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| No, the Painted Post Smoke Shop wasn't located between Coles and Thrifty's. They're just for scale |
Over the years I’ve had a few conversations with Vince where I’ve lamented the fact that there seems to be very few layouts inspired by the TTC’s streetcar network. Maybe none. I’ve seen a few model railway layouts with some streetcar track added, prowled by TTC streetcars, and sprinkled with a few of Toronto’s signature buildings, but nothing completely Toronto and TTC and streetcar. Nothing that makes a statement or has a singular vision. I think Little Canada comes the closest, but it’s a commercial tourist attraction for children. Personal layouts, built by dedicated amateurs or folk artists, that focus on Toronto's TTC streetcars and environs, well, I haven’t seen any - if you have, please let me know, my knowledge is quite scant in this area and I'd like my strong statements to be wrong.
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| Memory drawing of the '60s / '70s version of the Painted Post Smoke Shop |
I’ve toyed with adding features reminiscent of the Toronto I knew to my layouts. The Lost Ocean Line, the Alta Vista Transit Commission, and the Way Out Layout, all had some features, but they were always diluted with other very non-Toronto, non-TTC aspects. They never fully communicated what I had in mind.
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| Walls are laminated from 3 pieces of 4-ply Bristol board + 1 piece of brick embossed styrene |
As I’ve become familiar with micro-layout thinking, selective compression, observation, and abstraction I’ve tried to use those concepts to design a Toronto and TTC inspired streetcar layout, or at least come up with the broad outlines of one. In retrospect getting familiar with those concepts was crucial to making such a layout achievable.
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| Testing wall fit before gluing. |
Look, the TTC and its streetcars date back to 1921, and Toronto streetcar service in general goes back even further to 1861. So, you’ve got this streetcar system with a long history, a vast network of track, many types of vehicles that have operated on it over the years, and many, many different areas the cars rumbled through. To build anything you have any chance of completing you’re going to have to make decisions, and those decisions are going to reflect a personal view. There are no absolute right or wrong decisions regarding the layout's theme and design, which means there is no definitive Toronto streetcar layout. Any layout will reflect the concerns and interests of its designer. Given the TTC's long streetcar history there are conceivably many possible layouts in all sorts of styles, genres, and scales, so TTC streetcar system layout designs will be hard to exhaust.
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| 1/16" thick clear plastic for the front wall. Walls are now glued together with Weld Bond |
My layout won't be a micro, but it will be small, much smaller than what is considered small over here, and will focus on places and vehicles that have some sort of meaning to me. Operation isn’t a priority, but story is. Liberties will be taken to tell it, which is where micro-layout thinking, selective compression, observation, and abstraction come in, not to mention other things I’ve learned over the years.
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| Front window framing drawn on a sheet of 0.010" thick styrene. |
I’ve decided to stop scribbling and commit to building, beginning this year. It’ll likely take 2 or 3 - hopefully not 4 - years to construct, but I need more non-worldly, complex tasks to help take my mind off things now and then. The Toronto and Mt. Lowe layouts should do the trick as these are both layouts I’ve wanted to build for a long time. I figure if I can get the base built and track installed this year I’ll be doing well.
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| Transfer tape was stuck to the back of the window frame piece. It will stick the frame to the 'glass'. |
Like I said, it isn’t going to be a big layout, likely only slightly bigger than the family room coffee table as far as foot print is concerned - cities are dense packed after. It’ll be roughly rectangular with Scarborough at one end and downtown at the other. My Scarborough includes the old Painted Post Smoke Shop where I’d buy my model building magazines and comics in olden days, so I thought I’d construct that little structure first to ease into things, and to provide some counterpoint to my ongoing Mt. Lowe layout work.
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| Unfortunately the transfer tape resulted in a very rough cut that required lots of clean up. Next time I'll go back to individual styrene pieces for window frames. |
I realised recently that when I lived in Toronto it was full of excellent bookstores and libraries - maybe it still is - and I had developed routes I would travel between them. Those routes varied with my age and circumstances over the years, but I was an inveterate bibliophile from my earliest memories - I still am :-) - so I would regularly travel my routes looking for treasure. Cars were rarely involved so I didn’t get chauffeured around - I didn’t have one as a teen - so it was always my own two feet, buses, streetcars, and subways that provided transport. Even when I did own a car, its only job on one of those trips was to get me to a subway station parking lot. My little layout will be inspired by those routes and modes of transport in some way. If you’re a regular reader here you’ll know I’m keen on using pathways as a design strategy, which will come in handy.
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| I was still in denial about the rough window frames at this point. Sign is a printout laminated between 2 pieces of very thin, clear plastic using transfer tape as the bonder. |
I wasn’t a snobby reader. I read whatever seemed interesting from low-brow to high-brow and all the brows in between. As a boy and young teen the low to middle brow magazine and comic book offerings of the Painted Post Smoke Shop, a short walk from our house in Scarborough, exerted a magnetic pull. I bought a lot there, and got kicked out a few times with a loud reminder that the store wasn’t a public library :-) That’s where I bought the issue of Model Railroader magazine that introduced me to the work of E. L. Moore, so naturally it needs a place on the layout.
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| Everything's glued in place. The end of the grey area marks where a false back wall will be added. |
The model is just a rather elaborately decorated blue box with a removable lid for a roof. The prototype was a unit in a strip mall, but I've sliced it out from its brothers and so felt I had to panel the new exterior walls with the same mottled blue brick that I recall surfaced the façade.
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| The roof is a removable lid glued up from 4-ply Bristol board. An LED strip is used to light the interior. That white piece of paper used for the ceiling diffuses the LED's light. |
I had the 4-ply Bristol board out from the Cape Breton Island FireHouse project and decided to use it on this build since I was on a roll. All the wall laminates of 4-ply you see in the photos were made with transfer tape, and Weld Bond was used to glue up the walls and floor into a single structure.
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| You can see the LED strip attached to the false wall at the back. There's a strip of thin clear plastic glued to the front of the LED's light box. |
The prototype still exists, but it appears the only part that's the same as in days gone by is the metal window framing on the façade. So, I used that as a guide to layout and dimension the building. Everything else is from memory - you've been warned :-)
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| A hole was drilled in the bottom for the LED's wires. |
The model still doesn't have an interior. I have some sort of mental block when it comes to them. I leave room for interior detail, but it's hit-and-miss as to whether I ever get around to providing any. Maybe in a year or so when the layout has some sort of rudimentary form I'll get some interior inspiration.
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| The façade after a lot of scraping on the window frames to de-fuzz them. Results are mixed. |
It looks a bit forlorn standing there empty. I know, I'm fixating on the window frames, but once posters appear in the windows, and shelves in the interior, I think my focus will shift. And then there's that old issue I have that digital cameras can make things look worse than in real life.
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| Hmmm. Some trim needs repositioning. |
I don't recall what the building looked like out back. This is all minimalist guess work on my part. Some weathering will be needed when the time comes to place this in a layout scene, but until then I'll just contemplate its blueness.