Uncertain days ahead for restoration of Ottawa streetcar #696

Image modified from this more positive post

You may recall that back in January 2022 I wrote a post about the efforts to restore Ottawa streetcar #696.

Yesterday I was dismayed to learn that the work may come to an unceremonious conclusion by the end of this month. According to this CBC article, streetcar #696 and the restoration team have been ordered to vacate the shop space loaned to them by OCTranspo by the end of this month.

Money for projects such as this one is hard to come by, and I can only imagine the scramble that's on to find money to comply with this order and a place to relocate, not to mention organize a move of the unfinished streetcar and all the associated  tools and materials.

I'm going to try and find out what's going on.

Gear trouble

Yesterday in some comments I mentioned I had bought a loco (a Life Like # 8302 Dockside Switcher) at a swap meet awhile back, and I was assured by the seller that it was basically new-in-box and ran. Later I found it didn't run, but for $10, no loss. It can be used for photographing scenes, which is what it was meant for. I wanted to have some sort of loco that would look appropriate in an E. L. Moore type of diorama, and this will once I've repainted it.

The body's in great shape and will be straightforward to convert to an EVRR livery.

The gears on the other hand need alignment, and maybe replacement. I'll have to take it apart to know for sure.

And those side arms on the wheels don't move that freely. They'll need some sort of adjustment.

Did Gil Mellé invent kit-mingling in 1963?

Top: Mellé's lumber yard; Bottom: Curren's

I'm now rereading Gil Mellé's 1963 Railroad Model Craftsman articles. In the April issue I stumbled across the kitbashed project shown in the top half of the photo on the left, his so-called Split Level Lumber Yard. I immediately felt some deja vu. It was Art Curren's Artz Lumber Co. in his 1988 book, Kitbashing HO Model Railroad Structures, I was remembering. 

Mellé's project made use of Atlas' then relatively new #750 Lumber Yard and Office kit and #704 Signal Tower kit, with the #801 Street Light kit thrown in for some extra detail. Curren's used 3 of the #750s and an AHM #15303 American farmhouse kit.

Art Curren preferred to call what he did kit-mingling instead of the more commonly used term kitbashing, which the publisher of his book used in the title. I think kit-mingling is more accurate, and I prefer it, but the market is what the market is.

Interestingly Mellé doesn't use any special terms to refer to what he's doing other than noting the resulting model is a hybrid and a customization:

This month I shall proceed to show a new plastic kit trick. In previous articles I’ve shown you how to customize many of the plastic buildings currently available. This time, if you want to try your hand we’ll not only do that but we’ll also throw another kit into the batch and really come up with a hybrid.

But, just look at the picture up there. The model is clearly a species that much later would be referred to as kit-mingled. Did Gil Mellé invent kit-mingling? Maybe not. I'd have to read back more into the late 1950s and early 1960s to know for certain. However, he clearly was one of its early practitioners.  

Gil Mellé on kits

Mellé's painting guide for Revel's Sandhouse Pumphouse

I've been rereading Gil Mellé's Railroad Model Craftsman articles from 1961 and 1962. I'm looking for something, but I don't know what I'm looking for. A clue of some sort.

Mellé has a very get-down-to-business writing style that's quite different from E. L. Moore's. The only part that has so far seemed to stray into the land of background information was this brief sentence from Customize Those Plastic Buildings in the April 1961 issue of RMC:

It is my habit to buy virtually every new kit that comes out on the market be it plastic or otherwise, and there are few available that I have not built.

It was no doubt still possible in the early 1960s to buy and build every new kit on the market. Although, when he says this I think he's referring to kits of buildings as many of his articles deal with improving and superdetailing structure kits. This is in stark contrast to E. L. Moore who hated "like poison to put a kit together." let alone write an article on how to superdetail one. The early 1960s was the era of quite decent plastic kits of buildings finally hitting the market, so I guess it isn't too surprising RMC was interested in articles about improving those kits.

Cal's Lumberyard: First side wall

Walls temporarily taped together

There are a lot of side walls on this structure. Four if I can still count: 1 adjacent to the office, 1 internal to the main building, 1 adjacent to the standard gauge car shed, and 1 exterior to the standard gauge car shed.

It looks like E. L. Moore handled the detailing on each one rather simply. I'm trying to give an impression of structure so when anyone peeks inside it looks more-or-less normal in there. I'm surprised at how much work it takes to make that happen. I'm sure that if I were to step up to a fully accurate interior, it would be a time consuming project indeed. Certainly not Mr. Moore's classic "2 weeks of evenings".

There's the wall of the main building that butts up against the office. The two openings that aren't filled with studs are for the doors to the office.

The primary horizontal and vertical pieces are 0.080" x 0.156" styrene strips. The thin vertical studs are 0.020" x 0.080" styrene. Those horizontal louvers are also 0.020" x 0.080" styrene.

Installing the louvers was a bit of a struggle. A tried a few methods that I thought were smart, but didn't work. In the end I just eye-balled them into place with a pair of tweezers. They're a little wavy, but not too unsightly. 

That space is where the boiler house will eventually go. I might work on it next for a bit of a break, but I'm also keen to get the main building's interior partition made so I can start gluing up the walls and seeing a building start to form.