Roads, Sidewalks and Spam-bots

Last week a friend of mine asked if I had any posts about building roads. I had a couple on how I used styrene to build roads and other paved areas. But the question made me realize that I didn’t have ‘Roads’ as a label, so I went and attached one to suitable posts. 

The other thing this question brought up was that earlier this year a Blogger stats server spam-bot kept on pinging an old post called ‘New Sidewalks’ in a feeble attempt to lure me into one of their traps by way of their fake interest in the post. The only way I could get the annoyance to stop was to delete the post. After that I never saw another link in the stats from that spam-bot - although no doubt I’ve jinksed things by even discussing it :-)

That old post had some road building stuff so I thought I’d throw caution to the wind and re-post it. So, here it is, in its entirety, originally posted on 11 January 2010, admired by spam-bots around the world, ‘New Sidewalks’,

I was able to devote one day over the Christmas break to layout building. I thought I'd accomplish a lot, but I was only able to get the new Y-shaped diesel 'parking lot' - hopefully, the subject of another post - and some sidewalks installed. I plan to use sidewalks as a design element to tie the various parts of the layout together -which is weird in someways since this is a model train layout.

The sidewalks are cut from 0.080 inch sheet styrene, painted with thinned, loose coats of Tamyia light gray, Tamyia medium gray and flat black. They are glued in place with gap-filling super glue. The road surfaces were made by first gluing foam core to the train table's plywood base and then gluing a heavy weight piece of watercolour paper on top - I thought that was a good way to create the illusion of a textured, paved surface. Core roadbed strips were used as edging along the sides of the foam core and provided the base for the sidewalks. Results of this road building technique were mixed. In the future I'd simply use styrene sheet for the road surface. It's easier to work with, and will probably look just the same after painting. The road doesn't look too bad, but it is far more pristine than most roads I've driven over in Ontario!

Finished painting the new pavement

I spent about a week of spare time painting the pavement in the urban area. Looking back on the photos, this whole operation would probably be better described using a time-lapse video, but that’s beyond my capabilities, so I’ll just show a few photos of some of the steps along the way.

 [First, I removed the buildings.]

 [I then put on a rough base coat of a neutral gray - looking back, I could have probably skipped this step.]

 [This was followed by some coats of PolyScale Aged Concrete.]

 [Then alternating coats of loosely mixed aged concrete, several light grays, white, and flat black. I kept working the colours until things started to 'look right'.]

 [Roads were painted in.]

[As I got closer to finishing I glued on sewers and grates from Blair Line, and then used some light washes to blend them into the roadwork.]

Basic paving wraps up

Last weekend I finished up the styrene paving job in the urban area. I’ve been working on this for a few minutes each evening over the last two weeks, and I was able to devote a few hours on the weekend to finishing it. After the last piece was in place I had a long look and was struck by the feeling that the layout is starting to look done, and less and less ‘in progress’.

Before cutting and installing the median strip between the tracks and the outer ring-road, I got the GE 45 tonner off the shelf to check clearances. It’s got the widest profile in my fleet and it has unearthed some problems with scenery placement in other parts of the layout, so I thought I’d check that it got though this section of track without scraping against anything.

That’s Stella’s in the distance. I’m having a difficult time finishing it off. I think I’m being too apprehensive about whether it’ll turn out alright. I just need to dig in, finish gluing it up, and then use whatever results as a starting point for any corrections or modifications. I’m more and more seeing it as a learning piece about what not to do on my next high-rise!

Well, it’s on to painting.

Finished paving the hotel area

[The layout looks a lot different when the photo isn't carefully staged and the scenery is pulled back.]

I spent a few hours last weekend finishing laying down the styrene ‘concrete’ in the hotel area. It was sort of a tricky job getting the various curves and angles properly laid out on the styrene sheets, but in the end it turned out to be a fairly pleasant task. Three tools that came in rather handy were a profile gauge for transferring some odd track curves when the curve wasn’t too long, a drafting spline for transferring long curves, and a sliding bevel for transferring angles. 

Originally I started paving the various concreted track areas on the layout with Walthers’ Street Track Inserts product. It’s basically just a box of styrene pieces shaped to fit in various sizes of track: straights, curves and switches. After painting it looked passable and made the job rather easy – just trimming and gluing into place the various pieces; no messing with plaster. Well, after awhile I ran out of certain pieces and went looking for another box. No such luck. It’s out of production. So, to finish off, the concreted track areas are a mix of remaining pieces from the Walthers kit and others I’ve cut myself from styrene sheet. No big deal really. I’ve had to cut a number of styrene pieces anyway to build roads, sidewalks, squares and other pedestrian areas, but the convenience of the Walthers kit was hard to beat.

