I think roofs are odd things in HO scale buildings. In real life down here at ground level we often don't see much of roofs, and when we do they usually aren't the main attraction.
On a layout we observe our little HO world like giants. We're confronted with acres and acres of roofs in all their glorious detail. The sight of all those roofs should make it clear that we need to configure our layouts so they stand near eye level.
Ok, that's my pre-coffee rant, and my my way of saying why I don't like to spend much time on roofs.
Now that's out of my system, with coffee in hand, let's look at the HQ's roof.
The roof trusses were glued to the underside of the roof. This takes a bit of careful alignment because the kit's roof is non-removable, and is installed by first gluing the trusses to steel columns inside the building and placing the roof panels on top.
The trusses need to be spaced so that they will go around the outside of the elevator shaft.
You can see that I had to notch the roof's corners so the assembly wouldn't interfere with the building's corner pilasters. I think I the notches are a little too big, but they're not visible.
Along the ridge I glued on a strip of 0.010" styrene, and off to the side is a Walther's air conditioning unit from their roof-top accessories kit. The a/c is placed so it's directly above the elevator shaft.
I often add air conditioners so I have something to hold onto when I'm removing a roof, and that's why I added one to this project. The a/c is attached to the roof panel with plastic solvent, so when dry it's solidly held in place and can resist handling.
Lighting is from two LED strips that have been stuck in channels built up from 0.020" styrene sheet. The short strip is located at the front, and in retrospect I should have made it as long as the one at the back. The wire leads snake down the elevator shaft and out through a hole in the building's floor.
To finish off this side the roof panels were brush painted with some gloppy white acrylic to improve the interior's reflectivity.
The roof's outer surface was first base coated with Revell's Aqua Color Tar Black, and when dry, several layers of thin washes of Tamiya's XF-1 Flat Black, XF-80 Royal Light Gray, and XF-49 Khaki were applied. The chimney, also from Walther's roof-top accessories kit, and a/c were based coated with flat aluminum before applying washes.
I make no claim to this looking realistic, and I tend to let the paint move and settle as it wants to. I'm more concerned with achieving an interesting pattern more than anything else.
The lighting isn't too bad and one can see inside fairly clearly.
Argh, I see I haven't set the roof's front edge properly. That'll need a little touch-up painting along the edge and some adjustment.
Not much more to go to finish this. There're a few interior detail parts I need to order, but I think I'll finish off some inside wall detailing on the upper floor while I wait for delivery.
This book was published by Schiffer Publications in 2000, and you might ask why buy a book from the early days of the internet when what’s inside has likely been obsolesced by what’s available on today’s internet? Well, first off, I don’t think the information on the internet is complete, and is no doubt not without errors and inaccuracies of its own. Also, I think books bring structure and thoroughness to a subject that is often beyond the internet's capability. And, I like getting pre-internet and non-internet perspectives on things, not to mention I found a good copy for a low price :-)
As the title says, it’s filled with photos and information on toy buildings that were sold in the US from 1880 to 1980. It doesn’t cover doll houses, construction sets, or most kits of buildings available for model railroads. I had hoped it would cover Kenner’s Girder & Panel construction sets, as I had one as a child in the ‘60s, but no such luck. Pre-assembled toys sold as children’s toys is more or less it. However, that in itself is a lot, and the book provides a good overview of the field. There are many interesting items covered in its pages, but I’ll mention just one collection that I found particularly interesting: Chapter I, The Village, Town, and City, and in particular, The New Pretty Village play sets.
Pages 10 &11: Cardboard village play sets
Starting in 1897 the McLoughlin Brothers company, a New York publishing company founded in 1858, sold a series of build-them-yourself cardboard miniature building sets under the name The New Pretty Village. These were sets of lithographed cardboard model buildings, sold flat-packed in boxes measuring 8.5” x 11.5” x 1”, that could be easily assembled by children. Folding and interlocking were basically all that was needed to be done to quickly build up a little village. The miniature buildings are quite charming, but take a look at the box art the sets came in. What we see being advertised are layouts; layouts made from McLoughlin buildings of course, but layouts nevertheless.
Box art for the Engine House Set
The Engine House set in the series was released in 1900, and I found this image of its box art on the internet. I should note that 'engine house' in this case means that the set includes a fire engine house, not an engine house for a railway locomotive. Also, the same box art, or variations on it, were used for the other sets in the series.
