47 Ocean Blvd: Kibri 38222 is finished!

Finally, after 7 months of on-and-off work, the apartment is done! I temporarily set it up at the corner of Ocean Blvd and Cedar Heights Ave to see how it looked. I see lots of opportunity for weathering, street furniture and other open air stuff, but it's not looking too bad. 

There's quite a number of parts in this kit, and it isn't a shake-the-box project like W. E. Snatchem. It could be built box-stock, but I've made a number of small changes to make it more at home in a Toronto-Ottawa setting.

The assembly instructions are good, so I won't go into a play-by-play of how I built it. But as you can see in the photo I still managed to install a wall component upside-down. It turns out that it didn't matter to the structure; although, if you're familiar with this kit you'll note something looks a little odd. I leave it as a test for you to identify the part :-)




As for changes I made to Toronto-Ottawa-ize it for the Alta Vista TC, here's a list,

1. Painted the walls a common bricky-red. Window and door frames were painted a contrasting green.

2. The store signs were changed to common ones I've seen here over the years and might make sense as the store-level on this sort of building. There's a dry cleaner, convenience store, five-and-dime, and cigar store. The kit's fru-fru window coverings were not used. Instead, pieces of white and off-white paper were cut and installed. They make the windows appear more like those you'll see in real life. Well, ok, a couple of the kit's paper curtains were used as well as some slices of gift wrap to provide a little contrast in the windows and account for human eccentricity :-)

3. The kit's base wasn't used because I wanted the building to sit flush with the sidwwalk. The base would have introduced a step that I feel would appear out of place. Some strip styrene had to be added to the foundation to fill holes left by the missing base.

4. The interior scenes are photos sourced from the internet and seem like ones I might see here. The interior pictures included in the kit are a little too sketch-like for my tastes.

5. A large air conditioner was added to the roof as were quite a number of items from Walthers roof details accessory kit, #933-3733. The items I chose to add had nothing to do with reality, and were stuck on to give the somewhat barren roof what I felt was an air of complexity and an interesting pattern.

6. The kit's exterior light fixture mouldings seemed a little too ornate and were left off.

Some extra work was done to add interior LED lighting so the stores don't look abandoned and the apartments seem lively at night. 

There are 4 light strips: 3 are inside styrene boxes, and the 4th was glued on top of the stores' light box, pointed upward to give some general interior light to the front windows. Window curtains and pieces of black card have been used to diffuse and block light to provide a pattern. 

The stairwell light boxes have blue filters on front - made by inking some clear plastic with a blue Sharpie pen - to add colour. 

The roof is removable so I can add more lights or service those already installed.

In the end, like all kits I build, there were a few parts leftover that I have no idea where they are supposed to go :-)

What's the Intent?

I know, Boxing Day isn't until mid next week, but I was reading Galen's blog and he posed an interesting question about laying out the intent of a layout. Well, more precisely, he read this insightful post at Mike Cougill's blog about intent and model railroading, gave some serious thought to the intent of his own work, and kindly asked if I had any thoughts on the subject. I had to think about it a bit because I did, but haven't attempted to write them down. Fractured sleep has been my companion for the last little while, so I decided to put the demon to work and write down some thoughts on the intent of the Alta Vista TC. What follows doesn't apply to my E. L. Moore related activities, or the Elizabeth Valley tribute layout, or my interests in model railroading in earlier times.

Before we dive into the who, what, when, where and why, here’s my short answer: 

The Alta Vista TC is a slice of the Toronto-Ottawa-Los Angeles that lives in my mind.

The long answer isn’t so easy to state, but I’ll give it a try.

In this blog I don’t usually discuss things I’m not that interested in, but thought I should make an exception in this case. My guidance before going further is that if you read something below that you like but I don't, I'm not trying to insult you, I'm just trying to clarify what I'm not into so my intent is a little clearer. So, what follows are my interests – the building blocks of my intent – mixed up in a stew and seasoned a little with the chili peppers of discontent.

I’m not much of a model railroader. I like trains. I like travelling on them. I’m not interested operating models of them. I have no interest in simulating the railroad business. Timetables and rules and schedules leave me cold. Those things spell day-job to me, and I’m not interested in pursuing them as leisure. Yeah, business and profit, with all their rules and schedules and rigour, are the reasons railroads exist. I like model railroads. It's just that I don't care if they properly simulate something real. I just live with the contradiction.

I like streetcars much better than trains. I find the conventional advice about taking up streetcar modelling – the models are actually powered by electricity like the real thing, the track work is tight and constrained like the real thing, the models actually pickup power from an overhead wire like the real thing – irrelevant. If you like those things, I’m not dissing you; everyone should understand and pursue their own interests; I'm much impressed by people who pursue those aspects; I’m just saying those modelling interests aren't mine, that’s all. I like streetcars because I liked riding them when I was growing up and living in Toronto. I like the subways and buses there too. I like the light rail system here in Ottawa and the one in Los Angeles. I was primed to like them because of Toronto.

