A layout that won't be seen in the model RR press

[A snippet of a scene from Baltimore Babylon]

I came across this article in Make about a husband and wife built layout called Baltimore Babylon. Although there aren't really any overview photos or plans of the layout, and by the standards of today's model railroading press it sounds like a rather simple layout, but I rather admire their vision statement (and the scenes shown in the photos), 

We’re geographically and emotionally tethered to Baltimore, specifically gritty/tragic Baltimore. Gritty/tragic Baltimore-ness enchants and dismays us in equal measure. So naturally, when faced with deciding on our perfect model train layout, we realized that we wanted to capture Baltimore in all its postindustrial, grimy, glorious, gentrified, sagging, soot-streaked, architecturally-insane glory. ... a distillation of our perceptions about our specific place. 

Corrugated plastic roof panels as a layout board?

Since Edward St. might be a flat, lightweight layout, I’m toying with the idea of building it so it could be hung on a wall like a picture when it wasn’t in use - of course, the buildings and other scenic elements would need to be stored on a shelf. To pull this off I’d need a very light weight, stiff, and thin substrate for the track and streets. With that in mind, John gave me these cast offs from a gazebo roof he was replacing as something to toy with. They’re ¼ inch thick corrugated plastic sheets: very rigid along the corrugations, but needing some cross-wise stiffening – maybe simply gluing two pieces one on top of the other with the corrugations at 90 degrees will do the trick. I’m not going to be so cavalier in tossing out these pieces before I’ve given them a good test as I was with that pump house floor I discarded a couple of years ago.

Three favourite facades

I've been sorting through my photos and these are three of my favourite building facades. The one above - Park Square - is located on Elgin Street in Ottawa.

I shot the photo from the passenger seat, through the rolled-up window, while Debra drove. That's why the raw image - one of the last I took with my film camera - has an odd colour, but as you can see, the print is not too far off HO scale. A little reduction and maybe the image itself could be glued to a sheet of plastic and used as the beginning of a building.

This post office I think is located in Merrickville, Ontario. I took the photo sometime in the late '90s and didn't take note of where it's located.

This is one of the entrances on the Austin, Texas, power and light company building. I like that lightning-bolt through the 'City of Austin'. Another great thing is the sign on the side of the building - it lights up at night and looks great. Unfortunately, I don't have picture when it's lit.

The Yost Theatre

Ok, the kit is actually the Wathers’ Rivoli Theater, but I have a plan to selectively compress it to fit into that newly paved spot across the alleyway from the Chapters bookstore, and to dedicate it to the founder of TVO’s Saturday Night at the Movies and Magic Shadows, Elwy Yost - naturally, I’ll modify the ‘Rivoli’ sign to read ‘Yost’. Although I never had the privilege to meet Mr. Yost, his tv shows were responsible for developing my lifelong love of movies. And 2014 is the 40th anniversary of Saturday Night at the Movies - yeap, it’ll have been on tv for 40 years! - so it’ll be a bit of an homage.

I bought the kit when I was at George’s 50th because I wanted the front facade. The building itself is very deep in order to accommodate the audience seating, but I’m going to radically change its depth to fit the space - I’m not sure how wacky that will make the building; I’ll need to do some more detailed measuring to see if it’ll look too weird. There’ll be a streetcar stop either behind or to the side of the Yost.

Cool streetcar scooter

I stumbled across this photo of what might be a maintenance vehicle for chasing after broken down streetcars or trams via No Tech Magazine, which sourced the story from Motoblog. 

And speaking of odd 'train' stuff :-) All summer I've been listening to Love Train: The Sound of Philadelphia. One of my favourites is this one (a shorter version is in the set),

Norman Bel Geddes: Futurama and the model railroader’s spirit writ large?

I came across this excellent article today about the various early projects (table-top football, table-top golf, The Nutshell Jockey Club, The War Game) the industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes undertook that lead up to his famous Futurama at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Some great stories here. Worth the read.

