Layout deconstruction has begun

I thought I'd keep the two main road sections of the layout for use as photo stages. The loop module though will be taken apart so its track can be reused.

Once the layout's been disassembled a little bit of work will need to be done to the support structure to ready it for the new layout board. 

Fun times ahead!

Crazy about a Mercury

A variation on this photo along with some musical commentary by Alan Jackson. 

Here comes the streetcar

A variation on this photo.

Reconnecting the Ocean Park module

The Ocean Park module has been hanging on a wall in the basement since late last March. Back then I thought that around September I'd take it down to begin preparations for Christmas showings of the layout. That was all scuttled. I haven't assembled all the modules since last March. So, for no other reason than to see if all the modules could be reconnected I got Ocean Park off the wall and got to work. 

I was happy to see it connected just fine. There wasn't any warpage to any of the pieces. Last time I ran it the loop got its power from rail joiners from the Ocean Blvd line. Even though I had  soldered power leads to the loop I hadn't attached them to the main track power. That'll be the first job as I don't want to continue to rely on rail joiners at the module boundary for power.

Waiting

Waiting for the Ocean streetcar at the Mortimer subway station.

Steinberg on Ocean Blvd.

I spent some time fiddling with placing Steinberg's along Ocean Blvd. One thing's clear: I need to outfit the store with some sort of interior given that huge expanse of glass on the facade.  

Thrifty's is open for business!

Cold weather, snow, and a lockdown have helped me keep building. Over the weekend I took the opportunity to finish Thrifty's Yonge St. store.

Although they can't be seen in the opening photo, there are 2 dormers on the upper floor. It's some sort of mansard roof up there, along with 2 arched top dormers facing the street.

My dormers are based on window castings from Tichy Train. The ones I had in my spares box had many more mullions than the prototype, so most had to be cut off. Once that was done, two vertical mullions were cut for each window frame from 0.010" thick styrene and glued in place.

The dormers were laid out on 2-ply Strathmore Bristol board. These are basically the structural backings for each of the windows. 

The angles for the dormer side walls are measured from the drawing.

The dormer side walls are folded up once each piece is cut out. I used a scriber to etch the fold lines before cutting out the pieces.

 

The window frames were glued to the dormer walls, and then the complete assembly was glued to the wall on the uppermost floor. These units were painted black and outfitted with clear plastic windows prior to installation.

The semi-circular dormer roofs are cut from 3x5 card. You'll notice that these dormers are not exact replicas of the prototype. They're simplified representations. As they're not the focus of the model, I didn't feel like spending much time on them, and that entire area on the prototype is painted black, so there wouldn't be much to see anyway.

I papered the upper floor wall with self-adhesive block paper from Micro-Mark as I thought it had a nice texture that would work well up there. The problem turned out that the texturing was a little too subtle, and was mostly obliterated once painted flat black. Live and learn. 

The upper edge of the main wall was built up from pieces of card and balsa. Once all the elements were glued in place the whole thing was painted flat black.

The decorative fence along the top of the facade is made from Atlas' HO-scale keyhole fencing from my spares box. I'll replace it if I come across something a little more decorative - and cheap :-)

The interior is a picture of a jeans store interior I found on the internet - it isn't representative of the Thrifty's store in the '80s.

On many other builds I'd have separate light boxes for the main sign and the interior. This time I decided to use 'ambient' light and simply put a light on the underside of the roof and have it illuminate both areas.

Last year I bought some LED button lights from Amazon for the Canadian Press complex. I had one left and stuck it to the underside of the roof. It has a built in battery and an on-off switch. It'll conk out one day and need replacement - we'll see how long that takes.

One obvious problem with this approach is that the sign's interior structure, along with some internal balsa stiffeners cast a shadow on the inside upper part of the main sign, so illumination is not quite uniform. Doesn't look too bad, but it's not perfect.

I didn't spend anytime detailing the sides or back. As mentioned in a previous post, they were just covered with brick paper so they didn't look too odd.

