Full Observation

Full Observation: The art of using one's camera, senses, thoughts, and time to understand a place.

Usage: I brought my lunch as well as my camera to the yard's visitor parking as I intended to fully observe some switching operations.

Source: The idea was presented in the Observations column of the June 1985 issue of Railroad Model Craftsman by C. J. Riley in an essay called Observations about observations. Mr. Riley notes that if you are out taking photographs to record a prototype or place you plan to model you should remember that A camera is good for a permanent record of the facts, but a camera lens can limit one's viewpoint and interfere with the information flow to the brain, and that one should Lay the camera aside now and then and just look, listen, smell, think and absorb what is around you.

Full Observation is not a new concept, but was touched on in the Prototype Junket entry that appeared in the dictionary's 1st edition. Prototype Junket was coined by George Allen in the 8th instalment of his Tuxedo Junction series that appeared in the May 1953 issue of Model Railroader. Mr. Allen notes that one of the key features of a Prototype Junket is to develop your understanding of what it is to railroad: to live railroading you gotta get out into the yards, breathe deeply of the bituminous smoke (or fumes, if you're in dieselized territory), tread the cinders, admire four-wheeled hacks, and watch the grand panorama of a busy switching yard. 

John Olson also hints at full observation in his Researching the rails that appeared in the May 1982 issue of Railroad Model Craftsman: My interest centers mostly on the character of an area, the general layout of rails and typical photos of structures and rolling stock, as opposed to the fellow who wants exact dimensions for historical data or accurate scale drawings.

Diligent application of full observation might help alleviate visual purposelessness and assist a model railroad in saying something. Conrad J. Obregon notes in his essay, Toward a model railroading aesthetic, that appeared in the December 1981 issue of Railroad Model Craftsman that model railroading is an art form, and it is purposeful. It is in this adherence to purpose that model railroaders fail and goes on to say that the majority of the hundreds of model railroads that I have seen, there is little sense of a vision on the part of the builder. Full observation is about developing deeper vision.

Susan Sontag states in her 1964 essay, Against Interpretation, that What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more, and she goes on to note that Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all. In our context of model railroading as an art and medium, too much content - in that context - is manifested as a possible overload in the replication of the camera's permanent record in the models or layout.

Full observation shouldn't be confused with either the concepts of railfanning or observability in physics and computer science.

from The Dictionary of Non-Existent Model Railroad Terms, 2nd ed., 1999.

Starting Steinberg

I thought I'd make a start on the easy part of the Steinberg supermarket and begin the facade later.

The box is built from 5mm thick, acid-free foamboard held together with Weldbond glue. The floor is cut from a scrap of matte board. The slightly shorter inner wall is for supporting a removable roof. 

I consider this project to be Moorian in that I'm drawing inspiration from a place I frequented when quite young that's left a positive impression. It isn't the use of balsa to build models of places from 1900 that puts something in the Moorian tradition, but expressing what you must express with fairly readily available materials.

And speaking of photos from car windows....

Photo by Debra; as you can see, my hands are firmly on the wheel.

We took a little westward trip out to the country today, and along the way we saw the body - or should I say fuselage - of an Alstom Citdas Spirit in OTrain colours being hauled east to Ottawa on a flat-bed truck.

It was not so easy taking this picture. Once I realized what was coming our way, we had to find the camera, turn it on, and then Debra had to quickly take a photo. No easy task, but trust me, that's a Spirit body. It turns out that was one of two Spirits-on-a-Flat-Bed we saw, and we also saw an OCTranspo bus being towed west to meet its fate in some garage somewhere. The photo is in the impressionist school, but no model will result :-)

Overhead along Ocean Blvd.

After a considerable amount of trial and error, the lower part of Ocean Boulevard has overhead wiring - well, more correctly, overhead thread as it's all just for looks.

Here's a summary of steps to get it installed:

1. Calm your mind. This isn't a flippant comment, if you're edgy or pre-occupied, don't try any of this. Any time you feel your concentration lagging, take a break. Take plenty of breaks. I worked on this on-and-off for several days, maybe a half-hour or so at a time.