Blue lights above

I ordered some optical fibres and illuminators awhile ago. They showed up in the mail late last week. That's a 3mm diameter side-glow fibre lit up with a blue LED illuminator. I'm trying out some ideas with the fibres, and one was to have an illuminated overhead system for the streetcar fleet. It's certainly not prototypical, but I thought - given the 'retro-future' setting of the layout - it might add some interest to the city scene. So far, several problems: the fibre will need longitudinal support since it isn't rigid as an overhead wire would be; instead of 3 mm, I'll need to try it again with the 2mm fibre to get better tracking of the trolley poles; in general, trolley pole tracking could be tricky problem because the different streetcars have different systems with different properties. I'll have to give this some more thought.

Cloud Blimps

{Passing Cloud sourced from Treehugger.com}

Any article that touches on both trains and airships is sure to get my attention. I stumbled across this one last week at TreeHugger.com. It was designed by Tiago Barros as an entry for the "Life at the Speed of Rail" competition. One might question the practicality of a vehicle that floats along wherever the wind blows it with all its passengers sitting on top, but I admire the out-of-the-box thinking.

The part that got away

Two years ago I had to replace my old, weather-beaten pumphouse – well, pumphouse is a rather regal term for what amounts to a big box that shelters a pump from the elements. After lots of humming and hawing and cogitating about what to replace it with, I finally settled on simply buying a small RubberMaid outdoor storage shed kit, cutting out the floor, and popping the whole thing, kit-and-kaboodle, over top of the pump on the foundation where the previous pumphouse stood (and if my wife is reading this, it should be noted that she did play a big role in figuring out which of the many shed kits that are on the market to buy when I couldn’t make up my mind  ). It worked like a charm and has been through two winters so far. It still looks and works as good as new.

And after those two winters I still had the section of floor I cut out stashed in my junk pile.

Well, this last summer I finally realized that my junk pile was going on forty years old, and was starting to make our place look like a candidate for an episode of Hoarders! I separated out some useable stuff, and carted the rest off to the junk-yard (10 trips and 3 Saturday mornings in all with our poor cars stuffed to the gills with ratty old junk).

My regret is that I took the floor section on one of those fateful trips and I have it no more.

Even though I was hauling junk to the dump I was also thinking about how to build the base for the layout. That scrap floor section was speaking to me. It was light. It was rigid. It had lots of interstitial spaces for plumbing wires through. It was plastic. All good things. But it wasn’t completely flat – if it was a piece of wood for sale in a store, I would have put it back on the shelf and selected another. In this case it went to the dump. My mistake. I now think I could have reworked it a bit to make it a little flatter, and maybe useable.

I obviously used a more traditional approach to building the layout base. It’s got the flatness and rigidity I want, but it weighs more than I’d like. Weighs way more. In retrospect, I’d try an experiment where the upper surface of the train board would still be made of 2-inch thick high density construction foam board, but the lower box frame used for stiffening and wiring infrastructure would be something like the floor scrap from the pumphouse.

Mobile garden rail car

I recently came across this - what looks like - a transit rail car chopped down to a garden on a flat car designed by Joe Baldwin at treehugger. There's lots of negative comments about whether or not it's eco-friendly and such, but, either way, it's an interesting rail car.

Highly Unusual Trains

Ok. I figured out how to do embedded YouTube video. This is the full promo for last night's episode of Top Gear on BBC Canada. Even more train goodness.

Jag on Rails

Well, if it's possible to put an El Camino on rails, this Jaguar XJS makes perfect sense - a great segment of Top Gear I saw on BBC Canada last night.

Update 30 Sept: Since I figured out how to do embedded video yesterday I went ahead and added one here.

Ground Effect Train

[An experimental ground-effect 'rail' vehicle; Picture sourced from the IEEE article linked to in the post.]

I stumbled across this story about a Japanese research team investigating the use of ground-effect flyers to build completely new concepts in ‘rail’ transportation. It’s still early days, but it’s amazing stuff. You know, with ground effect based vehicles a hybrid rail / water transport is a possibility – maybe something along the lines of some sort of Alexander Lippisch Aerofoil Boat ‘rail’ / water vehicle. The ‘rail’, or I guess land-based channel if you follow this Japanese line of thought, could lead the vehicle right to the water’s edge where it then flies out over the water towards another ‘rail’ on a distant shore. Wild stuff.

