Cal's Cabbage Co. on the backlot

It was nice and sunny on the weekend and I took a few minutes to shoot a couple of pictures of Cal's Cabbage Co. outside. Compare to the relatively calmer staged shots I made indoors back in 2014.

Intense sunlight brings out every little detail, whether intentionally added or not. I see a corner of a solar panel has lifted and needs to be re-glued, not to mention some skewed uprights, and their very coarse balsa texture. 

And on the bottom, out of view, I need to re-solder a couple of light leads that got damaged when Cal's was removed from the old layout. I'll do a few repairs and have another go another day.

Rootin' and ticketin'

[A delivery to Cal's Cabbage Co. Photo by E. L. Moore]

This will be the last post for awhile as I’m thinking of retiring from blogging. Things seem to be pointing in the direction of placing the blog on the shelf: there are more demands on my time these days; as well, there are some other projects I’d like to pursue, and I think I’ve come to the end of things I want to post about. I can see the weeks and months ahead merely consisting of status updates and I’m not overly interested in that. I’ve taken blogging breaks before, but always with a plan to return, so Debra suggested I just set things aside for awhile and see how I feel in a few weeks. Sounds like a good idea. The blog will remain up-and-running, and I’m still around for comments or email. Of course, if there any new and interesting developments, I’ll be back.

[Buying tickets at the Grizzly Flats Depot. Photo by E. L. Moore]

Cal starts a nightshift

News of the latest 2016 health fad scrolled onto Cal’s screen a few weeks ago: sauerkraut juice is the all-natural elixir for everything that could ail a body. Worldwide demand is projected to soar.

That’s Ray and Bob taking a little break between juicer loads. The main vat is only half full and there’s still a carload of cabbage to go before dawn. Happy New Year and may your cabbage harvest be plentiful! 

After hours at Caleb's Cabbage Company

As part of the effort to add more lights to the layout, Caleb's Cabbage Company is now on the grid. This is what's got this pig's interest.

A location for Caleb’s Cabbage Co.

I fiddled around on the weekend with the placement of buildings on the LOL to find a location for Caleb’s Cabbage Co. I guess in the end it was a game of “which one of these things just doesn’t belong”, and it turned out to be Jones’ Chemical Co. Jones’ appeared to be the outsider in the organic-veggie-bean-sprout-tie-dye region that is becoming the new-normal in the rural region of the LOL – ignoring of course the presence of the seaside barbecue :-) Luckily, the rail-side portions of both Caleb’s and Bunn’s Feed and Seed line-up quite well with the existing track layout, and the truck-delivery doors of Bunn’s even orient properly with the road put in originally to service Jones’. So things are not looking too bad arrangement-wise. I now need to fix up the surrounding plantings, grassy areas, trees, out-buildings and other details to blend everything in and make it seem like a unified whole.

E. L. Moore's Legacy in the 21st Century: Modernizing Caleb’s Cabbage Co.

In the back of my mind I was thinking, what might this building look like if it were built today down in Prince Edward County - well, a fictional version of the County where old meets new, and Canadian, American and British railroad practices combine - and ‘opened up’ more in line with what John Allen did with his Engine House? Basically, my attempt at applying Selective Staging to E. L. Moore's Cousin Caleb’s Cabbage Plant build that appeared in the December ’71 issue of Railroad Modeler (the first three instalments in this part of the E. L. Moore in the 21th Century series can be found here and here and here).

I’ve been wondering if John Allen had mid-20th century [1] modernist leanings expressed in his buildings. Maybe not in all his projects, but his Engine House appears to have some. That building is a bit deceiving because its surface appearance is rustic and rural, not vast glass surfaces held together with spindly steel struts. But, what those two extremes have in common is they both go to great efforts to seamlessly join together the environments inside and outside the walls of the buildings. Those stereotypical glass boxes do it in a very blatant manner with broad expanses of glass [2], but Mr. Allen’s Engine House does it by tweaking the sizes and shapes of existing building elements - bigger windows, skylights, door-less openings, interior lights – in such a way that they all look at home in the building’s early 20^th century skin. It sort of seems like something one might see in Lloyd Kahn's Shelter. Many of the buildings in that book are also rustic, but modern too.

