Train Song performed by Holly Cole

A base for the Mt. Lowe layout

The layout on the base mock-up.

Before starting on shooting layout glamour photos I thought I'd finish building the mockup for the base. Who knows, maybe this will become more than a mockup and be the actual base.

Trefoil base plates are rough cut with a Japanese handsaw.

When I set aside base construction last year I had the three tubes cut out and covered with that wood grain contact paper for a 70s Radio Shack look. The trefoil tube arrangement supported the layout quite well.

Marking the location of the bearing on a foam plate.

Sometime last year Galen suggested mounting the layout on some sort of bearing so it could be turned around for better viewing. I was intrigued by that idea, but I had to resolve a few problems before it became viable. First was the layout had a power cord sticking out of it for plugging into a controller. If it were to rotate, the layout couldn't have any external power or control cables coming out of it. In keeping with the 70s vibe I decided to build in a battery powered controller to solve that problem. With the benefit of hindsight I'd probably make use of an external wireless controller in future projects. 

Plate edges were shaped with a rasp and smoothed with a sanding block

Then there was finding a suitable turntable bearing. The one I eventually settled on is a bit of overkill as it's rated to support a 750 lb load (!), but it cost less than $30 and had the diameter I was looking for, so the decision was easy.

Exposed portions of the base plates are painted with black acrylic.

For awhile I thought I'd use plywood or chipboard for the base's trefoils, but 1" thick foam sheets that are used for house insulation won out. The load to be supported is minimal (I should weigh the layout, but I'll simply comment that it is "quite light" ) and this material is good enough for supporting light loads like those often encountered with micro-layouts. It's easy to work with too. All I ever use is a small handsaw for rough cutting, a rasp for final shaping, and a small sponge sanding block for smoothing edges.

Transfer tape was used to bond the turntable bearing to the foam plates.

Finally, in the mockup spirit, I decided to bond the bearing to the foam trefoils with transfer tape. The tape provides a surprisingly strong bond. I've used it extensively in layout construction, so I thought I'd use it here too to make construction quick and easy.

Top and bottom plates have been bonded to the turntable bearing.

The bottom of the base panel that rests on the floor has a some anti-slip material bonded to it. Again, I used transfer tape for this. The part I haven't figured out is how to attach the layout to the tubes. If someone bumps the layout, it could take a heartbreaking tumble. Of course, if the layout were attached to the tubes the whole thing could still be tipped over because it's rather top heavy. I might need to add some weight inside those tubes to try to make that harder to do. Well, that's what experiments and mockups are for: finding out this sort of stuff. 

Anti-slip material is bonded to the bottom of the base

Well, that's basically it for construction. The tubes were stood on the base and temporarily held in place with good, old duct tape. Here's a video of me 'taking the base out for a spin':

I see a few things that need to be fixed, so it's back to the workshop for me.

The Brandywine Transit Co. and Me

After writing the post on the genesis of the Mt. Lowe layout, the project that took 10+ years from desire to finished layout, I got to thinking about how long I've been thinking about building a layout inspired by the TTC's streetcar network. So far it's been 50 years! 

From very early on I've been thinking about a TTC layout. Maybe from around '74 or '75, I can't say for certain other than when I saw the May '75 issue of Model Railroader at the local smoke shop newsstand with The Brandywine Transit Co. emblazoned on the cover I thought maybe this was the project to tell me what I wanted to know about building a streetcar layout.

It turned out I was rather disappointed.

So fast-forward 50 years. I went searching for information about The Brandywine Transit Co. online. There was almost nothing, but there were the usual AI findings at the top of the search results. They were rather sketchy though, not to mention pathetic and misleading. I decided to go and look up the BTC articles in my old magazines to properly get an idea of the big picture, and do a little reminiscing. The feel of the paper and the odour from the pages was enough to induce some mild time travelling :-)

I was surprised to find that the series was much longer than I remembered. There were 15 articles altogether from the May '75 issue to May '78. The first 10 dealt with construction of the layout, and the last 5 showed how to build some buildings and rolling stock. Here's the list:

May ’75: Part 1: Building the benchwork and plotting the plan

July ’75: Part 2: Beginning the tracklaying and overhead construction with the hidden interurban laps

