Last three birches

I finished three more birch trees, bringing the total to six on the layout. The first three were placed in a group over by the road. I've planted the two biggest ones of the new three on the other side of the layout: one by the shed, and the other on the slope near the rock face.

Those two biggest ones are on the right and left in the above armature photo. The smallest tree - in the centre of the photo - was planted over by the road, on the side opposite the original three. 

Birch trees seem weird to me. In the wild they're scraggly and grow in odd shapes. I hope that comes across with these three.

Here's the littlest one over by the road. And that birch log on the road? That's the piece scooped up from the workshop floor after shortening an armature to make this tree. I didn't want that piece to go to waste :-)

The layout now has 25 trees: 19 pines and cedars, and 6 birches. There isn't room for more, although I might try to finish this maple tree armature and squeeze it in near the causeway. This would let me try out another bark making technique that seems appropriate for maples.

The layout is nearing the finish line. I see many small landscaping issues I need to fix up, but I'm thinking major work is done. Hopefully in a few weeks I'll have the various odds and ends cleaned up, and can start planning a ribbon cutting ceremony!

Loons

What's a Loonar Module without loons? I searched high and low all over Googledom for a pair, and low and behold I finally found some 3D printed ones at Miniprints. They're quite decent, although I wonder if their beaks are a little too short. With some high power magnifying lenses I was able to paint them without problems, and they look convincing regardless of my beak fixation.

This time of year a successful breeding pair has an offspring or two nearby. You can see a juvenile loon over on the right near one of the adults. I may need to find a small HO-scale duck to stand-in for junior.

I'm feeling that the Loonar Module is just about done, and I think it has taught me all the lessons it has to teach, which was its purpose. There're just a few more details I want to add, and that'll be that.

A is for Architecture and T is for Train

A is for Architecture, Gerald Budner & Robert Verrall, provided by the National Film Board of Canada

While going through the family history files I inherited from my father I found some of my old school notes. In one Duo-Tang I found a page that indicated I had watched the movie, "A is for Architecture", in my grade 11 architectural design class in May '76. I couldn't remember seeing this movie, so this being the 21st century, it was off to Google to see if I could find it, and I did!

It was released in 1960 by the National Film Board of Canada, and has a very late 1950s cool feeling to it. Watching it again I find the beginning and end the most interesting parts*, not to mention the music, which I'm informed is by Eldon Rathburn. Going back to Google, I found this interesting video called, The Romance of Improvisation in Canada: The Genius of Eldon Rathburn.

And this being 30Squares, there's a connection to trains somewhere in this rambling :-) Apparently the above was taken from the 1952 NFB animated film, The Romance of Transportation in Canada, which at around the 5:50 mark gets into trains.

*Although the end is a little more distressing than interesting. It looks like some old buildings near the Mary, Queen of the World Cathedral in Montreal are being demolished to make way for a modern pile of concrete. It makes me wonder what new building they were pouring, and if it's still standing?

A red boxcar and yellow trailer in HOe

This little boxcar is based on one used by the Toronto, Grey and Bruce Railway in 1870. The TG&BR operated as a narrow gauge line (3’-6”) from its creation in 1868 up until it completed conversion to standard gauge in 1881. So, I fully admit this car is an anachronism on the Loonar Module, but the whole layout is an anachronistic fiction, so it fits right in :-)

The prototype was a 4-wheeler based on British railway practice and measured 15’ long. So, given this information, the boxcar sketch at Narrow Gauge Through the Bush, and the requirement to run on the Loonar Module’s N-gauge track, I started to think about what I’d have to do to make some sort of HOe model. 

Basic Peco NR-122 chassis (I've added a wire loop 'coupler' to left end)

The first decision was to buy a suitable British N-gauge wagon whose undercarriage was similar to the TG&BR boxcar’s as I didn’t think I could scratchbuild a chassis with the precision needed to run properly on the track. After some internet searching I was glad to see that one can buy kits of just chassis, which saved me from scrapping a perfectly good wagon body. The kit I settled on was Peco’s NR-122, 15ft WB Wagon Chassis. The 15ft WB part means the wheelbase is 15ft. I wasn’t sure if 15 N-scale feet was going to be too long to negotiate the layout’s tight curves, but overall this seemed to be the right size chassis for this project.

I needn’t have worried. It goes around the track just fine, and there was a lucky coincidence with this chassis: its deck measures 15 HO feet long by 4.5 HO feet wide, so lengthwise it matches the prototype. However, the deck’s width needed to be extended a bit.

Chassis with deck extended

Doing a few calculations I estimated the width of the prototype boxcar to be around 9.5’, which would be too wide for my track. Also, recall the prototype boxcar ran on track whose gauge was 3’-6”, and mine is around 2’-6”, so a boxcar of scale width would overhang the wheels too much. On the other hand, the Peco chassis’ 4.5’ width is a bit too narrow to be practical for this kind of car. As well, such a narrow width would make the car look too tall and skinny. In the end, to make the width more practical and better looking I glued on styrene pieces to the deck to increase the width to 6’. So, my HOe boxcar was sized to be built on a deck 15’ long and 6’ wide.

Once I had sorted out the chassis and deck, I sketched out a drawing. Nothing fancy, just something to remind me of the major dimensions and where the main detail items were to be positioned.

As with the canoe car, I'm not going to do a step-by-step through the construction of this little model, but instead show some built up photos and talk a bit.

