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 :-)

Opening Soon! Thé Noir at its new location

Paparazzi mob Thé Noir's big location reveal

After publishing the LOL video and thinking about Michael's comments I figured I should note that Thé Noir* has a place of honour on the current layout. Instead of being on a city street, it's now located on Ocean View Lane, with a view of the ocean :-) And, it's right beside the natural history museum. Prime real estate indeed. There is a problem though: no on-street parking. Walk-in and streetcar accessible only.  Stay tuned for the Grand Re-Opening!

*Note: Improvements include straightening the sign!

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.

Red Car Barn

Last Sunday I was looking around for a small, simple kit to build to take my mind off things for a little while. I considered a few projects, but settled on AHM's Village Smithy. I had bought this model a few years ago with the goal of using it as a donor for refurbishing the one I built in the '70s. I figured, what the heck, just build it, refurbishment of the old relic can wait some more.

I decided not to go crazy on modifications as I wanted to finish it fast. I wanted to see if I could create a sense of flow by not prolonging construction. Considering my track record, I built this one dead fast: started on Sunday and added some finishing touches Friday. And yes, I entered that state of mental flow a few times and found the experience of building this barn quite pleasant.

At the outset I also decided it wasn't going to be a blacksmith. Since my very first E. L. Moore build back in '73 was a version of Bunn's Feed & Seed converted to an automobile garage I settled on this being a garage too. I think I'm fixated on garages these days, but it is what it is.

I'm not going to describe the barn's construction in detail as it's pretty simple. I'll just note a few minor changes.

I cut open the back wall where the little addition attaches to the main barn so that one can look all the way through the big front doors to the window in the addition's back wall.

The second storey hatch door on the front wall was replaced with an N scale Tichy Train Group window casting from my spares box. 

The base was cut away from the barn's floor and discarded. I should note that the floor was cut in such a way that it fit inside the barn and was surrounded by the walls instead of having the walls sit on top of it, which is the way the kit was designed. This meant the roof opening for the chimney had to be opened up a little so the chimney would properly sit on the floor.

Speaking of the chimney, it was moved to the back so that it didn't block the front entrance. The roof panels are symmetrical so flip-flopping the chimney to the back is no problem. Now, whether it is advisable to park gasoline powered cars near an open flame is entirely another sort of problem :-)

But, maybe the fire is inoperable these days because I didn't include the coal shed in the build.

Given this is the 21st century, and the neighbourhood the barn's located in, and the expensive cars inside, security cameras were called for. Well, at least signs indicating there were security cameras watching.

The barn was painted red to take it back to its roots. Green, being E. L. Moore's favourite colour, was used for the trim to give the kit's designer a tip of the hat.

I didn't have any plan to use this building, just construct it for purposes of mind soothing. However, while looking for a place to snap a beauty shot I absentmindedly plopped it down on the Way Out Layout where you see it in the drone view and instantly thought it belonged there. In fact I immediately had a mental image about how I wanted the large field between the road and the ocean to develop. All that from one careless placement of a building done in a carefree manner. I see lots of things to work on in the aerial view. Maybe they'll be next.

[Mid-morning update]: As seen outside the Red Car Barn early this morning:

[Mid-afternoon update]: A B&W in B&W:

Last year, this year, next year

Upper: 26 Dec 2021 | Lower: 27 Dec 2022

The top picture was shot nearly a year ago today. It's hard to believe a year has gone by, but it's a year I'll be glad to say so long to in a few days.

<-Inspired by T.O. | Inspired by L.A. ->

Well, ok, it hasn't been all bad. I've enjoyed working on the Loonar Module, and was very glad to see the new collection of E. L. Moore models in February. Skills wise, I learned a lot about building trees, which I hope to further develop in 2023, and enjoyed the Park Square kitbash. And, I've finally gotten my act together on the E. L. Moore book.