Train to the launch pad

[Image: NASA/Bill Ingalls]

I was reading an article this week reporting that the Voyager spacecraft will soon be leaving the region of space under the influence of our Sun and heading into interstellar space. The article eventually led to a NASA photo archive site, and being a train person I decided to search on ‘train’ to see what would come up. Among the results were some great photos of the train used to roll-out the Soyuz spacecraft rocket to its launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. I’d recommend going to the NASA site directly to get all the details if you’re interested. There’s lots more photos other than these two I’ve posted, and they certainly provide some intriguing ideas for developing a freelanced launch pad layout.

[Image: NASA/Carla Cioffi]

HO-scale logging airships?

I was going through some old files, and came across these MacPaint pictures for a track planning tool I created way back in 1985 with my friend vp.

I was a Mac zealot back then and was especially enamoured with MacPaint. vp thought MacPaint and the Mac’s capabilities in general would make for a great track planning tool. He was certainly more prescient about this than me. I thought model railroaders would prefer using all their spare time model railroading – I was wrong, there is a niche for these sorts of tools.

The tool didn’t undergo much development because I lost interest as other activities over took it. Initially, it was meant to help plan very simple layouts: flat ones that used snap track. I came across some Pascal code I had developed (unfortunately I don’t have a way to run it any more), but we also thought of simply making a track planning font where letters and keys were replaced with different types of track that could be later cut-and-pasted into position with MacPaint or MacDraw.

I only post these fragments because I got a laugh out of the above picture with the blimps and trains that I had done as a diversion while we were fiddling with more prosaic track planner issues. I’d completely forgotten about it. With the popularity of steam punk, it doesn’t seem like the odd combination that it did at that time. Back then I was part of a team doing research into hybrid airships that could be used in forestry, so to my inner model railroader, this logging blimps meets the railroads of John Allen and John Oslon motif seemed like a natural combination. Although, I can’t account for the motivation behind the Queen lyrics and the all-seeing eye 

Are functional, flyable HO-scale blimps possible? A late 1970s to mid 1980s vintage Goodyear blimp has an envelope that is 192 feet long and a maximum diameter of 50 feet. Its volume is 202,700 cubic-feet. In HO scale these dimensions would translate into 2.21 feet, 0.58 feet, and 0.31 cubic-feet, respectively. The lifting capability of helium doesn’t scale, so to figure out how much mass the model could lift is simply a matter of multiplying 0.31 cubic-feet by the static lift of helium, which is 31.5 grams/cubic-feet. It turns out the HO-scale helium inflated envelope can lift a mass of around 9.8 grams.

"Logging in steep terrain" - from the LTA-20-1 sales brochure

A similar calculation can be performed on a 1980’s vintage LTA-20-1 concept logging hybrid airship. The sales brochure states its spherical envelope has a 91.9 foot diameter. In HO-scale this becomes 1.06 feet, with a volume of 0.62 cubic-feet. Since it’s about twice the volume of the Goodyear blimp model, it also can lift about twice as much mass, which is around 19.6 grams.

"Heavy-lift emergency situations" - also from the LTA-20-1 sales brochure.

Building an actual HO scale radio controlled flying model will have its challenges given that the static lift of either of these two examples is rather small; however, if the power and control technology of this Carbon Butterfly were used, they seem to be within the realm of possibility. That indoor R/C model airplane has a total mass of just 3.6 grams, so we’re certainly in the right ballpark. Cost ? Well, I’ll swag it very, very conservatively at the cost of 2 Carbon Butterflies plus $100 for helium and some miscellaneous extras; that turns out to be around $420. Pricey, yes, maybe even too conservative an estimate, but in the zone of an expensive locomotive model; maybe it’s not too outrageous for a prototype HO-scale blimp of some sort.

