Some lunar lunacy with Gemini

I asked Gemini to replace the bland, black background in the opening photo to the Lunar loco construction post with a lunar environment. Up there is what it generated. It's not bad, although a tad stereotypical with the frip-frap in the background. I guess further prompting could have eliminated all that.

Next I asked Gemini to take this scene snippet from the lunar loco test run video and remove the southern California style environment and replace it with a lunar setting and futuristic lunar buildings:

I could see that things weren't moving in the right direction from the get-go, and after a couple of prompts to try and steer Gemini to something plausible I gave up at this stage of image creation:

It looks like a strange desert scene, but I'll give it high marks for injecting more Way Out into the Way Out Layout :-)

Way Out Layout Runabout, Part 4: Testing, testing, 1, 2, 3, testing.

Trying to make sense of the guts of the Peter Witt streetcar

As soon as I had cleaned up stray matte medium from the track after ballasting I got out some streetcars for test running as many had not been out for loops in several years; the Bachmann TTC Peter Witt being one of them.

It always was a poor runner since I bought it new in 2013. Since I have plans for it to run on the Taronna layout I wanted to figure out the root cause of the problem and see if I could fix it.

Long story short, it turns out the power pick up on part WT24 on the right side of the rear truck was not making contact with plate WT23. This meant the rear truck wasn’t picking up any power, so the streetcar would stall out while trying the pass through nearly half the layout’s switches. WT24 had not been installed properly at the factory, and its pickup was bent inside the body instead of being outside and sprung against WT23. Some careful bending with a pair of tweezers fixed things up.

Yes, I know this gobbledygook makes no sense at all to readers who don’t own a Peter Witt, so I’ll just call it a screw up at the factory that meant the rear truck wasn’t picking up power. If it was test run at the factory only on switchless track this problem would never have been noticed. It should have been discovered if they had tested by applying power directly to the wheels of each truck.

Theoretically I should have resolved this problem years ago. Thing is, with the Way Out Layout running properly, and the workshop reorganized, I felt motivated to press on and get the Peter Witt problem fixed. Hopefully that’s a good sign for future success.

Here’s the Peter Witt running smoothly through the switches at the front of the layout without stalling.

Way Out Layout Runabout, Part 3: The Friendly Ballaster

Track ballasting continues on the Way Out Layout.
Some rudimentary track weathering is up next.

I seem to have a strange relationship with the Way Out Layout. At one time I thought of it as an honest to goodness layout; a successor to the Lost Ocean Line. These days I view it as a test layout for helping me develop Taronna and the Community Gardens layouts, but I feel compelled to at least sort of finish it to bring it up to the concept I originally had for it. Ok, I admit, it's way more finished than the usual utilitarian test bed. 

Maybe what I'm testing is my resolve to get something more-or-less finished before diving into new projects.

Ballasting supplies laid out and ready for action.

As I've been ballasting away I started to think that maybe the Way Out Layout has a lot in common with The Friendly Giant's old tv layout.

The Friendly Giant's tv layout at the PumpHouse Museum.

Last year I went with my cousin to visit the PumpHouse Museum in Kingston. Much to my surprise they had the model railway used on The Friendly Giant tv show. 

It was in pretty good shape. I know, the Way Out Layout doesn't look like it, but they're around the same size, and neither are meant to be serious layouts, just a bit of railway pleasantness. 

Well, after ballasting, some scenic tuneup is in order and then it's on to new layout work once I've been suitably inspired.

Way Out Layout Runabout, Part 2: Revival

I’m working on reviving the Way Out Layout. It’s not glamorous work, and even though the track is clean and trains now run, the layout’s not a pretty sight. And won’t be for a while as revitalization continues.

Way Out Layout Runabout, Part 1: A Man With A Saw Thinks Everything Needs Cutting

Top: Before | Bottom: After

I have saws and cutting with saws on my mind these days. First it was the Desert Dodge's roof, then the Desert Dodge's pickup box, next it was the RDC-M's body, and now it's the beach on the Way Out Layout. 

A black Sharpie pen was used to mark what needed to be cut off.

Construction on the Way Out Layout has been stalled for a very long time. I tried to think of why over the Christmas holidays. I realized one stumbling block was I was probably never going to finish detailing the beach area. I had lost interest and it was holding me back. So, I got out a Sharpie pen and drew a black line around the area I had no interest in.

A tool-box saw does the deed

As I've written about before, I have a number of small layout projects in mind for this year, and although my thoughts haven't settled and gelled on how to proceed yet, all will need the Way Out Layout for test running vehicles and trying out landscaping techniques. So, I thought I'd fix it up and get rid of whatever was annoying me about it. That included cutting off parts that seemed irrelevant. 

All that's left of the beach is a trash bag o' foam pieces.

Although the layout's base board was built up from styrofoam, it was surprisingly tough to cut through.

Once the desired landscape was removed I smoothed out the new rough foam edges with a rasp and painted them with black acrylic paint. 

Strangely, I'm glad the front edge has been sectioned.

The next thing is a general layout tidy-up and to test run some locos and streetcars.

Yes, the posts are still quite random here, and I expect them to stay that way until I settle on a new direction. Stay tuned!

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:

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 :-)

EXchange sightings by the yard

I've been using these old yard sticks from long gone Toronto hardware stores to mark out the streets on the layout. They're of the era when telephone numbers still had exchange names. Over at Orange Crate Art, Michael has an ongoing series where he notes sightings of exchange names in movies (here's one). Duly inspired I thought that after staring at these old sticks for such a long time, I felt I should make note of the stores and EXchanges.

Gray's Hardware

471 Sammon Ave.

Phone: GE 4060

Coxwell Hardware

1628 Danforth Avenue

Phone: RI 7300

Eglinton Wallpaper & Paint

2032 Eglinton Ave. West

Phone: RU 3-6135

Wikipedia tells me beginning in March 1966, the Toronto telephone directory no longer contained exchange names.

Bonus EXchange:

Smith & Sons Dry Cleaners

(location unknown; somewhere in Toronto)

Phone: OX 1-1141

Track installed

Track installed and functional

I've been scratching my head for quite awhile over the Way Out Layout's track plan. As well, I've been settled on a simple loop for the longest time, but I've had some nagging doubts I just couldn't shake that stopped me from installing the track.

Then I had two realizations that broke through my mental log jam. The first came from this statement in Scale Model Electric Tramways and How to Model Them: "On a model tramcar layout there is always movement and action." The more I thought about that statement, the more I figured I needed another loop. In the past, I found with the Lost Ocean Line layout visitors liked to have a go at running streetcars and found it quite fun when we got a lot of cars going. This track plan allows for that. And second, I would like to build a compressed model of the old Yorkville streetcar barn, so I needed a spur.

During the head scratching planning action

Along with those two things I reintroduced strong diagonals into the plan. I found it surprising that certain diagonals didn't seem right to me, but others did. I can't explain it, but there you have it. There's now a tilted cross of a sidewalk / roadway that divides the plan into four main areas.

So now I think the layout has the right mix of elements for a little fun as well as space for scenes. Next project? I think I'll add the road and sidewalks along the long, straight section at the back as it'll establish a number of levels that'll work their way throughout the layout.