My favourite aspect of model railroading is making buildings, staging scenes and  taking pictures. As I said, I’m not much of a model railroader, and strictly speaking, I guess I’m not a model railroader at all. I like model railroads, but I’m not into modelling actual railroads. Model railroading is the gateway that lead me to what I do. Neither am I a model tractioneer - or whatever it’s called. Building complex street track and installing overhead has no intrinsic interest to me – well, maybe just enough to get the scenes I want to see; it’s just that it’s not my focus. Believe me, I find the work of others on those things fascinating, but I couldn't do it. Hopefully I've repeated myself enough on the subject of the traditional reasons to get into 'traction modelling' to get it out of my system :-)

I’m interested in the lost urban world. Lost to money and gentrification and the alternate universe we call the internet. There’s a lot that I’m glad is gone; however, much is gone that I lament. No internet browsing technology can replace the physical pleasure of riding a railed machine along a street to a remote place, getting off and walking the walk to wherever, scouring the books and records and movies and stuff on offer, finding unexpected things, meeting, looking, exploring, eating and talking, and taking home the bounty. And doing it again and again, year after year, with some new variation on the theme each time. But that’s all gone. Ok, just more-or-less all gone - I'm certainly not going to write about the remaining places where I can still find a little of it. The sterile seductive glow of the display screen can’t come close to replacing it. Maybe the new world is so drunk with efficiency that staring at a glowing slab in one’s hand is the only proper response to its banality.

I’m interested in places. I didn’t just ride the streetcars, buses and subways of the TTC for the fun of it. I had places to go. The TTC exists to take people to places. I focus on places. And they don't necessarily have to be real places, they can be speculative as long as they seem to fit the feeling I'm after. Real or imagined, places must dominate. And they must have the right vibe.

I'm interested in the feeling of a place. Or at least the feeling that comes to me when I'm there. With Toronto it's mainly nostalgia. The Toronto in my mind isn't exactly the one you'll find today when you roam its streets. With Los Angeles it's unrequited love. With Ottawa it's refuge and time travel to pockets of places that seem like things I recognize, but don't properly appreciate - I don't really understand Ottawa in it's own right and therefore have mixed impressions about the vibe it projects. Getting the feeling right on the Alta Vista TC is more important than the traditional desire for high detail and weathering. Those are parts of achieving the right vibe, but they are subservient and not primary. Paul Michael Smith's Elgin Park is the exemplar in my mind for modelling brilliance in the service of vibe. 

I'm interested in Noir fiction. Mainly classic crime Noir: Philip Marlowe, Lew Archer, Claire DeWitt, Mister X and their fictional brethren. Noir strikes a chord with me. Noir is the flip side of the good vibe of places and exploration the city has to offer. Noir seems to me an urban thing. There might be rural Noir and country Noir - I haven't studied Noir that closely to know. Raymond Chandler made Los Angeles the birthplace of what I think of as classic Noir. Toronto is Noir even though its residents might deny it. Ottawa isn't Noir just yet, but with the sharp increase in gun crime it's on its way. At present it's more Bureaucratic Gothic combined with doses of Techno Thriller. The Pale King meets Cryptonomicon. Some aspect of Noir should be present in the Alta Vista TC. I'm not sure how to accomplish it.

I’m interested in light. Have been for a long time. Light was just about the only subject in high school physics that I actually enjoyed. As a boy, one of my earliest memories is of walking to a local convenience store to buy a jug of milk for my mum, and along the way wondering why how the same light comes into everyone’s eyes, but everyone seemed to react differently to things. Crazy, I know, and I don’t think I summarized it quite like that as a boy, but that’s the modern gist of it. I knew light came into my eye, somehow did something in my brain and the world appeared. And that world didn't appear the same to everyone. Light was the key, but I didn’t know what to. All I can say today is that buildings and places must provide light and be shaped by it or they'll appear dead.

I’m interested in watercolour painting’s infinite ability to represent the effects of light. I don’t use light enough in my work and I need to. It’s something I want to work on. One thing that strikes me is how flat and uniform a lot of model railroad photos are. That’s good for studying details and such, but things aren’t illuminated like that in the world, or at least in the world I see.

I'm interested in being able to look into and through buildings and see things along the path from outside to inside to outside again. I once thought of this as Selective Staging. I don't want model buildings to always be opaque structures that you must look around. A bit of that is good, but not every building is a fortress.

