Night escape

After the sun had set, and the late show had run its closing credits, and all the good citizens had brought in their dogs and let out their cats, and all the bad citizens had hidden from the accusatory moonlight, Leslie left her cabin through the basement window and made her way to the beach. She was carrying her backpack and had a plan to spend the rest of the night, and all of the next day, tucked away in a hidden coastal cave. She wasn’t sure if she’d wait out there until she was supposed to see Ryan again or just run for it like all the other times.

She couldn’t be sure if David had been followed when he came out to her cabin. Someone might be watching her; lurking in the woods waiting for the right moment. She took a risk leaving; she took a risk staying put. By sneaking away in the dark, maybe she could lose anybody who might be out there and dozing at this late hour. Maybe paranoia was getting the better of her, but even fugitives from the law like her have enemies. Especially fugitives from the law like her.

It was only 3 kilometres to the cave as the crow flies, but she travelled 5 since she couldn’t take the most direct route and still keep a low profile. And taking the InterTrack was definitely out. It took her a couple hours to get there, but it was, thankfully, still dark when she arrived. She’d slogged her way through the backcountry, and immediately fell asleep once she was cached away.

The next instalment can be found here.

Mysteries of the June 1941 issue of Model Railroader

[A snippet from an urban section of the June 1941 MR Layout of the Month]

{Put on your best Rod Serling impersonation before reading on} Presented for your consideration, a pleasant summer’s day in June of 1941, and the latest issue of Model Railroader magazine is arriving at mail boxes, drug stores and newsstands across America; its treasures calmly awaiting perusal by the stalwart model railroading fraternity. Fast forward to the snowy winter of February 2013: a user of Model Railroader’s 75-year collection enters that DVD time machine and stumbles upon the June 1941 issue. He searches on station, on layout, on trolley, but only finds his answers deep within The Twilight Zone. {You may resume your normal persona.}

As I mentioned back in my review of the Model Railroader 75-year collection, for me it’s an endless source of good entertainment and interesting ideas. Quite by accident I recently stumbled across a couple of mysteries in the June 1941 issue: one clearly a production glitch in the preparation of the collection, and the other a minor editorial oversight dating to the original publication.

There’s a good article on how to build a model of a modern train station - entitled A Modern Terminal Station - and the table-of-contents lists it as appearing on pages 289 to 294. It’s a rather graceful arch design that somewhat resembles a cathedral-style radio. The only problem is the scan of the issue is missing the introductory part of the article that appears on page 289. In fact it appears that all pages from the page after the opening editorial up to and including 289 are missing. Clearly, this is some sort of oversight in the preparation of the DVD. Hopefully it can be fixed up in a future release.

Although I like that station, the main thing that brought me to this issue was the Layout of the Month drawing and notes that appear on page 303. The layout itself hasn’t been named, but the author gives a succinct description that lets you figure out what the name should be, “The plan is that of a suburban and local transportation system running from Uniontown around Union Bay to Norfolk on the opposite side of the inlet. I’d say, The Union Bay Railway is as good a name as any.

This is an extraordinary layout from the perspective of the streetcar-oriented modeller.  It has lots of great features: extensive street running through several neighbourhoods, a substantial trolley barn, a harbour, countryside, farms, 'miles' of coastal terrain, hilly look-outs, light industry and a fairgrounds. It’s a good example of three strengths of a streetcar-oriented layout: omnivagant design (Mr. Westcott’s term for ‘goes everywhere’), some possible long twisty loops for uninterrupted running so you can sit back and watch things go, and it offers modelling opportunities for a wide variety of places and scenes. If I had a 16 foot by 24 foot room, and lots of time, this would be a strong candidate for my layout – maybe a little updated to bring it into a more modern era. 

Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be an author associated with this article anywhere to be found, but given the drawing style, and it’s similarity to the layout design that I discussed in my post about the May 1940 Layout of the Month, my guess is that it was also developed and drawn by Linn Westcott. Given the release date of the issue, this is a mystery that may remain unsolved.

Letters, Metal and Brick for the World's Biggest Bookstore

I've been spending a lot of time sanding and smoothing the sign letters to try and remove their rough edges as best I can. I must admit it was rather a tedious job and I only worked on two or three letters at a time. I figured if I tried to complete too many at once, I'd start to rush, and that's when I'd do something really bad and have to start again. I'm pretty sure my friend Vince would tell me that cutting out these letters was a job best done by a laser cutter and I'd have to agree :-) With a laser cutter one could probably easily match the exact font, and turn a big cutting and sanding job into a light snack. Maybe next time I'll have to look into it.

I pulled out just about all the sanding tools and  files I had for this task. With all the different shapes and curves I figured I'd need a corresponding big set of smoothing tools. Probably the most useful for this job was the flex-i-file - the backwards C-shaped aluminum tool on the green cutting mat. It's basically a frame that holds taut a strip of sanding film. It was especially useful for sanding in tight corners such as those found on the letters r, k and d.

Once the letters were done, I worked on sizing up the metal sign board that they'll be attached to and the lower brick wall at street level. The brick wall is cut from a brick styrene sheet. The signboard is a 'metal' corrugated 0.040 inch styrene sheet from Evergreen plastics cut down to the approximate size for this building. I didn't have enough on hand and have ordered another piece to finish. This is going to be a big building - probably around 30 inches long. 

New lights for the The Noir cafe

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm continuing to update, repair and renovate some of the buildings on the Lost Ocean Line.

The cafe didn't have any interior lights. When I wanted to fake some lighting for staging photos, I'd just open the roof and drop in  a small LED connected to a battery. That was ok for background shots, but didn't allow for photos near or inside the building, so I built an overhead light fixture from some styrene scraps and two grain-of-wheat bulbs.

The bulbs aren't glued into place and can be removed if they burn out. The wiring snakes through the styrene trough that keeps the fixtures in place, goes down through the kitchen area, and pops out the bottom of the building for connection to the layout accessory power.

As well as lighting, I added a sign above the back door and a small garden for outside seating. It needs some tables, chairs, and people, but that's for another time.

New signs for Moe’s

Over the Christmas holiday, as well as being able to do lots of train running, I also had the opportunity to look closely at my building inventory. It was clear that many would benefit from some further detailing, and others were in need of a little repair. That work seemed like a good job to undertake in the dead of winter, and since I’ve had to order some materials for the World’s Biggest Bookstore project that build is slowing down a little. I figured in the meantime I’d do a little building renovation. 

Last summer I bought this CD called Barbecue Any Old Time. While re-organizing the CDs recently, it struck me that its logo would make a good sign for Moe’ Barbecue. So, I scanned the box, printed, and cut-and-pasted some paper signs onto some backing material – plastic for the over the door signs and wood for the main roof sign. Voila, some nice signs for Moe’s.

 Those little signs are mounted on thin styrene and are for the end-walls. The main sign was bonded to some thin basswood.

I also noticed the roof section below the clerestory was badly warped. This likely happened because it is a laminate of two relatively thick styrene sheets, two different types of glue, and metal roofing. Temperature and humidity changes, combined with dissimilar material properties, have not been kind to it. When I had a similar problem with the McGregor Park Library roof, I replaced it with a single piece of textured material; however, on this one I just added some trim to the roof edges so one could no longer see how the roof didn’t attach to the walls properly. The curvature in the roof itself seems ok given the type of building this model is meant to represent. 

 Here I've added some facia cut from 0.012 inch styrene to hide the gap between the walls and the roof.

 I freelanced a support structure from styrene pieces for the main sign.

 Here it is with the signs installed. Now I need to work on the lighting.