2. Set the height of the cross wires with the gauge. I didn't glue the poles in place, they're just friction fit in holes drilled into the layout. They're quite snug, but this allows for some adjustments to be made.

3. On the cross wires, mark the centre of the track using the gauge and a red Sharpie pen.

4. Slide the wire hangers over the red marks, and glue each hanger in place with a drop of medium thickness super glue. Make sure the hanger's ears are approximately parallel with the road surface.

5. Cut a length of thread and lay it down on the track's centre line.

6. Starting at the centre posts, smear a thin layer of medium thickness superglue on the underside of the hanger ears. Lift the thread up and attach it to the underside of the ears. It should hold itself within 2 or 3 seconds. Once it's attached, give it a light spray of accelerant to speed the bonding process.

7. Once the overhead thread is bonded to the centre hanger, proceed outward down the road using the same procedure. The only difference is that you'll need to pull the thread ever so slightly to tension it as you glue it to the next hanger. 

The thread has very little tension in it, and can't withstand the vertical force exerted by the springs in the PCC's trolley pole. I had to install a safety line to the trolley pole of just the right length so the pole's wheel just nestled onto the overhead thread without too much upward force. This prevented the overhead from being grossly distorted when the trolley pole was engaged.

The overhead is quite spindly and delicate, which gives it more-or-less the right look in HO, but I'm not sure how robust it will be over time. I notice in the lead photo that one of the ears wasn't glued properly and has debonded. Hopefully that's just a teething pain. The next tricky part will be installing overhead in the Mortimer Park Loop.

Selective Impression and E. L. Moore's Cole Mfg. Co.

In the comments to the Selective Impression post Paul noted that E. L. Moore often applied Selective Impression, although Mr. Moore didn't call it that. The comment got me thinking about one of E. L. Moore's unpublished manuscripts, Build a 1900's Foundry, that described how he built a version of the Cole Mfg. Co..

It wasn't so much the article that got me thinking about E. L. Moore and selective impression, but the reference photos he took of the prototype. Many were shot from a distance, some maybe from a vehicle, and others look like he might have taken them while walking around the grounds - he did say in the article he got a guided tour. Whether he made any measurements is unknown. 

I didn't post his reference photos with along with the Cole article as the story was long, and they weren't referenced by it. But, now that we're on the subject of loosely using reference photos to design a model, I thought I should post them. I apologize for the dark shadows that many have. I wasn't able to adjust them enough to make a significant difference, so I've just posted them here as is for completeness. I think this is the most extensive set of reference photos I've seen for an E. L. Moore project.

The large store sign off in the distance is for PIC 'N PAY SHOES, and the Cole's sign in the photo below notes that the entrance to Cole's is off Central Avenue. E. L. Moore mentions in his article that Cole's can be seen from the overhead bridge where the highway rises above the Seaboard tracks. Maybe these clues are enough to locate where this foundry once stood - assuming it was in Charlotte, N.C..

From those cars it looks like these pictures were taken in the 1950's, maybe the mid to late '50s. So, although the Cole manuscript was submitted in June 1967, it looks like E. L. Moore had these photos in his files for awhile before he started to work on the project.

In the upper left, way off in the distance, you can see a water tower that looks a lot like the one in the HOJ POJ Mfg. Co. project. The HOJ POJ project was based on a factory complex in Charlotte, N.C., so maybe the Cole project is too if I can assume the water tower actually was located over at the HOJ POJ prototype site.

In the upper right, to the left of the PIC 'N PAY SHOES sign you can see the sign for another store called ADVANCE.

In the first four paragraphs of the Cole article E. L. Moore outlines how he came up with the model's design - it sounds rather similar to that used by Franke on his feed mill, although this process isn't uncommon amongst model builders.

For some reason the Cole complex reminds me of AHM's Old Time Factory kit. The two don't look all that similar, although both are rather low-slung. Maybe it's simply the words 'old' and 'factory' that alert my E. L. Moore circuitry :-) But, I think there's a Faller kit that has some features similar to E. L. Moore's project. I need to try and find that kit.