E. L. Moore often made use of Selective Compression to make his models more amenable to the confines of a model railroad, but I can’t seem to find an example where he applied Selective Staging and visually ‘opened up’ a building like Mr. Allen did with the Engine House. Many of Mr. Moore’s buildings have full interiors, but usually one would need to do the usual thing of lifting off the roof, or maybe peaking in a scale-sized window, to see what was going on. So, he was probably more of a traditionalist with regard to Selective Staging. One thing I need to do is try and learn more about John Allen’s other structures to see if the Engine House was a onetime flirtation with mid 20^th century modernism and Selective Staging, or if it was a common feature of his work.

As I progressed with this project I quickly realized there were a lot of little sub-assemblies and details to work on to open-up the building. 

There's a partial basement under the shed that, according to Mr. Moore, housed a boiler for powering the cabbage shredding equipment. In my version those machines are powered by electricity, so the basement is now used for storage. The basement 'tray' is built up from scraps of sheet styrene.

Here's basement after it has been sanded, painted with concrete coloured paint, and glued into the floor. You can see that the back door enters into the basement.

The three vats on the front porch are built up from 1/16 inch balsa for the ends, and 1/32 inch for the wrapper. The wrappers are scored to show individual boards on the outer face. Super glue was used to construct these things.

Here they are after they were glued up. Some strips of balsa were added to the lids as per Mr. Moore's drawings.

For a little contrast the vats were stained a dark brown. The silver strap around the top of vat is a strip of paper painted aluminum. Some old Letraset letters were rubbed on so it would be easy to identify each vat. Wouldn't want to make mistakes when filling them up!

The roof substrate is cut from 3/32 inch thick sheet balsa as specified in the article. The one modification I made was to cut three skylights into the enclosed shed portion, the idea being that a modern version of this building would try to make use of natural light wherever possible to save money on lighting.

Mr. Moore specifies that the roof be covered with glued on tissue and then ruled with a pen, which would simulate a tar-paper roof. A typical building in Prince Edward County these days would either use asphalt shingles or metal panels. Tar-paper would be out-of-the-question. I toyed with Mr. Moore’s method of using scribed paper to represent metal siding – which is not too bad – but I was lazy and didn’t want to do the work. On the other hand, I had a piece of self-adhesive ‘shingle paper’ from Micro-Mark left-over from another project that looks pretty close to new asphalt shingles, so I decided to use it. It’s good to use up what you’ve got on hand. 

In a small way this sort of decision is representative of many that a contemporary model building hobbyist faces: be self-reliant and make a part using what’s on hand to the degree that your skills allow, or buy something from the vast world of consumer products that may have far better fidelity than you could produce with your own skills. In this situation, I chose the latter, but Mr. Moore chose the former in his article. At the time his article was written and published, he did have the choice as various textured surfacing papers existed, although not to the same extent and fidelity as today, so it’s not a false comparison. Make versus buy. Self-reliance versus consumption. Over the years I’ve indulged in both, from completely home-made stuff to plastic kits to mixtures of commercial and scratch-built parts to pre-completed resin cast buildings. I’m ok with anyone being on any end of this scale. The only thing that bothers me are claims that one end is superior to the other and using that as a  basis to judge the other parts of the continuum. It depends on what one wants out of the hobby. I like making things and trying to get better as I go along. I figure I’m closer to the build-it-yourself end of the hobby, but I still use lots of purchased components. E. L. Moore was much closer than me to the fully self-reliant end. Well, when he was in his prime in the later 1950s and into the 1960s, the hobby in general was closer to the self-reliant end, and even more so the further back in the 20^th century one goes. So, choices for them were more limited than for us. The thing to keep in mind is that we have a wide range of choices, and we’re free to choose up-and-down the continuum, and can also sift through the information of previous generations to pull out the good stuff [3].