I'm interested in walking. Streetcars are an aid to walking. There needs to be a network of interconnected sidewalks to reflect that reality. On the Lost Ocean Line I deliberately made sure that sidewalks connected all the places, and the same will hold for the Alta Vista TC.

I'm interested in spacing. That is, making sure the roads and sidewalks are wide enough, the gaps between buildings and objects make sense, the arrangements of people seem natural, and so on. And all that needs to be balanced against the confines of a small layout. 

I'm interested in water. Ottawa is defined by two rivers; Toronto by a great lake; Los Angeles by an ocean. Strangely, I'm an air sign. Although I'm trained in aeronautics, I'm attracted to water. So much for astrology. To me a layout needs a water feature, no matter how small. It could be just a fountain or even a puddle.

All of the above is a lot of intent for one little model world to carry. There's enough for several projects. The thing to note is that they aren't a list of deliverables, just a list of guiding principles.

Well, that's the stew. If I could lay it all out precisely in text - properly describe the vibe - maybe I wouldn't find modelling so compelling.

An early good riddance to 2018

2018 has been a year of both little progress and major changes. The biggest change being the death of my father. One might think that even though he was old and ill, and that I'm no youngster myself, the impact wouldn't be that great. One would be wrong. We're working on making 2019 better.

Still, there were periods of normalcy, and some of the usual was done. And as has been my custom* for awhile, here are a few highlights.

The blog crossed the 1,000 posts line in April (this post you're reading is No. 1,037),

1,001

Personal blogs haven't been cool for a long time, but I don't care. I enjoy writing one, and greatly enjoy reading other people's. I wish I had started earlier.

Some progress was made on the N-scale Elizabeth Valley RR tribute layout (although it has been hanging on my wall for quite awhile awaiting further inspiration),

Balancing the EVRR*

Coaches and cars for the EVRR

And some progress was made on the Alta Vista TC,

Paving Track Along Edward St.

Power at the Alta Vista TC Electric Street Railway!

I didn't build much this year, just two plastic kits that were surprisingly pleasant to assemble,

The kit that launched a great adventure: Building AHM's version of E. L. Moore's W. E. Snatchem Funeral Parlor

A hiatus from The Hiatus: Building Model Power’s Mercedes Car Agency

I tried my hand at writing movie reviews (which turned out to be the most popular posts of those written in 2018),

2001: A Yost-Verner Odyssey

Samurai Blues

Band of Outsiders: Paris, two men, one woman, and a convertible

I tried my hand at mockups, one being a movie theatre that I'm looking forward to turning into a model,

A and A mockup

TD Bank Tower Mockup

Imperial Six Mockup

I did a lot of reading and armchair streetcar-ing that included,

The Los Angeles Railway Through the Years by Steven L. Easlon

The White Front Cars of San Francisco by Charles Smallwood
Surf, Sand and Streetcars: A Mobile History of Santa Cruz, California by Charles S. McCaleb
Montreal's Electric Streetcars: An Illustrated History of the Tramway Era: 1892 to 1959 by Richard M. Binns
The New York Elevated by Robert C. Reed
Tenements, Towers and Trash: An Unconventional Illustrated History of New York City by Julia Wertz

selected issues of Voie Libre International
stacks of Railroad Model Craftsmans from the '70s and '80s

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
Only to Sleep by Lawrence Osborne
Stone Cold Dead by James W. Ziskin
Dirigibles that made history by David C. Cooke
reread issues 404, 405, 406 and 407 of Batman comics

Perfect Wave: More Essays on Art and Democracy by Dave Hickey

reread Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy by Dave Hickey
Scenic Railway Modelling by P. R. Wickham

reread Paddington to Seagood: The Story of a Model Railway by Gilbert Thomas
currently reading The Infinite Blacktop by Sara Gran

My father was the person who kicked off my interest in model building and model railroading. Although he wasn't a model railroader himself, it was something he supported, and he took an interest in my latest purchases; in later years, especially those TTC PCCs. He had far more experience riding the TTC than I ever did.

One of my favourite model makers, Michael Paul Smith, also died this year. One of his projects was a 1/24 scale model of the house he grew-up in. The model was excellent, and looked easy to build - deceptively easy as it turned out. In 2017 I decided to try the same with the house I grew up in. It was more difficult than it seemed to draw up a 1/24 scale plan just using old photos and my memory as reference material, and once I finished I realized building that size of a model was a no go. Even the relatively modest suburban bungalow I spent my childhood in becomes a large object in 1/24. So, I decided to try and build an HO version and got as far as building the foundation and floor. I stopped there. Not because of build problems, but because it unlocked too many memories. Don't let anyone tell you model building is a totally banal and benign activity.

