Community garden shed through the seasons

17 August 2025

18 September 2025

14 December 2025

14 February 2026

19 February 2026

16 April 2026: Design work on the path continues.
The first model shed is used as a visual aid for sizing as the wires on the new one are unwieldy.

18 April 2026
The shed and notice board have heaved seriously off level.

A model railroader goes to a plastic scale model show

My 'Moon Mail Madness' diorama. (No, that tattooed leg isn't mine) 

I went to the scale model show held at the Holland Armoury on Sunday. Ok, well, I did more than go, I entered a diorama too. The first time I've entered one of these events since 1975 at age 15.

When I heard about the show back in June I immediately had an idea for a diorama after reading the requirements on the show's flyer. I had some vehicles I had kitbashed back in 2005 or so that had never been entered into a show before, and now I had some impetus to build the diorama I long thought they belonged on. The small layouts I've built over the last few years have improved my diorama modelling skills, so it seemed like the right time to give this project a go.

The blue car on the left is a 'Martian Rover' I kitbashed from an AMT/ERTL Dodge Deora Show Car kit.

The box was shortened by 1", and the roof forward of the back window frame was cut off. The wheels and tires are from an AMT/ERTL Moonscope kit. I was kind of obsessed with the Moonscope kit back then and its parts showed up in a lot of my builds. However, I did build one up and mildly accessorized it:

The trailer is from an AMT/ERTL Fireball 500 kit. And yes, the wheels and tires are from another Moonscope kit.

The postal vehicle on the trailer is a very old MPC Ultravan kit that has been accessorized - yes, you guessed it, accessorized with some Moonscope parts :-)

The mailbox is a new build. It's made from scrap pieces of sheet styrene. The prototype is the mailbox at the end of my street. The door handle needed to be big so a gloved astronaut could grab it. Keeping in line with the show's theme of 100 Years of Mopar the handle is from a '69 Dodge Charger!

I'll do a separate post on building the base, but for now I'll note that it's built up from Cell-U-Clay.

Your loyal scribe shows off his handy work.

A bit of paint, a bit of glue, and a postcard from someone's mum and everything is ready to go.

So, off I went. 

You know I had great expectations for the dioramas that I might encounter. I waffled for a long time about taking mine as in the grand scheme of things I didn't spend a lot of time on it even though it was a fun little project.

This is the passage in the show's promotional flyer that sent my thoughts racing:

"*Models may have bases. As soon as ANY objects are added to the bases other than the model, it will be classed as a "diorama" *Dioramas cannot exceed 2' x 2' (51cm x 51cm)"

Seems an innocuous statement, but it got me thinking two things: first, I thought show dioramas must be becoming such large, complex pieces that practical limits had to be placed on entrants (which got me thinking my little diorama would be massively overshadowed), and, second, when 2' x 2' was noted I immediately started to think they should have a category for micro-layouts. You may recall 2' x 2' was the footprint for the Loonar Module micro-layout. Look, in essence all a micro-layout is, is a diorama with an element capable of motion. Why are there segregated shows for plastic models, especially ones that are components of large dioramas, and shows for model trains? It's likely just a historical relic whose root has something to do with how the hobby business was and still is structured. I think there'd be some interesting opportunities for idea sharing if big dioramas with plastic models and micro-layouts could share a show. Let's not forget micros, and many smaller sized, portable layouts can be in larger scales like 1/64, 1/48, 1/35, 1/32, 1/24, and 1/22.5, which correspond with several plastic model scales. Not too mention that a few micros have featured automobiles, military themes, and airplanes as well as trains. 

There were only 3 dioramas featuring automobiles - at least when I was there*

Who won you might ask? It wasn't me and I don't know who did. *I had to leave early due to a comedy of errors I caused that was ignited by lost keys :-( It ended with the keys found and a bout of leaf raking. I'll say no more.

Main diorama table at red arrow. Impressive work that I unfortunately didn't capture.

There was lots of impressive work on display and I was very glad to have attended to see it all. The one project that made the biggest impression was this one (unfortunately I don't know who to credit this build to, but if you're out there, you did a great job!):

I entered one of these kits in the 1975 model show.