Being modern and all, solar panels were called for since Ontario has a big solar program on the go. The panel pictures were downloaded from the internet and printed out in long strips. A piece of styrene sheet was glued to the back of each strip, and a Sharpie pen was used to draw on the black frames between the panels. Later on, ground-up gray pastel was lightly dusted on the panels to knock back the sheen.

I've had a fascination with solar panels for a long time. That freelanced model house was one I built as a boy for my first model railroad. Those silver squares were a youthful attempt at solar panels. It could use a reno considering all those weird finishes, but the building seems basically ok.

There's lots of windows out back, but it's salvageable.

Jumping ahead a bit, here is the finished roof. A styrene strip was glued on back of each set of panels near the top so the whole panel is tilted off the roof a little at the top to made things a little more 3D. The skylights were framed with 0.010 inch styrene strips. Clear plastic was used for the glass.

The shed service doors and their frames were built up from scraps of balsa. The shed's back door was built up from a sandwich of cardboard and clear plastic. Mr. Moore's was a solid door, but I wanted a window in the door to let light into the shed to complement the skylights - again, continuing to apply the idea of opening up the building to viewing and light. A pin head was used for the doorknob in old-school style.

These freelanced cabbage shredders were one of most enjoyable details to build. They're made from scraps of styrene and left-over parts from some old 1/25 scale plastic car kits. Mr. Moore hinted that he put some sort of shedders inside his building, but they weren't shown in the article. Mine would be dangerous to use: ladders and big chutes for tossing in the cabbages are a deadly combination. 

It doesn't appear that Mr. Moore's building had lights in the shed, but I thought I needed them to push on with the whole 'opening up the interior' concept. I built a tree from styrene tube and channel stock to hold 3 small incandescent bulbs. I had some in my spares box and figured I'd use them. They have a warm light too. I didn't think the clear, cold light from an LED fit with this project. The light tree starts with the T shown above...

... and ends with the three-pronged structure shown above. The lights are held in place by a sandwich of styrene channels. 

And here's the tree installed. A hole was drilled in the floor to hold it in place. It's not a prototypical light fixture, but it's not too bad. In the picture I hooked up a battery just to make sure all the bulbs lit up.

You see that wall in the previous picture where the long arm of the light tree extends over vat a, I had to add an upper section to the half wall to close up the shed. I decided to make a simple balsa frame with a 'chain link' panel glued over it - it's actually a piece of 'chain link' cloth from a Walther's chain link fence kit. I figured it would keep out birds and 'varmints when the building was closed up for the off-season. It would also continue to allow views and light into the shed.

There is the half wall installed. Below it is the central sauerkraut juice tank. The tank body is cut from a pill bottle and is around 9 scale feet in diameter. Balsa wood ends were glued on and 0.010 inch styrene straps were used to cover the joint between the ends and the body. Lots of scrap styrene was used to build the upper platform and cap. A bent pin was used for the tap. I also poured in some Woodland Scenics 'water' to simulate the sauerkraut juice, but that didn't work too well. Capillary action drew the 'water' up the sides and made for a weird sight. It was overkill and there wasn't any point in doing that, but it seemed like a good idea at the time :-) Mr. Moore used an all wood tank, but again, I wanted to keep the view into the shed as open as possible.

Here's the other side of the building and the back end of the tank. Climbing that ladder is a safety hazard, but there's a nice yellow railing to hang onto :-)

One last look before the roof was glued on. That green stuff on the floor is flocking to simulate cabbage scraps that didn't make it into the shredders. Gluing on the roof was a little nerve racking, so no pictures during the big event. But, once the dust had settled, and the glue was dry, here's what the sides looked like,

Now that all was said and done I wondered if 'Selective Staging' was a success. 