Well, that's that. It didn't take as long as many projects I've undertaken, but it wasn't as fast as I had hoped. Small steps I guess.

PCC fleet emerges from the car barn

I spent a lot of time last week testing the PCC streetcars. Usually prior to Christmas I get them all out in preparation for our annual party, which includes hauling the layout modules up from the basement and running them in the living room. No such thing last Christmas. But, I got the urge to run trains last week so I pulled the streetcars out. Prior to check out I installed trolley pole ropes on them all so they'd look like they were running properly under the wires on Ocean Boulevard. In one streetcar I finally installed a TCS DCC decoder that had been on my shelf for 4 years (!) waiting for this day - luckily, the streetcar and its decoder ran flawlessly. Lubrications were done, wheels were cleaned, loops were run, and in the process I reacquainted myself with the various DCC functions on each. They still need exterior ad cards and a little mild weathering, but at least they're ready to run on the layout and look pretty for scene photos.

A sign for the Mortimer subway entrance

As I contemplate and build street stuff for the the layout, one important piece of missing stuff is a sign noting the presence of a subway entrance at the Mortimer station. All the street level subway entrances of the TTC have them, so to me if one wasn't at Mortimer, something was wrong. I had some parts lying around, so I decided to give it a try to make one for the Mortimer station entrance. 

I started with an N-scale street lamp, breaking off the decorative plastic lamp cover to expose its small incandescent bulb. 

The front and back signs are cut from photos I took of the real thing. There are various styles in use, and I chose one of the older ones that lent itself to easy model making. The signs are glued with Weld Bond to pieces of thin, clear plastic. The outer surfaces of the signs are smeared with a thin coat of Weld Bond.

The signs were then glued to the top of the post so they surrounded the bulb. Several applications of Weld Bond were used to fill the gap between the signs.

Once dry, the entire piece was painted with aluminum coloured acrylic paint.

When lit with a 9 VDC battery, the sign's lettering is readable, although all the pictures I took just show a blob of light. I likely need to lower the voltage, and fiddle with my camera settings to get a decent photo.

Will the heat from the bulb melt the Weld Bond holding this thing together? I don't know. I suspect if the voltage is low enough, this might not be a problem, but time will tell.

The two street level photos in this post gave me a good vibe, even though the lit sign doesn't present too well. The size and spacing of items along the street, as well as the buildings, look about right. Although, the environment is a little too clean, and all the street stuff has yet to be added.

Workbench Scenes: Fire hydrants & Parking meters

Fire hydrants & parking meters being painted.

The layout needs a lot of 'street stuff' to make it credible: mailboxes, sewer grates, manhole covers, trash cans, newspaper boxes, street signs, traffic signs, fire hydrants, phone booths, parking meters, bike racks, and so on and so on. One or two of these things won't do; it would be like a 'forest' with just one or two trees. I need these things in bulk. 

I found some 8 packs of fire hydrants made by Atlas that looked pretty close to those along some TTC routes of interest, so I bought a couple packs. Along with some miscellaneous ones I already owned - which can be used to represent hydrants along older streets - I think I'll have enough hydrants to make the layout seem like it has at least rudimentary fire protection :-) The 6 parking meters are Walthers items I found in my spares box. Ocean Boulevard isn't open to automobile traffic - much like King St. - so the meters will be installed on side streets. No, I won't be modelling HO scale change for a dollar :-)

A thin background building

I've been playing around with ideas for background buildings for use in photos. Over there is my first attempt at making one.

The model is basically a box glued up from scrap pieces of foam board, and then papered with a photo of a section of a high rise apartment. 

I didn't make any attempt to have a proper ground floor, or any variation in the wall pattern as would be appropriate for different levels. I'm assuming that in most photos I'll take with this in the background the bottom floors will be obscured by models in the foreground. 

This building can either stand on the layout behind a model, or be attached to a tripod so it can be placed some distance behind the layout to enhance the illusion of depth.

The tripod mount is made from a piece of metal strapping bent into an L-shape

The metal L is glued and duct taped to an inside wall. 