You can see the layout is front and centre. It looks like it has been set up on a dining room table, although the faint background painting suggests the table’s location could be somewhere between a dining room and parlour. The layout seems rather sophisticated and embodies a few good design principles that even many of today's model railroad layouts have problems adhering to: the buildings are well made and quite detailed, their positioning seems logical, negative space is skillfully sized and apportioned, and we see several judiciously placed accessories like boats and wagons along with plenty of trees and shrubs. Overall, nothing seems crammed together or out-of-place, and everything looks rather natural. The box’s artist knew a thing or two about layout design as well as making the set as compelling as possible. I suspect an actual layout, arranged by actual children, would look far different. It’s clearly an adult’s view of how a layout should appear, which I guess is to be expected as an adult was likely the one who paid for these things.
As well, there are a few other things I think need noting, or at least numbering as I've done in the photo. 1, In the back of the layout there appears to be a locomotive pulling a boxcar. It isn’t the layout’s focus, which appears to be the hint of a lake, complete with a boathouse, in the front corner pointing directly at the viewer. 2, Those are pieces of buildings waiting to be folded up into structures. The models were comprised of foldable two-wall pieces, instead of the 4 used in the strip method, so they’d fit in the set’s relatively small box. 3, Even in the late 19th century kittens demanded attention regardless of whether you were trying to build a layout :-)
I rather admire that box top layout, but I wonder if formal layouts like this one were something cooked up by marketeers to sell all the things needed to outfit them, or if those same marketeers were just trying to take advantage of something children and adults were already familiar with. I'm thinking the history of non-model railway layouts is intertwined with that of miniature buildings and the rise of railway oriented layouts.
I found this 2-page spread on some of Bill Schopp’s scratch built traction cars in the June ’54 issue of Railroad Model Craftsman. What caught my eye was the opening statement that Schopp’s traction layout, The Rancocas Valley Interurban, was built and operated between 1940 and 1945 - the same era that John Page noted he had the opportunity to see Schopp’s layout. So, these could be the cars Page noted: "were built sloppily, even by the more permissive standards of that day ... but ... I realized they fascinated me. I found them endearing, even loveable. In place of precision they had something else very special. I suppose "character" or "personality" would be the word, and for all their construction shortcomings, they looked realistic and quite at home in their environment." We don’t see much of anything of their environment - which is the key to Page’s assessment - in these photos so it’s hard to judge if they’re casualized, or just not that well built.
These photos highlight some of the problems with looking at model work from pre-digital eras. Photos were harder to take, fewer were taken, magazine paper quality wasn’t that good for reproducing images, and many photos - then and now - don’t give the viewer a sense of what was really going on, mainly due to poor composition. Yeah, I know, the last statement seems odd, but it’s easy to just snap photos and then later wonder why what was there and felt doesn’t come across. That might be happening with these photos. We think we’re seeing what was actually there because we’re looking at a photo, but just because it’s a photo doesn’t mean what it records is true - I now remove my Captain Obvious hat and return you to regular programming :-)
It was just a few days ago I came across the work of Bodys Isek Kingelez, and I regret discovering it so late. He was a model builder of fantastic vision and impressive creativity. If that wasn't enough, these quotes of his seal the deal in my mind:
Without a model, you are nowhere. A nation that can’t make models is a nation that doesn’t understand things, a nation that doesn’t live.
and
If you succeed in building a model you visualize what is living inside you so the outside world can adapt it, study it, discover it, see it.
The following video gives a good overview of the 2018 MOMA Kingelez exhibit. I found the camera work a little annoying, but you'll see a decent selection of models.
Also, make sure you check out the images of the MOMA exhibit of his work. I'm impressed with how his work was displayed, and there's lots of lessons there for modellers of all sorts.
And all that was done with paper, cardboard, cast-off commercial packaging, push-pins, straws, scissors, glue, Gillette razor blades, and other odds-and-ends.
One last video. This one is an interview with Sarah Suzuki, the MOMA curator of the 2018 Kingelez exhibit. Superficially this might look like a dry, talking-heads type of thing, but around the 4 minute mark things start to get interesting when she begins talking about Kingelez's beginnings, how he started building these models, and his discovery by the mainstream art world in 1989. Suzuki is an interesting speaker, and the video is pretty much cant and jargon free.
Around the 10 minute mark there's an interesting exchange where they try to classify and slot Kingelez's work. Was he an architect, sculptor, etc? Model maker of the miniature building folk art heritage sort doesn't get mentioned, but his work, origin story, and practice has all the hallmarks. It is something of the human experience, independent of place or time of origin. I need to think some more about this.
In this 3rd wave lockdown I seem to have the attention span of a squirrel, running all over the place with no rhyme or reason. I've been thinking about track plans, and have been wondering about adding a small streetcar turntable to the layout. Having temporarily lost my motivation to install a roof on the HQ model, I thought I'd see what was around the workshop that I could use to build a simple, manual turntable.
I've got a build, I ain't got no steps, no.