It is possible to easily see all the way inside and through the building. That picture above was shot with natural sunlight streaming in the skylights and no retouching was done on the photo. It's not too bad.

Likewise, at night with the lights on, there's good views into the building, and the inside of the shed is fairly well lit up.

So, again, was this effort to modernize an E. L. Moore project and apply Selective Staging a success? I think the results are mixed. Overall, I’m happy with the way the project turned out even though the construction methods are relatively unsophisticated. The shed, and to a certain extent the vat deck, is well lit and offers many sight-lines, although some are a little blocked. However, even though the pictures of the insides don’t look too bad, they’re a bit deceiving; as are a lot of Mr. Allen’s Engine House and Mr. Moore’s building photos. My photos, and theirs, are more or less all shot at or near ‘eye level’ in those miniature worlds. This makes it relatively easy for the viewer to make the cognitive leap into the photo’s world. On the other hand, a typical model railroad, when viewed ‘in the flesh’ presents the observer with a bird’s eye view of a world – a fairly unusual position. Roofs dominate from that vantage point. Even if one can take the roofs off, as was possible with the Engine House, and with many of Mr. Moore’s builds - although not with Caleb’s - the view inside is from high in the sky. And Caleb’s has got one big roof; it’s slope is fairly flat and blocks a lot of the view into what’s going on. So I’m thinking that Selective Staging is about both the way a building is organized, and how the viewer’s eye is positioned with respect to the building. There’s probably a whole line of investigation into how to design a model railroad completely optimized for eye-level viewing – that is, more than just taking a layout ‘as is’ and hoisting it up higher :-) I might even go as far as stating that maybe optimized eye-level viewing, along with view staging – full blown Selective Staging that is - is as important as detailing and weathering, maybe more so. But, that’s just conjecture, so for now, release the pigs! :-)

[The Naughty Pigs from Shaun the Sheep]

It wouldn't be Caleb's Cabbage Company without the pigs rooting around on the 'leavings' [4].

Digressions

[1] In the United States, the so-called mid 20th century period extended from the end of World War II to the swearing in of President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Architecturally, I guess the period ‘officially’ ended well before the Reagan era, and possibly the later ‘70s was merely the hang-over of the mid-century period. Regardless of date haggling, by sometime in the late ‘70s or early ‘80’s, mid-century modernism was over.

[2] I get the impression from some of my cursory reading of old model railroading magazines, that Railroad Model Craftsman flirted a bit with publishing some clearly modernist model building projects in the late 1940s, which coincides with the years when mid 20^th century modernism was hitting its stride. Today, the mainstream model railroading press has a strong emphasis on the steam-to-diesel transition period that started in the late 1940s and lasted  into the 1950s, but consideration of modernist leanings in that period seems to be largely missing from today’s view into that era.

[3] Mike Bidlo is an artist who creates replicas of certain pieces of 20^th century modern art. One of his most well-known series was a re-creation of a number of Jackson Pollack drip paintings.  Mr. Bidlo tried as much as possible to replicate how they were produced using the same materials – as could be found at the time – and same processes as the originals . His goal wasn’t to create counterfeits, but to try and experience what the artists experienced as they created the originals. When I stumbled across Mr. Bidlo’s work I sort of felt this E. L. Moore series was somewhat in the same vein. To just read the articles is one thing; to try and act on them is another. 

Artists that do what Mr. Bidlo does are called ‘appropriationists’, as they make use of, or appropriate, things that others have produced in order to make something new. Mr. Bidlo was trying to produce the experience that artists like Jackson Pollack had to see for himself what it might have been like to produce those art works and maybe learn from the experience. In effect, producing art from art. Sometimes I read in the model railroading media that it isn’t worth the time to produce a model from a model; that is, say, reproduce model from a John Allen article, or a model from a Jack Work article, or a model from an Art Curren article, or even an E. L. Moore model from an E. L. Moore article. I think there are a few reasons to give these a try, some are: the project is interesting and will fit on your layout, so you give it a try; there’s interesting techniques – and maybe low-cost ones – that seem useful; experience what it was like to build something from another time in some else’s style – an admittedly rare occurrence, but after a few builds, I’ve noticed an appreciation of what doing these builds back then might have been like that I didn’t get just from reading about them. I think that last one might be the basis of another model railroading genre I’d call ‘Retro’: building a model railroad as was done ‘back-in-the-day’ –maybe with some concessions on the control technology side so that many of the old time frustrations are eliminated, but the visual style remains.