[Rubber cement was used to hold the paving to the layout board. Containers of screws acted as weights to hold things in place while the glue dried.]

One thing I should point out if you plan to pave streets and track with styrene. Make sure you keep the styrene pieces a bit below the top of the rail as well as leaving some clearance for the flanges. With my first attempt last year I was a bit careless on some installations and had some styrene pieces level with the top of rail, and in some cases, where the plastic butted against the outside of the rail, it was a little higher than the rail top. This was a painful lesson because some streetcars would ride up on the plastic, lose contact with the rail, and stall. Much grinding of plastic, restoration of clearances, and prying and replacing of plastic paving ensued – as well as periods of unrestrained cursing   -  to get things back to operational. I took this lesson to heart with last weekend’s work.

[Rocks also made for some handy weights.]

In the end the hotel area grounds were paved, a long sidewalk was built to connect the grounds to the shore, and a disguise was made for the program track power terminals. Just need to paint them all. The whole job took around 4 or 5 hours. I got slowed down a bit camouflaging the program track terminals. Basically, I just built a square cap for the terminals and will place an electrical box (a nostalgic relic from my ‘70s layout) on top. It’s removable if I need to get at the wiring. 

I pulled out my old Red Garland records to play while I worked. Paving and piano seemed to be a good combination.

The fate of the old layout

Over the Christmas holidays the old layout was moved out of the basement to make room for the new one. This blog got its name from the old layout: it was 6 feet by 5 feet in size, 30 square feet, hence, 30 Squares of Ontario. Maybe I should consider a name change.

I salvaged what I could from the old layout, then hauled it outside, wrapped it in plastic, and stashed it behind the shed for the winter. It’s too big to disassemble in the basement, so I’ll tackle that task outside in the backyard when the snow’s gone.

Debra commented that the remains seemed like some sort of strange abstract collage style painting. Well, if anyone wants to buy it as such, contact me and I’ll give you a price  Saves me the work of taking it apart 

The old layout’s rolling base I kept and modified to act as the stand for the new portable layout. The tilt-top action was eliminated and replaced by a fixed support frame. No big loss since the new layout is about half the width of the old one and just a little longer. This makes it easier to roll around the basement, and no tilting is necessary to get clearance when attempting to move around obstacles.

One good thing about the new layout transportation-wise is that only one person is needed to lift and carry it. I installed a lifting ring at the balance point along with handles before and after it. I attach a strap to the ring for lifting and carrying the board, and the handles are used to balance and tilt it – the strap takes the weight and the handles are for control. This seems to work ok, but the board could be built lighter through a more judicious use of materials!

Paving the streets

I'm working on 'paving' the streets. That is, inserting styrene pieces in the track to simulate streetcar track in the streets. I'm using a combination of Walthers street inserts and styrene sheets cut to fit.

Cedar Heights Station in context

I've added the street corner where the Cedar Heights Station will be located. It's just on the northern end of Art Park. The corner facing the street will get a bus stop and shelter so that it's easy to transfer from bus to train.

The other rolling home

The buildings on rails post reminded me of the other, more conventional rolling home. This one is being parked at Art Park - not a bad location all things considered.

Switching chocolate

This is an aerial view of the level crossing at Art Park. You can see the big mistake in the upper right corner of the photo. The stop line for traffic doesn't align with the lowered barrier. Stopping at the barrier while the arm was lowering would result in a big surprise for the occupants of the car! What happened was when I first installed the crossing barrier, the vertical part was too close to the track and trains collided with it, so it had to be moved - I really should repaint the road lines too.

The Baker's Chocolate car came from a hobby store in Los Angeles called Arnie's. It was nearby the hotel Debra and I were staying at back in the fall, so I had to give it a look. It's excellent. I have a soft-spot for tank cars and always buy interesting ones even if they don't make much prototypical sense for my layout.

Trouble at the Lincoln show

Those are Hot Wheels Lincolns and they are somewhat bigger than HO-scale. 1/64 maybe? I don't know for sure. Regardless, they make for an interesting scene.

Shapes at Art Park

S/R/Sv2 was something of a study in shapes. When laying out the geometry of the roads and sidewalks at Art Park I thought I'd continue on that theme.

Level crossing at Art Park

This is a test shot of the level crossing at Art Park. I need to work on getting better depth-of-field in the photos, but I'm happy with how the scene is developing. The crossing barrier is non-functional and is a relic from my 1970's layout - close-up it doesn't look so good, but from a distance it's not too bad.