I'm gonna let the components move me around.
So, I got started by searching the internet and old magazines for ideas, as well as looking through my parts stash. I'm not saying that what I settled on is the best, but it seemed workable with what I had on hand and my current temperament.
Some design considerations in no particular order:
1. I had a cheap Lazy Susan bearing from 30 or so years ago that I was keeping around to use 'one day'. 'One day' arrived last week. Its square metal base measures 4" on each side.
2. All the turntable has to do is rotate a streetcar 180 degrees. There's no track indexing or massive roundhouse to be serviced.
3. I'm perfectly happy with it being powered by pushing it either by finger or stick. Motorization isn't needed. Cheap and cheerful is the name of the game.
4. Its track has to fit streetcars with the longest wheelbase in my fleet, which are PCCs. The body can overhang the turntable.
Soldering the plug to the rail.
The part that concerned me most was how to get power to the track?
The method I used is based on the one presented by Bob Hayden in an article called An inexpensive, easy-to-build turntable, in the Feb '87 issue of Model Railroader. It used a 1/4" headphone plug as the turntable's rotational mechanism and method of transferring power. I used a much smaller 2.1mm x 5mm plug instead as I had some on hand, and since I was using a bearing for rotational motion, I didn't need a 1/4" plug.
I've got a story that's got a moral.
Don't use two axes ever again.
I should mention there's a problem with my design. There are two axes of rotation: the bearing has one, and the plug has one. These two axes need to be perfectly lined up, one on top of the other, for the turntable to freely spin.
It turns out because I eyeballed the installation, these two axes aren't perfectly aligned, so there is a little bit of binding when you turn the thing. This isn't a big problem because there's no motor that'll burn out, and no large number of tracks to be indexed, but eventually something will wear out or break: likely the plug, or its supports. Given how little use this thing will get I'm betting wear out will happen long in the future. But, we'll see.
A better scheme would likely have been to solder wipers to the rail bottoms and have them rub against contacts from the fixed layout track when rotated into position. This gets rid of the plug's axis and eliminates binding, although you'll need to make sure the wipers have sufficient spring to make good contact - I didn't have components on hand for that kind of system, so I didn't pursue it.
The top and bottom circular plates are cut from 0.080" sheet styrene.
In this photo I've inserted the plug into a whole drilled into the centre of the upper plate after the plug's leads have been soldered to the underside of the rail.
The track has been attached to the plate using plastic solvent.
I'll probably have to adjust the rail lengths when installing the turntable into the layout. I cut them a little long so fine tuning can be done.
The plug to plate connection was stiffened with four gussets, each cut from 0.080" styrene. I spent a lot of time trying to get the plug dead centre and as perpendicular with the plate as possible, but as I noted above, it wasn't quite good enough.
After drilling a matching hole in the bottom plate, the turntable was glued on with epoxy and left to dry for a few hours.
One thing I should point out before I forget is that I was checking the electrical continuity after just about every step.
I'd hook an old 9v battery to the track, and then use my continuity checker to make sure the light came on. The light is quite faint in the photo, but that's because I'm using an old battery.
I don't have any photos of the struggle to align the two plugs, but basically once the plates were epoxied to the bearing, I pushed and persuaded the joined plugs until the turntable seemed to rotate back-and-forth without much friction. The bottom plug was then epoxied into place along with 2 torsion supports cut from 0.080" styrene.
And this is what it looks like once everything was glued in place.
I applied a little light oil to the bearing to help smooth its operation.
From here on the rest was painting and decorating to make it sort of look like a turntable.
Styrene sheets were used to build up the upper surface so styrene brick sheets could be used to panel the top.
I took care to make sure the brick sheets were below the rail head, because if they're level with it, it's often possible for wheels to ride up on the plastic and lose rail contact.
Some 0.040" x 0.060" styrene strips were glued to the perimeter to neaten the edge. Then it was on to painting.
I continue to dabble with Revell Aqua Color. The basic brick hue is mixed from their #37 Reddish Brown and #39 Dark Green using the same technique applied to both the Weekly Herald and the HQ. Alternating thin layers of the brick mix, #75 Stone Grey, and Tamiya flat black were used to build up the final colour. The edge trim was painted with Stone Grey.
I'm finding I rather like those little blue cubes Aqua Color comes in. I often use them as supports for work-in-progress.
Those Ls for rotating the turntable are cut from piano wire and inserted into holes drilled through all the top layers.
*Well, that's that. Given how I've mangled Billy Preston's lyrics, I should leave you with the legend so you'll know how great the song is.
I think roofs are odd things in HO scale buildings. In real life down here at ground level we often don't see much of roofs, and when we do they usually aren't the main attraction.