The box's walls are a bit off square, but after papering, and when positioned for photographing, this isn't noticeable.

This model is more-or-less a test article for these kinds of buildings, and I see several areas for improvement.

The photo used for the wall was sized a little too small, so this model needs to be placed a little further back behind the models than in this test shot. Background buildings close to the models need their features scaled a little smaller than the foreground items, but not as small as in this test building.

The tripod attachment works ok, but it's a little wobbly once on the tripod, and needs to be improved. 

So, promising, but improvements are needed.

Trolley pole rope loops

There are a lot of little jobs that need to be done on the layout to get it into a state suitable for running and photographing. One of the smallest is to add rope loops to the trolley poles to two members of the PCC fleet.

The Bowser PCCs come with rope loops on their trolley poles, but one of mine had a loop that was either malformed, or broken by my mishandling sometime ago. Either way, the pole needed repair. 

To create a new rope loop I took a strand of wire from a multi-strand picture hanging wire, bent it around a drill bit of suitable diameter, and after a little trimming, superglued it to the damaged trolley pole. The picture on the left shows the new rope loop after a dab of flat black paint. It's a little larger than the original, but it doesn't look too bad.

A similar update was made to the Con-Cor PCC's trolley pole. In this case though the model didn't start out with a rope loop, so this is an addition instead of a repair.

The next step for all the cars will be to add trolley ropes so the poles can properly engage with the overhead wire.

Test track Safe-T

The test loop is setup temporarily on top of my Work Mate, and to help prevent it from being accidentally knocked off I've added a safety cleat. 

It's made from 2 pieces of scrap 1x2 pine screwed together to make a T. 

The T slides into the hole in the centre of the test track board, and is then clamped between the Work Mate's jaws. The board is a little wobbly as the foam underside needs a bit of flattening - or needs a shim - but locos run fine, and the T does stop the board from being bumped on the floor.

Test track loop

 I'm planning on assembling all the layout modules and preparing all the streetcars for running. I thought it would be useful to put together a loop of track where I could test and run cars independently of the layout and its potential issues. So, I went through my shelves and materials to see what I could make from what I've got on hand. Ideally I wanted a loop with a 22" radius, but I didn't have enough track, or styrofoam for a base. I did have enough for an 18" radius loop, so that's what I built (I plan to add an inner loop of N gauge track in the future). The top is styrofoam glued on a base of expanded poly-styrene. The track is standard Atlas snap-track. White glue was used to hold the foam pieces together, as well as the track to the foam. Works ok, so it's on to assembling the layout modules and getting out the streetcars.

A tree got in the way

This was one of the first A&A trial photos I took on Boxing Day. I rather liked it until I noticed way off in the distance there was a tree in the Mortimer Park Loop still in full summer foliage. That wouldn't do. I thought about it for awhile and decided the only thing to do was yank it out - so I did. Luckily, after photos were taken, summer was restored by gluing it back in place :-)

Lessons from photo staging

I learn a lot about layout improvements when I stage photos. Yesterday being Boxing Day, I got to thinking about Toronto Boxing Day sales in the '70s and '80s, especially at A&A and Sam the Record Man. Given that I have an A&A model, the die was cast, so I took some photos of the lineup outside HO A&A's on Ocean Boulevard and posted one to Instagram. 

Setting things up made it quite clear that I don't have any figures dressed in cold weather clothes, and that my figure collection skews towards older people. When I sorted out the figures I did have, I found a few that wore some sort of cool weather clothing, but I didn't really have enough to stage a proper Boxing Day lineup, so the lineup is a bit sparse. And the street looks a little too barren. It needs things like fire hydrants, newspaper boxes, trash cans and so on. So, lots of improvements to make in the year ahead.

The lighting's not quite right in this one, but the bigger problem is the gigantic camera lens reflected in the window ! With so many 'glass' surfaces on these city buildings, checking for stray reflections requires constant vigilance :-) I like the framing along the bottom provided by the two parked cars and the guy leaning against the fender, but the rest needs improvement. 