[4] The cabbages used in the photos are coriander seeds - organic ones at that! - painted green. 

E. L. Moore’s Legacy in the 21st Century: Sticks and glue may build Cousin Cal’s Cabbage Plant, but sauerkraut juice will never hurt me

I found Cousin Caleb’s Cabbage Plant to be rather poorly edited. Some statements regarding dimensions didn’t seem to agree with the plans, figure numbers mentioned in the text didn’t appear to be attached to any of the accompanying drawings or photos, and there were some dangling statements about boilers and cabbage processing equipment that hinted at more description in the article that didn’t exist. Those later passages left me wondering if the whole ‘sauerkraut juice’ premise was just another Moorian tall-tale. 

The wonders of the internet came to my rescue, and lo and behold, yes sauerkraut juice is an actual product and making it is big business. I downloaded a few pictures of cabbage processing equipment to help me cobble together something for this project, and decided to go look for some juice in local stores. It wasn’t that easy to find, but there was a health food store in the mall that had a few bottles. Long story short, one swig told me this stuff was not to my taste. 

But, with taste testing behind me, I returned to the project and started to work on the perimeter frame.

First, I drew the front and side frames on a sheet of paper: my plan was to layout on the drawing the balsa pieces that make up the frames [1]. I guess I could have photocopied the article's plans from the magazine, but I wasn't confident about their dimensions. 

I pinned the drawing to a piece of cork-board I bought from Michael's, then cut the balsa pieces that make up the frame in accordance to the drawing, dabbed them with white glue and pinned them in place. Even though I laboured over the drawing, I still managed to screw up the size of the diagonals on the left on the front frame, so a little pushing and pulling and adjusting was required when all the sub-assemblies were finally glued together.

After the glue had set, I pulled out the pins holding the balsa in place and carefully dabbed the joints with super-glue using a pin held in a pair of tweezers as the dabbing device. After drying, there were a few little blots of dried glue at each joint sticking the frame to the paper. I slipped a brand new sharp knife blade between each joint and the paper to slice the frame free from the paper. Any little paper still stuck to the frame was cut off with a knife. Once free, I glued a horizontal strip of balsa to the back and top of the frame. This basic procedure to make all three frames.

Here's the left side after it was glued up and before it was sliced free from the drawing.

And here's the right side while the vertical uprights are being pinned down. Well, you can see that building the frame is rather involved. I'd say this isn't a project for beginners given the complexity of construction of the various sub-assemblies.

Once all three frames were built, I moved on to the floor. It's made from a 3/32 inch thick piece of balsa with a 1/32 inch piece glued on top with its grain perpendicular to that of the thicker piece. The thin piece over hangs the edges of the thicker piece on the sides by 1 mm.

I used medium density superglue to bond the two floor pieces. Some big, old and heavy books came in handy to apply pressure to the laminate. I left this overnight and called it quits for the day.

The next day I cut out the slots for the frame uprights, the openings for the circular fermentation tubs, and the rectangular opening at the rear for the boiler room foundation. The tub openings were first outlined with a circle cutter and then finished free-hand with a sharp x-acto knife. Slow and steady is the name of the game when cutting these openings.