One last thing before I go back to pondering all the snow outside. A few days ago I was thinking the urban side of the layout is inspired by Toronto, and the ocean side is inspired by Los Angeles. A one-way street, Oceanview Rd., separates the two. I started thinking of calling this layout Los Torontos, so I went to the all knowing Google to see what Los Torontos turned up, and it turned up this:

Still life with static grass

Working on object placement

I've shifted from cutting and gluing foam slabs for mental diversion to creating scenery, specifically using my static grass applicator to build up the ground cover on the ELM diorama. I want to take some beauty shots of that setup, so this helps get things ready.

The very beginnings of an open field

At the same time I'm building up an open field on the LOL II with static grasses. I'm experimenting with different types of glues, and finding I'm liking the effects I can create using Mod Podge Ultra Matte spray.

Working between the two I think I'm finally getting the knack of static grass application.

And it's relaxing.

Layout as Antilayout

The weather has been unusually pleasant for the last few weeks, consequently model building has been pushed to the side. However, winter is now definitely on the horizon, so I'm getting things organized for hunkering down in the workshop when the snow eventually flies.

One task is to get the layout ready for the next phase of construction. I think it might take 6 to 8 months to get it into some sort of baseline state as far as looks and features are concerned. It has been in a sorry state for awhile, so I figured if I got it cleaned and tidied, I'd have it in a positive condition as a starting point, which would put me in a good mood as I get going on this next phase.

While busy cleaning up I got to thinking this layout is more antilayout than layout. You may recall I wrote about Bill Schopp's concept of the anti-layout, but I'm starting to think that is a specific instance of a more general concept I call the antilayout. I define antilayout as a layout that goes against the grain of layout conventions, and not just here and there, but in overall design and execution. An antilayout isn't nontraditional just for the sake of being contrarian, but because it is the only way to express what the builder needs to express. With this layout the goals are many and don't involve the usual things such as the ability to simulate railway operations or delivering power by functioning overhead wiring, but instead it provides: loops so I can watch streetcars run, a place for displaying buildings (and is very reconfigurable as the mood strikes), a setup for photographing city and seaside scenes, and lightweight construction so I can move it around and take it places. Antilayouts are idiosyncratic and reach beyond the somewhat juvenile refrain we hear these days that goes something like, "it's my layout and I'll do as I please". This being said, I need to tell you that if you are looking for helpful, realistic, and generally applicable layout construction advice, you need to look elsewhere.

Going for a spin on the Way Out Layout

I haven't been ignoring the Way Out Layout. I have been tinkering with it now and then, but I did lose the plot for awhile. There was something that didn't quite sit well with me, but after staring and thinking for a long time I realized there were two problems: there were too many buildings on the beach side of the layout which destroyed the open field look I wanted, and the arrangement of buildings was too scattered in the urban area that fronts the side road that divides the city and beach. Now that I've resolved those problems, the layout arrangement is looking better to my eye so I can get on with modelling and detailing.

So, to kick things off I decided to try running the two AHM trolleys I bought at a swap meet back in the spring. They were $5 each, but the seller didn't know if they ran. I found they ran haltingly at best. I opened up the Public Service trolley, scrubbed its wheels and pickups clean, and oiled the gears. After a bit of run in it ran quite smoothly, and I shot this video once it could do reliable laps. Although, I should note that sometimes it would stall on the wye switch frogs because of its large flanges. You can see in the video how it bumps through those switches.

I see more tinkering on the horizon.

December May romance

Although I've spent the majority of my time since last fall on the Loonar Module I haven't let the Way Out Layout languish. At the top is the state of the layout on 13 December 2021 just after the foam base had been glued together and the first tentative pieces of track were being pushed into place. On the bottom is the layout as of 6 May 2022. The city portion, which unfortunately is facing the wall in this shot, is scenicked, but the open seashore half merely has its first coats of paint applied. Streetcars run well over the tracks, and hopefully this summer I'll have some time for bringing this part to life.