I found this one in my files from back in the fall soon after the Mortimer Park overhead was installed. This picture also looks a bit barren, but I do like the feeling of depth and openness. Also, I'm going to build some moveable background flats made from foamboard with photos of high-rises stuck on to provide some view blocking to the background - things should then not look like the edge of the world is just behind some model :-)

Connecting the overhead at the module joint

This is the overhead 'wire' connection at the joint between the upper and lower Ocean Park modules. At this location the wire support poles are unusually close as I wanted to have more-or-less each module completely spanned by its own overhead so I could disconnect the modules and still have most of each module spanned by overhead. 

At this wire joint there's a short piece of thread spanning the two pairs of poles. On the rightmost module in the photo the thread is attached to the ears with superglue as per usual, but on the left pair of poles, the thread is attached with rubber cement, which allows for the thread to be carefully pulled off the ear for module disconnection. I was surprised that the rubber cement could resist more tension than I first thought, so maybe I should have used it elsewhere to hold the overhead in place. Live and learn. If you look carefully at the photo you'll see there's a kink in the thread near the ear on the pole in the lower right. That was caused by putting a little too much glue on the thread. I'll need to straighten that out a bit.

Track disconnection isn't too difficult. The street inserts lift out to expose the rail joiners, which then can be slipped back over the rails and away from the module joint. All that needs to be done now to disconnect the modules is to remove the two bolts underneath the layout that hold them together. 

The track on the lower Ocean Park module doesn't rely on the rail joiners for power transmission, but have power leads soldered to both sections of track. 

 

That completes overhead wire installation along the length of Ocean Boulevard from the Mortimer Park loop in the east, to the Ocean Park interurban crossing in the west. That's a length of 9', maybe a little more once the loop is taken into account. Likely early in the new year I'll get out the Ocean Park module and begin scenery, but for now I'm going to test all the lighting and track along Ocean Boulevard. Maybe take some photos too.

Wired

It took a few days of spare time, but the lights on upper Ocean Blvd are wired up.

Those copper strips are the power buses - there's one for each side of the street - and the side street is a stub off the lower bus. A pair of 9VDC wall warts are used for power.

Once the power buses were installed the module was flipped right side up and the overhead 'wires' - actually, elastic cotton threads - were strung using the same methods as used on the lower section of Ocean Blvd.

The module's now ready for reconnecting to the layout. Once there I'll just need to connect the overhead to the section on lower Ocean Blvd. 

Yeah, that middle street light needs some straightening - that's not perspective distortion. Although, when I've viewed a few street lights up close and personal, many are not as perpendicular to the ground as one might expect, although that one is particularly bad.

Overhead wire poles for upper Ocean Blvd

The last few days I've been working on adding poles for overhead wiring along the upper part of Ocean Boulevard. As this part of the layout is only one small module I decided to disconnect it from the other Ocean Blvd modules and work on it on the 'layout' table. In the workshop I use 2 adjustable standing desks with 2'x4'x1/2" composite tops attached to them as my work areas. They're back-to-back with one being used for the usual model making work, and the second - that has the module on it - for layout work associated with large projects. They're also on wheels, as is the layout, so they can be moved to wherever they're needed. 

I used the same technique for building the overhead wiring support poles as I did for the lower section of Ocean Boulevard. One thing that is a little different is that the light assemblies came from Model Power highway light standard set #476 (the ones with 2 lights per light standard) instead of #475 (which have 1 light per light standard). I only had 5 pieces from the #475 sets left; not enough to make all the new poles, so I went to some hobby stores to see if I could find any. Luckily, even though both sets have been out-of-production for many years, I found some #476s. Turns out a #476 double light standard set has 4 individual lamps, and a #475 has only 3 single light standards, and hence only 3 individual lamps. And with the #476 sets costing $2 less, this was a bargain! Luckily I had some luck :-)

Once all the poles were installed in the sidewalks, the module was stood on end so I could begin installing a lighting bus and attaching all the lights. Those wires you see there are for track power.

Last car at Ocean & Museum