Why? You remember that 1975 model show I mentioned entering, well, it was one of these kits that I built and entered. I didn't paint it up like this (I didn't have the skill), or build it anywhere near as good, but I'd recognize it anywhere.

Ah, memories.

Happy Canada Day!

Gaspar by the rails

Gaspar

One morning on one of my daily pre-heatwave hiatus walks down by the VIA Rail mainline out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw the bobcat that for years has been rumoured to be slinking through the fields and forests of Ottawa. But no, on closer inspection it turned out to be a Bengal cat, which is a cross between an Asian leopard cat and a domestic cat.

It's odd to see one on the loose given how much they cost, and this one looks in good shape for a cat living rough.

Named after one of the three wise men?

Over the weekend I was chatting with a neighbour who lives near the tracks and asked him if he'd ever seen the cat. Indeed he had, and the cat has a name: Gaspar (yes, with a G and not a C as was emphasized to me) !

It turns out Gaspar has a long and complex backstory, but suffice it to say some cat loving people are trying to catch him so he doesn't get into trouble in the wild. He's wily though, and so far attempts have been unsuccessful. For various reasons it's suspected he's already got a living arrangement with somebody and doesn't want to get snagged by anyone else.

Stay tuned to this cat channel for more breaking cat updates :-)

The view across my desk ...

... and down the sidewalk.

No, wait, we were made to love the way we move

We made a short trip to Toronto last week to visit a friend and Christmas shop. As usual we took the train. And we loved the way.....

...but the speed, not so much.

I was going to go into a whole nerd-a-palooza thing and analyze the bejesus out of our trip's distance, speed profile, average speed, top speed, trip time, delays, and so on, and so on. Forget that. Let's just say the quality of the trip was excellent - again, we loved the way - but our arrival in Toronto was 45 minutes late, and our return was 43 minutes late. Average speed either way, 88 km/h.

Sadly, this is not that out of the ordinary in our experience, even before VIA imposed speed reductions. However, nothing serious caused those delays, just the usual slowing for level crossings, waiting for other freights and passenger trains to pass, and we even stopped for the CPKC Holiday Train (ok, that was a pleasant stop). I eventually went with the flow and used the stoppages to squirt post cataract operation eye drops in my eye instead of trying to do so while the train was in motion, which invariably resulted in me squirting more drops on my face instead of in my eye. Who woulda thought those delays would have medical benefits :-)

And the other thing that's not out of the ordinary in our experience: good onboard service, good food, a friendly crew, and a good environment. And no, I'm not paid by VIA Rail to say that. So far so good in this department.

Look, maybe those VIA Rail commercials I don't like actually work. From my completely anecdotal, unscientific eavesdropping I heard some interesting comments from neighbouring passengers. Outward bound there was a small group of twenty-something women on a business trip, and upon arrival in Toronto one asked another, who apparently was riding the train for the first time in her life, what she thought of the trip. Her reply was an enthusiastic, "It was relaxing." On the return trip a twenty-something businessman told his seat mate this was the first train trip he'd taken since childhood, that he splurged to ride business class and was quite happy he did. Ok, so maybe VIA Rail does know its target market. I hope they can convince lots of young people to take the train using whatever messaging they think will work.

If anyone from VIA is reading this, look, you've got to make the travel time thing reliable, predictable, and so set-your-watch-to-it boring that every passenger takes arrival times for granted. You've got a lot of the other pieces of the puzzle in place, but that big one is one you desperately need to figure out. 

Movies ‘N’ Stuff Criterion Closet: Christian McPherson‘s & Peter Thompson's Picks

Today Peter was telling me about a homebrew 'Criterion Closet' that was shot at his store. If you're a long time reader of this blog you might remember the model I made of Movies 'N' Stuff a few years ago. Some interesting picks, and you'll see a bit more inside Peter's store. If you're a movie lover in Ottawa, drop by the store. You won't regret it.