Sept ’75: Part 3: Continuing with the tracklaying

Nov ’75: Part 4: Modeling the streets and sidewalks

Jan ’76: Part 5: Wiring the city division

Mar ’76: Part 6: Building prototypic controllers and wiring the interurban division 

May ’76: Part 7: Carbarn construction

Aug ’76: Part 8: Passenger terminal construction

Sept ’76: Part 9: Overhead wire construction for the city division

Oct ’76: Conclusion: Catenary construction for the interurban division

Feb ’77: Build a block of stores

Mar ’77: Old-time gas station

July ’77: Trolley-stop luncheonette

Feb ’78: Build a modern block of stores

May ’78: Build a trolley work train

I should also mention that there's a brief biographical note about the series' author, Walter R. Olsen, in the Aug '72 issue. He was an up and coming star at the time. Among other things he had written a popular series on how to build an N scale layout in a coffee table, called the East Glasstop R.R.. It ran in MR from Dec '70 to Apr '71. The biography also contains this rather interesting quote: "I don't care about operation at all. Once a layout is finished I usually run it only for visitors until it is torn up to make way for a new one." I'm more-or-less of the same mind, except for the tearing up part - ok, I have done that, but I like to think it's the exception and not the rule with me :-)

The BTC and series is a master class in how to properly build a traction layout with 1970s model railway technology and methods. I don't think I'd be exaggerating to say it was one of the best layout construction series MR published in the 20th century.

So why was I disappointed? 

In retrospect there was nothing wrong with the series. The problem was with my expectations. In Toronto the streetcar system was and is a fully operating, modern day transit system. The BTC was a somewhat old time system set in 1949 and wasn't urban. As well, it was too advanced and expensive for teenage me. The fit wasn't there.

Once 1977 and 1978 rolled around model railroading was slipping to the back burner. I had other things to do and other interests. These days I have the elements for a TTC inspired layout and some experience. There might be a fit now.

The old bank on Bank houses a new business

The prototype of this old bank model that I started in October and November 2017 and finished in February and March 2019 (!) has a new business in it. 

You may recall that the photos I shot and built the model from were taken in July 2016 when the building was up for sale.

July 2016

It's quite a deep building even though the facade it presents to the street is rather compact.

July 2016

It's so long that I had to do some serious compression on the model so it wouldn't overpower the layout I was building at the time and fit into the overall scene.

In 2017 the building housed a furniture store.

September 2017

The building is now home to the Sofia Vintage Motor Café. I heard they were having some sort of showcase preview event there last Sunday, so I walked over. I also learned that the concept of the place would be vintage, with a vintage car or two inside while one drinks one's coffee. So, coffee and vintage cars, I couldn't resist.

It's now the Sofia Vintage Motor Café

While I was walking there I noticed an unusual number of Porsche 911s converging in-and-around the area. When I got there I saw why: many, many high-end cars were parked nearby and on display. Obviously the word had gone out; the place was mobbed. There was a line-up to get in and get coffee and hob-nob. I don't have the patience to stand in lines at the best of times so I took a pass and will visit again during a regular weekday. I'm very interested in seeing the interior and sampling the coffee!

That deep side has plenty of room to show off cars!

I'm glad to see the old bank is being used for a new business and I wish them well. 

In the spirit of this new business, if I ever stage another layout car show I'll be sure to include this little old bank.

Done

Friday afternoon, while I was in the workshop installing the final trolley wire support arm, I had a feeling come over me that the layout was now done. Done in the sense that all the things I wanted to appear on the layout were now in place, the trolley ran, and the layout could be shown to civilians in the right setting. 

The old saying that a layout is never really done I can see applying here even though I've declared the layout done. There'll still be primping, tuning the details here and there, and maybe even adding some minor ones. And there's the stand that needs finishing, but it's the stand.

So, it's done.

Genesis of a Micro-Layout

This layout has been a long time in the making. I first had the idea of building something inspired by the Mt. Lowe railway back in 2014 after a stay in Pasadena. However, I had no idea how to proceed.

In the spring of 2015 we visited the Los Angeles area again and I was able to hike a portion of the Mt. Lowe trail in the San Gabriel mountains which runs along the old roadbed of the Mt. Lowe railway. Bad weather and scheduling constraints prevented me from hiking the entire route.