Here it is once the nerve-wracking circular holes were done. You can see I forgot to cut the slot for the upright in the back left corner of the floor - I realized it was missing a day or so later :-(

According to Mr. Moore's drawings, the front wall of the cabbage processing building is solid, like the other three walls, with a couple of doors. To open things up I decided to replace it with a wall that has large folding doors on either end and a centre panel that has a solid lower section with a window on top. This arrangement still allows the building to 'be closed up when cabbages are not in season', but might allow 'the boss' to see what's going on inside - well, anyway, that's the idea. So, I made a drawing of the front wall frame and built it up like the perimeter frames.

Once it was done, the front wall frame was glued in place with white glue, and some clamps held it all together while drying.

Here are all the pieces ready for a little staining before gluing them together. I used some very thin mixtures of red and brown acrylic paint. When dry, I dusted on some ground-up light gray chalk pastels and rubbed them into the floor.

I should have known better, the floor is a big slab of raw balsa, and it absorbs any paint like a sponge - and has the stiffness of a sponge too regardless of how sparing I tried to be with the stain. A bit of warping happened. After carefully bending the floor back flat, I added some cross pieces to it's underside to stiffen it. The framework isn't prototypical, but it's not something that will be seen and does the trick. As you can see in the beauty shots, some work will need to be done on the ends of the stiffeners to make them look a little more plausible and blend them into the overall look of the building.

Once the staining was done, and the floor was stiffened, the sub-assemblies were glued into position. The picture above was taken during the action. Everything was glued in place with white glue. Once things were dry, I reinforced a few joints with judicious dabs of superglue. Here are a few pictures of what it looks like after assembly action was done and the glue was dry.

Needs some more uprights in the loading dock area.

The left upright is vertical - my photo taking skills need improving.

Yeap, more uprights needed to hold up the cabbage processing building!

And more uprights here too. Also, that door-like opening is the top half of the door that opens into the boiler room. There's a sunken level that in the original incarnation was home to a boiler that drove the cabbage shredders. In this 21th century version, the cabbage shredders are electric powered and the boiler has been retired. 

The old boiler room is a big opening in the floor, in the new version it will provide lots of storage for cabbages before being shredded. One other thing you can sort of see in this view are the folding doors - glued into their open, folded up configurations. Each unit is made from four pieces of 1/32 inch sheet. I was all engrossed in their construction and forgot to take any pictures while I was building them.

This is the 6th instalment in an ongoing series. The other parts can be found here.

Digressions

[1] I bought this book last summer at a used bookstore in Sidney, British Columbia. For me, Sidney is a great place in that it has the highest concentration of used bookstores– all within a few blocks of each other - than any other place in Canada. It’s also by the ocean, I can walk everywhere, has many great places to eat or get coffee, and is nearby lots of beach access and wineries. I was roaming through the Haunted Bookshop and saw that they had an entire case of streetcar and rail history books, with lots more placed here-and-there in other cases – quite unusual in my experience, especially all the streetcar related books. Well, I wanted to buy them all of course, but having limited space back home, and wanting to keep peace in the family :-) , I decided cherry-picking just a few of interest was the best course of action. That’s when I stumbled across Junior Model Planes. One look at its good condition and charming illustrations, I knew I had to have it.

It was published in 1945, and from the inscription on the title page, it was a Christmas gift that year. I don’t know either Jackie or Laura, but whoever had possession of this volume over the years took good care of it - or maybe it was just forgotten in an attic - and I plan to do the same. A few pages have some annotation in red ink, but it adds to the charm, as they look like marks or reminders that were entered as someone worked on a project or two. A few knife cuts suggest the book might have been used to back some cutting. Still, the whole package, notes and cuts and all, makes for a very nice artifact.

The introductory projects deal with simple glider-like models built from sheet pieces of balsa. The later projects are more complex and demonstrate the classic method of building up wings and fuselages from a number of small balsa pieces on a flat board, as I’ve done with Caleb’s.

It’s been a long time since I’ve built a balsa airplane according to the methods shown in this book. I got a bit turned off as I’d spend a lot of time building a plane, only to see it get damaged – undoing my work – during the initial test flights to get the thing trimmed and balanced.