No Space Hopper at Smiths Falls

A reader asked me if I'd seen the Space Hopper recently. Unfortunately, no. But, it's out there somewhere. I can feel it in my bones. Hmm, maybe that's just from too much snow shovelling :-)

Barrelling through the trees en route to Ottawa from Toronto

Departing Toronto's Union Station for Ottawa

Insectary 75D

Left: Insectary 75C | Right: Insectary 75D

"During World War I, there was an increased need for information for farmers in all regions of the country, to help them protect their crops and maximize production for the war effort. Other insectary sheds were built. In the 1930s, "only the unparalleled problems of drought and soil drifting outranked the trauma that resulted from insect pests." Entomologists were in great demand. By the end of World War II, with a lot of research being conducted outside Ottawa, the insectary was closed and the largest of the buildings demolished. Others remain as outbuildings or sheds (Buildings 75A, 75B, 75C, and 75D),..." Some history about the smaller Insectary buildings at Ottawa's Central Experimental Farm from the highly recommended 2021 book, Building Canada's Farm: An Illustrated Guide to Buildings at the Central Experimental Farm.

Earlier this year I had a go at creating the many windowed Insectary 75C. 75D was next on my list but I lost my desire to build it then because for some unarticulated reasons it struck me as a difficult project.

Insectary 75D is now a garage

A week or so ago I was going through my farm photos again and began to think 75D was going to be far simpler than I had first considered. If I dropped thoughts for a removable roof, operating garage door, and an interior, well, it was just a rectangular box with a roof.

However, it was going to need a little selective compression and feature adjustment to make it fit into its location on the layout.

Basically, my model is shorter, the side with doors is on the left instead of the right, and the walls have a freshly painted glow with only slight weathering.

The walls were cut from a piece of Evergreen styrene clapboard siding left over from making the office for Cal's Lumberyard. It looks like the prototype used some sort of tongue and groove siding, but I didn't have any on hand.

The garage door is also an Evergreen scrap: a styrene piece with pre-scribed parallel lines whose product number is lost to time. The side doors are styrene scraps I scribed myself.

The windows are N-scale items from Tichy Train Group.

The interior stiffening walls are cut from 0.060" thick styrene sheet scraps. Once I had them glued in place I noticed the triangular roof supports didn't quite match up with the tops of the side walls and had to be sanded back in situ.

The roof is made from 2 pieces of 0.100" styrene for the substrate, and 2 pieces of brick sheet for the shingle layer. Yeap, the asphalt shingles are bricks. I was feeling a bit lazy and wanted to bring this model to a quick finish so I thought some scraps of HO scale plastic brick sheets looked pretty close to asphalt shingles when painted a few shades of black and grey thereby making them ideal candidates for speeding this project to completion. Since the roof will be somewhat obscured by the tree canopy, the bricks-for-shingles ruse won't be too obvious to the casual viewer.

Yikes! Once again the digital camera makes quite clear little defects that need correction. I see a painting problem on the back windows that needs fixing up.

Inside the windows I added a piece of Walthers chainlink fencing material to represent the security screen behind each pane of glass. The fencing fabric doesn't show up in the photos, and is a bit hard to see in person, so maybe that little detail could have been left off.

Well, this is the last building for the farm layout. The only other major item is the tree outside Vickis Veggies then it's on to adding the myriad of details I think will be necessary to bring the layout to life. That could take a few months, but it should be interesting work.

Uncertain days ahead for restoration of Ottawa streetcar #696

Image modified from this more positive post

You may recall that back in January 2022 I wrote a post about the efforts to restore Ottawa streetcar #696.

Yesterday I was dismayed to learn that the work may come to an unceremonious conclusion by the end of this month. According to this CBC article, streetcar #696 and the restoration team have been ordered to vacate the shop space loaned to them by OCTranspo by the end of this month.

Money for projects such as this one is hard to come by, and I can only imagine the scramble that's on to find money to comply with this order and a place to relocate, not to mention organize a move of the unfinished streetcar and all the associated  tools and materials.

I'm going to try and find out what's going on.

The Centennial Experimental Farm, aka LOL III, so far

I’ve been bouncing around a lot of blog topics over the last few weeks, so in the spirit of collecting my thoughts I figured I’d post this picture of what the HO-9 Centennial Experimental Farm layout looks like today and summarize its fictional history.

