. The front and back walls are 22' wide, 10' at the eves, and 19' tall at the peak. The side walls are 25' long.

Then the window and door openings were cut out using a sharp blade and a steel edge.

Vertical boards were scribed on. I used a scribing tool that I forgot to show in the video :-( but one could use the back edge of the x-acto knife instead - I've done that many times. Board spacing isn't precise and I did whatever looked about right.

Next thing is to cut the wall strip free. 

I then chose to slice the strip into individual walls. On Dilly's I simply folded the walls into a box and continued on from there. On this project I'm going to detail the interior a little, and individual walls allow me to do that easier than if they were folded into a box. An alternative is to keep the strip and detail the walls before folding which is what I did on Cal's Cabbage, but that was in HO scale. There's no right or wrong way.

Here's what the inside surfaces look like. No worries, they'll be painted white once some framing detail's been added.

At this stage I sliced some thin strips from the sheet wood you saw in the video and used it, along with some larger stripwood, to build up some faux framing on the inside wall surfaces. Nothing is to scale or rigorously prototypical - the idea is to simply suggest framing so things seem to make sense if you were to glance inside when the lights are on.

While taking a break from framing, I cut the walls for the small office that's built onto one of the side walls. Those end pieces are just 4' wide, and the long wall measures 14.5'. I think there's supposed to be a toilet in there, so I'll have to figure out what to do detail-wise - if this were an E. L. Moore build, he'd have an outhouse strategically positioned nearby instead :-)

There it is, more-or-less all framed. The office is going to have a wood floor so there's a bit of space in its framing at floor-level to accommodate that. The ends on the main building need a little more truss work, but I'll tackle that when I work on the roof.

The walls were temporarily tilted up to see how things were looking. They'll need to painted, have window frames added, windows glazed and lettering applied before gluing them together.

I'm not sure when I'll continue this project once Christmas vacation is over. With this model I was interested in giving video a go, writing my 'secret origins' story on how I got into making model buildings, and trying a little something by Mr. Ahern. If I can find the time, I'll continue and post another instalment. As Mister X would say, so little time, so much to do :-)