Another Day, Another Town

I was reorganizing my old vinyl albums on the weekend after they had to be shifted to make-way for a cable installer. I’d forgotten that this one had a railroad track photo on the cover (and I'm still wondering if it's model railroad track). It’s a little weird for a cover shot, but back then – believe it or not - I didn’t buy it for that reason. I was a big Jim Croce fan and a completist one to boot. I had to have every album he made, so when I stumbled across this one, I had to buy it. It’s a collaboration with his wife Ingrid. I’m certainly no music critic, but I’d rank it as ok. It’s enjoyable, but a little too folky for my tastes. Then again, I haven’t played it in probably 25 years, so I should give it another try.

Ok, while I’m on the subject of albums, this one, Moon Safari by Air, has even less to do with trains, but it does have this great idea for a VW van / spaceship conversion on the back cover of the CD. When I was building the E.L. Moore van conversion last year, it was vying in my mind with building this disco- hippy spaceship. Obviously, Mr. Moore’s conversion carried the day, but now that I’m considering a rebuild, maybe this time around I’ll try both.

Peter’s Pucks

I was sitting on the deck one day last summer doodling [23 Jan: Update. Was 'doddling', now 'doodling', thanks to she-who-must-be-obeyed] in my sketch book and thinking about some kind of thin building that could be shoe-horned between closely spaced siding tracks. The not-too-serious Peter’s Pucks was the answer. Basically, it’s a half-puck main building with smaller puck-like wings on each side and loading docks on the front and back. If I had all the materials for it at hand, it might be buildable in one long day – although I’ve said this before 

The Buildings Must Roll (with apologies to Robert Heinlein)

I saw an interesting post in Slashdot today about the Swedish design firm Jagnefalt Milton that won a prize for an innovative concept for reinvigorating a region of Norway: buildings on rails that can be moved to-and-from locations as needs and seasons change. The picture above, sourced from the ‘design addict’ link, neatly summarizes some of the work’s key points.

What made this doubly interesting was that at breakfast this morning I was thumbing through the ads in the December 2010 issue of Model Rail and came across one by Atlas Trainman for the April release of their HO-scale Trash Flat Car – the picture below is from the Trainman site – and I thought that it offered lots of possibilities for customization. A Rolling Buildings + Trash Flat Car kitbash might have the potential for opening up new areas for fun and exploration in model railroading.

Launch pad layout

I like to read the Micro / Small Layouts website from time-to-time. I'm always impressed with what people are doing with small footprint layouts. The timesaver track design I've used is a fairly common track plan in these railroads. So, in some ways, even though my layout is 6 feet by 5 feet, I often think of it as having a kinship with layouts seen on Micro / Small Layouts.

When I saw this picture of NASA's launch pad 5 for the Mercury project (it's a NASA photo) it sort of jumped out as being a good candidate for a micro-layout of some sort. I really need to try and design something based on this great photo. It would probably have a launch pad or two at one end, and some sort of vehicle preparation building or facility at the other. I'm sure if E.L. Moore were designing it, it would no doubt have the ability to launch rockets with much attendant smoke and fireworks :-)


I've also got this kit of Jupiter "C" rocket in my stash that I bought a couple of years ago that I'd want to work into the design. It's in 1/110 scale, which makes it a little small for HO (1/87) and much too big for big for N (1/160). If it was used with small diesel switchers and other small freight cars, I don't think it would look too out-of-place on an HO-scale micro-layout.

The rocket itself looks very easy to build, but the railcar gantry that straddles two parallel tracks looks much more interesting. I suspect with a little modification this could be turned into a functioning HO-scale car.

Lunar inspiration

This is the first page of a four page article entitled "Lunar railroad you can model", by Alan Cerny and Bob Hayden, that appeared in the April 1978 issue of Model Railroader magazine. No doubt it was probably meant as something of an April Fool's joke, but it was a well thoughtout concept, complete with detailed drawings and 3/8-inch scale models of a locomotive and freight car, for a model of a railroad on the Moon. I was mightly impressed at the time this was published, and it was always inspirational in all things to do with space modeling. This was certainly in mind while building Moonscope and the Lunar Postal Vehicle. Yeah, not much here to do with model railroading other than I came across this issue of MR while moving and reorganizing things around the house. I think I spent more time thumbing through old issues of model building magazines than actually moving stuff :-)