Now you see it, now you don't

The 'other side' of the layout, the side behind Edward Street's buildings, needs a lot of design work. To get started I added a removable strip of 0.020" styrene to the building pad to cover the track where the future streetcar barn will go. This was done to allow me to add buildings without the scene looking too odd and having to explain why track is running through foundations. I need to work in the sidewalk and pad colours in that area to make the strip blend in more, but it's a start.

A look down the street

In between E. L. Moore research I've been painting on the layout. The focus has been on sidewalks, roads, and the city building pad. Once in an acceptable state, I test placed some buildings along Edward St. (nee Young St.). I put a lot of store in feelings I get from scenes, and was happy that this stretch of road gave me a feeling that it seemed like it could be a downtown Toronto street of old. One that is sort of mixed up of course, and has a fantasy element baked in, but I'm thinking that with additional thought and detailing I'll be able to capture the feeling I'm after.

New paving

I stripped off all the foam boards, warped or not, I used to pave the area where the urban buildings will go and replaced them with sheets of foam with 0.020" styrene sheets bonded on top. Those foam sheets were obtained by peeling the card from the foam board, and luckily I had enough styrene sheets in my stash for the job. Recycling and making do at its best :-) Now to the test: painting!

Plate tectonics

Yesterday I painted the paved area with a thin coat of acrylic white primer so I'd have a uniform undercoat on which to apply colour coats.

This morning I was greeted to a number of the large foam board building pads lifted from the base. I suspect the paint caused the paper surface to shrink a bit, causing the board to warp, and the transfer tape wasn't strong enough to resist. I'll pull up the debonded sheets, bend them back into shape, and use a regular glue to reattach them. Living and learning on my way to - hopefully - a flyweight layout.

Paving Young St. & Ocean View Ln.

I've been 'paving' Young St.*, Ocean View Ln.*, and the area between them for the last two weeks. Not eight hours a day, just an hour or so at a time. The area beyond Ocean View Ln. will be open country, looking out to the ocean of course, and is planned for landscaping sometime in the months ahead. 

I won't go into a step-by-step, but will just note some points and improvements from lessons I learned from my previous streetcar layouts. 

The roads, sidewalks, and building pad area are built up from layers of cardboard, foam board, matte board, balsa, and styrene. I used what I had in my leftovers. If I was buying everything new, and specifically for this job, I'd buy one material in various thicknesses and stick with it.

Historical lesson #1: Instead of using glues to hold the layers in place I used transfer tape. This is not the least expensive way to go, but on previous layouts I experienced glue induced layer warping and distortion, especially with styrene glues. With transfer tape there isn't any distortion when bonding pieces, dissimilar materials bond together with ease, and the bonds are immediate. In the future I may regret using transfer tape, but on other projects that are a few years old, the bonds are still good and solid.

Historical lesson #2: On previous layouts I tried very hard to get the paving sheets right up flush with the railhead to mimic as best I could the surface on a Toronto street. The problem was that small warps, and imperfect sheet bonding, would often cause the road to protrude above the rail head, which would lift the wheels of passing streetcars and cause stalling. Fixing that was always a royal pain and discouraged me from running vehicles. This time I made sure all paving sheets were well below the railhead. This makes for a slightly less realistic street, but lets the streetcars run without problems.

Historical lesson #3: This is more of a planning thing, but I made sure the paved area didn't have any switches. I use standard Atlas switches, and feel they don't look good when paved into a street. Not to mention that lots of care is required to make sure they don't get fouled during paving. If I were to have switches in the paved area they'd need to be proper streetcar-style ones.

On each side of the layout there're two open areas of track between the roads that haven't been paved. These will be grassed in, and there will be low walls on the building pad side to prevent pedestrians from wandering onto the track.

*Young St. is a play on Toronto's Yonge St. Mine will capture some of Toronto's Yonge St. buildings of old, as well as a few that appear elsewhere in the city. So, my street is a free interpretation, hence Young and not Yonge. And Ocean View Ln., which is OVL de-acronymized? OVL, oval: is the layout type coded in the street name. Ok, you're right, I need more coffee :-)