And while we're on the subject of death, 2019 marks the 40^th anniversary of E. L. Moore’s. One thing I’ve never mentioned in my ELM writings is that his work, and other stories I read in the model building press way back when, were what opened my eyes to the idea that one could write about making things, and do so in an engaging manner. I know, it seems an obvious thing, but being young and thick, it never occurred to me until I encountered those magazines back in the early ‘70s. As well, my parents encouraged reading, which is probably why I could buy those magazines in the first place. My mum didn’t read that much herself beyond newspapers, but she read to me well before I could read, and took me to the library. My father was a big time reader. We swapped books back and forth, regularly visited the public libraries of Scarborough, and often went to some good bookstores – well, they seemed good to me at the time - in downtown Toronto. I read stuff that was at a much higher level than I probably should have been exposed to, but I didn’t know any better, and it was fun. His family was poor when he grew up, but he was driven and it didn’t stop him from getting a university degree in his early 40s. I read some of his required reading during his time in school**, and tagged along on some trips to the university bookstore and library. So, Mr. Moore, those writers in the ‘70s model building press, and especially my parents, were a huge influence on making reading and writing an integral part of life. And it has served me well all these years. Yeah, you’re right, I’m no genius writer, but I keep on keeping on :-)

On a more positive note, there's one other thing about 2019: it'll be this blog's 10th anniversary. 2018 marked my 10th year as a blogger, but 2019 is my 10th year writing here. In 2008 I started a blog called Separated Flow. I didn't like it and shut it down a few months later. After thinking about what I wanted a blog to be, I started 30 Squares of Ontario***  and retroDynamics**** in 2009. I shut down retroDynamics after a year or so because I didn't have enough good material to see the concept through, and realized I didn't have the time or energy to post to two blogs. Believe it or not, even after 10 years I haven't done all the things I'd like to see done here at 30 Squares.

I'm starting to see 2019 up ahead and 2018 getting smaller and smaller in the time machine's rear-view mirror. I've got a couple of stalled layouts waiting to be jump-started, a new story with Leslie and Ed about half written, a stack of kits cluttering the workbench, a dream to get something published in an actual paper magazine, a new retro model railroading series itching to start, notes and drawings scattered around the workshop, a turntable that needs an amplifier, and hopefully a new vibe waiting to be shifted into once 2018 drops below the event horizon.

Well, reminiscing is tiring and I need some coffee. Let's wrap things up.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year to you and yours! 

Take us home Mr. Guaraldi....

I'll be back sometime after Boxing Day. 

---

*If you're interested in year-end rambles, here's where the custom started in 2016, and here's the sophomore run in 2017.

**A few weeks ago, ok maybe it was months ago, I read an article that said these days a lot of people think the soma-world presented in Brave New World is a good thing and the alternative - that is, real personal freedom - is the bad thing! Oh, and if you haven't read John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider, you should - it made my head spin.

***This blog got its name the way most model railroad blogs do: it was based on my layout at the time I set up the blog. The layout was 6' x 5', hence 30 square feet, and it was set in a fictional town in southern Ontario. After a while I found the concept boring and concocted the Lost Ocean Line, which was just an excuse to do whatever I pleased and incorporate whatever I wanted. I felt the working title of the blog should be changed, so I started calling it 30 Squares, even though the url still has the original name.

****retroDynamics was supposed to be about taking an old-school slant on a few topics: model building, blimps and airships, aerodynamics, some aspects of art, space flight, time travel, comics, retro pop culture and whatever else came to mind that wasn't model railroading related. It took me awhile to realize that a personal blog didn't have to be targeted to particular interests or people, contrary to what a marketing outlook on the world would tell us is good practice. I figured I'd just write about retroDynamics topics, if I had any, at 30 Squares and assume readers weren't so narrow minded. After all, we're human beings, who can be interested in and affected by lots of things, and whoever showed up to read the blog were the right people.

In Praise of the Amateur Model Railroader

While reading this article on the surprising power of the placebo effect, my eye caught this other story on why so few people have hobbies these days. All I can say is, right on.

ELM Epilogue: 2 outta 3 ain't bad

That's a photo of the Iron Age Mfg. Co., built by D. Russell Young, Jr., winner of the RMC / Dremel Kitbashing Award in the November 1976 issue of Railroad Model Craftsman. Of the three plastic kits that form the basis of this project, two of them are AHM E. L. Moore kits: the Gruesome Casket Company and the Molasses Mine. The third is Revell's classic Superior Bakery. The project is an excellent example of '70s style kitbashing based on three of the era's most popular and commonly available kits - although the Superior Bakery kit originated much earlier. Also, I was surprised to see the Molasses Mine in a project where it seemed like a perfectly sensible component :-)