The four sides are made from 0.020" styrene scraps. I scored vertical boards in with a scribing tool. These pieces were then reinforced on the back sides with pieces of 0.040" styrene glued on.

The overhead door track and end bumper on the side walls are cut from a piece of 0.040" styrene square stock, and the door lock is cut from pieces of 0.010" styrene.

The door handle is a leftover item from a Revell Lunar Module kit, and the grab iron ladders on the ends are bent from pieces of 26 gauge floral wire. 

Once the walls were glued up into a box and then glued to the chassis' deck, some further reinforcements were added.

First, some rectangular strip stock was used to reinforce two corners (the upper right and lower left ones in the photo), then two spacers were wedged between the side walls, and a beam was inserted between the two end walls to prevent those upper triangles from bowing in.

I used Weld Bond to secure the grab irons to the walls. 

After letting the glue joints harden for a day I moved on to building the roof and roof walk.

Both are built up from 0.020" styrene scraps. In retrospect I think the roof battens are a little too thick, and probably should have been made from either 0.010" or 0.005" styrene - oh well, live and learn.

The brake wheel was pried off a junker caboose and super glued to the end of a piece of 24 gauge floral wire.

You can get a bit better view of the end wall with the brake wheel in this photo.

As I've said many times, the digital camera is a harsh mistress and it's certainly true with this photo. The brake wheel looks all titled sitting on top of the wire, and the wire has got kinks in it. And, good grief, those grab irons. I'll only note that when everything is painted up, and the car's on the layout, it looks rather ok. However, if you're going to build one of these, consider using some straight piano wire for the brake, as well as commercial castings for the grab irons and brake wheel - remember I've classified this post as 'Casualized  HO' for a reason :-)

The car was now ready for painting.

The basic car colour is Revell's Aqua Color Reddish Brown Matt, 36137, painted on with a brush in as thin layers as I could manage, which turned out to be just a little too thick as much of the siding scribing has been lost. 

The roof was painted with Tamiya flat aluminum acrylic paint; grab irons, door handles, and brake wheel are Tamiya Flat Yellow; and the chassis components, brake wire, and door locks are Tamiya Dark Iron.

Once basic painting was done it was on to a little bit of weathering. Some loose washes of Tamyia Dark Iron and Flat Black were applied all over. When dry, a loose wash of a mix of Revell's Reddish Brown and Dark Green - to make a rusty colour - was slopped on the chassis and roof. 

What about that big 4* I hear you asking? It's hand painted on with some Tamyia flat white. 

Back in the '70s my sister is being a good sport lending scale

During the preparation stage on the boxcar project I found an N-scale freight car truck with an attached coupler in my scrap box. I thought I'd use it to build a little flat deck trailer for the boxcar. The one I had in mind to memorialize is that one over there I saw in the '70s - likely at the old Marmora train station. Mine isn't close to that in other than basic principles, so I can see me building a proper one later on.

This little thing was made from scraps of styrene L-angle, U-channel, and some 0.020" sheet. And of course I painted it yellow.

A little trailer like this one has a lot of uses.

Well, that's that.

Oh, wait a minute, one last thing. This project took only about 8 days of on-and-off work, an hour or two at a time, sometimes just ten minutes or so. I received the chassis in the mail on a Friday afternoon, by the following Wednesday all construction was finished, and by the Saturday both were painted and ready to run. That's some kind of record for me. I hope it continues.

*This boxcar was used to transport the equipment of the Lands & Forests Railway Test Facility’s hockey team, the Loons, to their first ever inter-departmental league game where they faced the Skies & Waters Snapping Turtles, with whom they would become arch rivals in the years to come. Unbeknownst to the Loons until game time, the first puck drop was by none other than Bobby Orr, who was invited to kick off the first game of the season. The Loons won and in honour of the win they stencilled a giant 4, Bobby Orr’s jersey number, on the side of the car that carried their equipment to that legendary game.

Start with Geography

 Start with Geography: A layout design approach that begins with developing a realistic geographical plan, and then proceeds to the creation of a track plan to fit the geography, not vice versa.

Usage: Mary was in the first stage of designing her layout using the Start with Geography technique.

Source: Paul Garrison outlines the basic principles in his February 1975 Railroad Modeler article, Start with a River:

The fact is that many a layout, though beautifully constructed and landscaped, suffers from the lack of logic that results when the builder starts by designing the desired routing of his track and then superimposes the landscaping as little more than an afterthought. While it is admittedly impractical to start with the landscaping, a procedure that would make track laying difficult if not impossible, one might consider designing a piece of countryside with paper and pencil, and then find ways to adjust the routing of track to its topography.  

In the article Mr. Garrison walks the reader through the process using the design of his 2.5' x 15' N-scale layout based on the terrain near a portion of the upper Rio Grande river as an example.

Model Trains ran a series in the Dec '57, Jan '58, and Mar '58 issues where the authors, Andy Anderson and Katie McMullen, came close to doing just what Mr. Garrison advised against: they built the scenery first on their project layout the Hither, Thither & Yonder. More accurately, they did have a track plan from the outset of construction, so the scenery was built with placing the track in mind. They didn't hack out a right-of-way from the completed landscape, they just didn't install the track until the scenery was complete. However, it does appear from the track plan that it was designed first, and then the geography was designed to accommodate the route.

See also, Three Ws, Full Observation.

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