Throughout 2015 and 2016 I toyed with the idea of building a Mt. Lowe inspired layout in N-scale. Strangely enough as a test piece for the layout I built a model of the railway's observatory. Nothing else came of that layout idea.

It wasn't until January 2020, just before the pandemic, that I was able to return to Mt. Lowe and resume hiking the trail. Again, I was only able to hike part as ice and snow made the trail a bit too risky for me. Near the end of that trip I caught what we now know as covid-19, but at the time no one knew exactly what it was. I had a miserable flight home and from news reports we watched I expected to be quarantined when we landed in Montreal. That didn't happen, but I was so sick I stayed home for about three weeks.

In the fall of 2023 after reading a few interesting pieces by Bill Schopp on trefoil shaped layouts in some old Railroad Model Craftsman magazines a light went on in my head and I finally had an idea on how to build a layout that captured what I wanted to express, and wouldn't take years and years to construct. By this time I had also dabbled with micro-layouts for a few years. My experiences with the Loonar Module and the Centennial Experimental Farm had opened my eyes to other forms and approaches that could allow me to express things I previously found inexpressible.

Instead of starting with an observatory I wised up and started the layout by building a trolley inspired by Thaddeus Lowe's personal trolley. The scale was S and the gauge 9 mm. It took a lot of thinking before I settled on that scale and gauge. Things like how I could build a viable trolley from commercial drive units, support tight curves on the layout, deal with steep grades, availability of figures and scenic accessories, provide adequate clearances, and so forth factored into the decision. By starting with the trolley this gave me a vehicle to test grades and curves to see how steep they could be on the layout, and assess what sort of clearances and dimensions I'd need. This was very important, so much so that I'm thinking of writing a future post on general trefoil layout design principles and the necessity of testing designs with rolling stock.

In June 2024 I finally made a serious start on the layout. By the end of June the track was installed and the trolley could run along it. And, you may not believe it, but the area of the layout's footprint is 4 square feet, the upper limit on micro-layout size. 

Building up the terrain was a long process. The big new technique I learned on this project was casting rock molds from latex and later using them to create the layout's rocky terrain. The mountains' basic form though was built up from styrofoam sheets. By August 2024 the final shapes were starting to emerge; by September the shapes were defined enough to begin solidifying the mountain structure and do final shaping with spray foam.

October 2024 was more-or-less dedicated to surfacing the mountain with Cel-U-Clay, making use of the latex rock molds. Creating the mountain surfaces was a big job and continued well into December. I kept working on the mountains into January of this year, but by this point I was wrestling with painting the mountains as shaping them was wrapping up.

You know, for a guy who considers himself a structures guy, I didn't start building structures until February. I started with the station at Poppyfield Flats because it seemed the simplest to me, and then went on to build the lookout at Inspiration Point, and then what I considered the most difficult structure, the Circular Bridge. The last structure, the Observatory, was almost an after thought to help sort out a design problem, unlike the observatory on the ill-conceived N-scale layout which was the first thing I built. 

Amongst all the structure building there was a considerable amount of tree 'manufacturing'. 

Later, much, much later, I built a simple passenger car for the trolley to pull. 

Interspersed amongst all these significant projects was a lot of detail work. There was construction and installation of trolley wire support poles and arms, trolley wire installation, tree installation, layering on of ground cover and bushes, and lots of odds-and-ends work that is too persnickety to write about.

Again, much later during construction, in August, I changed my mind on how the layout should be powered and controlled. At first I merely provided a power jack for an external controller to plug into, but came to think the controller's power cord would inhibit play. I then scratchbuilt a battery-powered controller into the side of the layout so it would have stand-alone power and control. On a future project maybe utilizing some sort of wireless handheld controller would be better.

Now, all this may make it sound like I had a master plan right from the get-go and simply followed it to the end without any hiccups. I did have plans at the beginning. I wouldn't start a project like this without them, but once I got started there were lots of detours, changes of mind, conundrums that left me stumped for awhile, times when I just stared at the layout and thought about its design, mistakes, fumbles, and realizations about things I'd do different next time. Many of them are documented in the posts that can be found stamped with the Mt. Lowe tag. Some I'll take to the grave :-)

What's Next

Taking photographs to capture what's in my mind's eye is on the horizon and could last for a few months. Then there's the lead up to Christmas. I want the layout to be looking and behaving its best so I can show it off during the holiday season.

The Future

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