Layout construction started in September 2022, but research began in January 2022. It’s inspired by the streetcar line that ran through Ottawa’s Central Experimental Farm from 1908 until 1929.

The farm was established in 1886, and is still in operation today. Its purpose is to perform scientific research for improving agricultural methods and crops for use in Canada. It must be unique in the world that a country’s capital city has a 400 hectare farm at its core. Parliament and the symbolic buildings of government are along the Ottawa river, but at the centre is a farm. As an expatriate Torontonian I find that quite delightful. The farm is a great place to wander around on a bicycle, and I’m hoping my shoulder and back are now up to it again.

My layout is a whimsical speculation on what the farm’s streetcar system might have looked like had it been re-established in 1967, the 100th year of Canada’s confederation, and continued to operate today. In 1967 the federal government sponsored many ‘Centennial Projects’ as part of that year’s celebrations. This layout is a look at one such project, albeit a fictional one. I’m not sure where Cousin Cal figures in this history, but I see his truck parked by the Insectary :-)

The layout uses Kato Unitram N-gauge track as its basis. I’ve repainted the track, and performed a few hacks on it, to run HO-9 streetcars in an Ottawa-like setting (with some Toronto influences). All the streetcars planned for this layout are HO scale ones re-motored with various Kato N-gauge drives. There is a problem that I can’t run streetcars side-by-side on this track as the rails are too close together along the straight sections, but it is possible to have operating sessions with streetcars running on both tracks as long as certain rules are followed - these could form the basic rules of a game, although that’s not really my thing.

I’m planning to try my hand at scratchbuilding models of local deciduous trees, and this layout will eventually be their home. The real farm has lots of trees and incorporates an extensive arboretum, so various sorts of trees will not be out of place on the layout.

When will it be ‘done’? There’s at least another year of work to go, but these days I’m more interested in seeing the layout develop than getting it finished. I’m still in a random activities frame-of-mind, so work on this will proceed at whatever pace seems right at the time.

Are any model railroaders working on Ottawa's Woe-Train?

Back in the fall of 2019 I had plans to write extensively about Ottawa's then brand new Light Rail Transit system, the OTrain. I even got press credentials to ride on the inaugural run.

Although that press event was pulled off without a hitch as they say, from then on it was one LRT problem after another right up until now. The problems kept coming so fast and were so serious that I stopped writing about the LRT because I didn't want the blog to become dominated by that terrible system. 

If you want to read about the LRT's entire tale of woe, Sarah Trick of TVO wrote an excellent summary, Ottawa's colossal LRT debacle: A brief-ish history, and there's an equally good one by Brett Popplewell at The Walrus, Ottawa's Transit Gong Show, from February of this year. If you think you can stomach all the details, you can find the final report of the public inquiry here.

So, why am I writing about the LRT today? Well, I had a gallows humour chuckle at the most recent problem noted in the CBC report, Axle bearings on Ottawa LRT might need to be redesigned. It seems like this might be the result of certain too sharp curves that were laid too flat (track issues were reported in, LRT inquiry commissioner still concerned about wheel and track problems). Are there any model railroaders on their team? Any model railroader with the slightest experience has learned - usually the hard way - that you can't run long trains with long cars on tight radius track. You get binding and jamming and derailments. And you need generous easements too. Often the only way to improve operations and resolve frustrations is to rip up the track and start fresh, maybe with a new layout - easy for a model railroad, impossible for the real thing.

If you're a longtime reader here you may recall I wrote about a fictional HO-scale layout of the entire transit system of New Toronto in my 2013 pulp novella, Light Ray Blues. It was run by the University of New Toronto's Lone Trainmen, and you can read about it here. That fictional layout's purpose was to physically simulate operations and root out potential problems like the ones we're seeing with Ottawa's LRT. If anyone from the LRT is reading this, I can give you the number of the Lone Trainmen :-)

A rare sunny day

Took the Jimmy off the shelf for a beauty shot

An afternoon of reading and taking photographs in the backyard. This past winter has been the darkest in the last 83 years, so I'm taking maximum advantage of every sunny day. And so are the purple flowers that are popping up in the lawn.

Thoughts while building the Insectary

Over the last week or so I've been working on the Insectary. It turned out to be a rather pleasant little project and the resulting model seems rather striking. 

If you compare these photos of the model to the real thing you'll see I've taken a few liberties and made some changes to several details, but I've stuck pretty closely to the overall design. I took this approach because I wanted to build this from odds-and-ends I had on hand in my scrapbox and avoid buying new materials. Although, I had to relent on the windows. I didn't have any suitable moldings, and I didn't want to scratchbuild 25 window frames (!), so purchasing something suitable was the only way to proceed.  After some guesswork regarding window dimensions, I ended up buying Tichy Train Group item #8062, 24" x 56" 2/2 double hung window moldings. Now the windows on the prototype aren't double hung, but appear to be hinged at their tops which allows them to swing open at the bottom, so yet another deviation. 

Verticals are 0.125" x 0.125" styrene strips 

Now that the E. L. Moore book is done I've been feeling a bit adrift blog-wise. The ELM project has been 'officially' going on since 2013, and 'unofficially' it traces back to the second post I made in March 2009 on building Bunn's Feed & Seed. I have simultaneous feelings that the long era of ELM posts is over and not over as there are still many unanswered questions. For the most part though I feel the posts are over, and there's an ELM shaped void in the blog :-)

The blog's stats show the ELM posts to be by far the most popular, followed by posts on other famous mid 20th century model railroaders. Strangely, before I got into serious ELM posts, the most popular posts were those in the first series of the Streetcar Noir pulp, Light Ray Blues. For awhile it had quite a lot of views from Japan for some unknown reason. The second and third series did ok, but not as well as the first. Posts about my own projects rank well below ELM, legendary model railroaders, and novellas. In a surprising twist, the most popular post on my own work was actually a rather banal photo of my old LOL layout I posted on Instagram. There's a message in all this for me :-)

Shingles are strips cut from 220 grit sandpaper

I'm thinking the posts are going to become more random than usual - I've been told some consider the blog chaotic, so maybe no one will notice :-) - as I settle into some other groove. Frankly I'm not even sure if blogging is the way to go these days given the dominance of video when it comes to how-to build scale models material. I have no desire to make videos, so blog retirement is a possibility - although I have said that before and gotten right back on the saddle after a few days of retirement :-) 

The roof is removable; it's made from 0.060" thick styrene scraps

Building the Insectary was a nice diversion from turgid blogging thoughts: it was a bit tricky construction-wise, but small in size so I didn't have to wait days to see significant progress.

The foundation is also made from 0.060" styrene sheet

Anyway, so much for navel gazing.

I have a lot of leftover window frames. They come in 12 packs, and I needed 25, so I've 11 for the scrapbox. I can see them being used for some other buildings that are near the Insectary. The windows will give the collection a family feeling, so they won't go to waste. 

The interior is simple, just a counter that runs around the perimeter with some cupboards underneath. I popped over to Ikea to see what they had in stock, but they were sorely lacking in anything in HO scale :-) So, out came the 0.020" thick styrene sheet, and in a bit I had some counter space. Once the layout is further along I'll add some sort of interior action - genetic insect experiments gone awry ?

For this picture I put the camera lens right up against an end window and hoped for the best. Yeah, there's some messy paint work near the eaves, but that isn't visible from normal viewing angles. I'll have to clean that up when I add some interior detail.

Well, that's it for now. I wonder if the farm has an Arachnidary?

Central becomes Centennial

In our last episode I reported on fence post installation. Since then the fencing - using the classic screen door mesh method - has been installed, a corn field - using Walthers corn - has been planted, streetcar stops have been installed, a cattle path to the pasture has been added, road markings and stops at the cattle and pedestrian crossings have been created, and an entry sign has been put up near the main road.

Ottawa's Central Experimental Farm is the inspiration for this layout. It's nowhere near an exact replica, so I felt a renaming was in order. The real Central Experimental Farm became the Centennial Experimental Farm with the fictional farm's core story being its streetcar service was reinstated as a 1967 Centennial project.

For the eagle-eyed there are a few TTC inspired touches I'll leave for the reader to identify :-)