On wiring and muffins

Installing the power buses for the street lighting is tedious but necessary work. I've been attaching copper strips for distributing power to the street lights. The lights are low current and voltage items at 30mA and 14VDC max, and no more than 12 lights are being connected in parallel across each bus. After all connections are made the strips will be taped over. To buoy our spirits through this onerous task Debra was busy in the 30Squares kitchen baking up Musical Assumptions Rainy Day Peach Muffins. They are indeed most excellent, and I would certainly recommend them as a necessary mid-step in any laborious wiring job :-)

Steinberg Stylized

I've been thinking about Toronto's mid-century grocery stores, and the one that figures most predominately in my mind is the Steinberg at Cedarbrae Mall in Scarborough. It's where my parents did our grocery shopping on Friday evenings, and although long gone, its elegant shape lives on in my memory.

No, no streetcar ever stopped at this place. It was a purely automobile oriented suburban mall, but that facade could easily front a long street serviced by streetcars like Ocean Boulevard on my layout.

The only pictures I could find on the internet were these two. Fifty years ago I never thought one day I'd be contemplating an HO scale model, so I don't have any photos of my own :-) I don't recall the iconography on the leftmost black-and-white image, but I do recall that in the colour image.

I spent a long time studying those pictures, and then did some drawings of an approximation of the facade. Of the two in the top image, the lower one is a little too compressed, which makes the building a little too stubby. The top one seems to capture the overall shape a bit better. Although, it'll be a long model at 535mm. I want to see if I can build this thing fast, and not my usual weeks that stretch into months.

Under the hood

Now that there're a lot of streetlights installed I thought I'd see about hooking up a power bus to light them. 

The first thing was to flip up the layout boards and have a look under the streets. The prop bottoms are bolted to the frame cross-pieces, and the back edge of the layout boards push against the alignment stays I screwed into the frame back in the spring when I last worked on the boards. When tilted up it's quite sturdy and seems unlikely to slip. This arrangement is better than having to crawl under the frame and work over my head.

I think I have enough components around the workshop from the old layout to light up Ocean Boulevard, but the first item of business will be to do a little parts inventory. 

Streetcar wire suspension poles installed

The five pairs of wire suspension poles were installed along Ocean Boulevard. 

These poles and wires don't carry power to the models. They're for scenic effect only. When I take pictures I don't want to see trolley poles not dragging along an overhead wire. Although the lights in each pole will be powered so that night scenes look right.

The wire will be some elastic thread, and installing that will be the next job.

The model railroad cartoons of Doug Wright

Snipped from July '64 MR Doug Wright cartoon - his drawing style is unmistakeable.

I wasn’t kidding when I noted that one thing leads to another on this journey through the pages of old model railroading magazines. Looking for Gil Mellé cartoons lead to finding Bill Baron cartoons, which has lead to finding Doug Wright cartoons. And it happened quite by accident. I was chatting with Vince on the phone while scrolling absentmindedly through some pages in the Model Railroader archive, and bingo, a cartoon with Doug Wright’s signature, and just as importantly, his signature style.

Why it was so surprising to me is that Wright is one of Canada's most famous cartoonists, and inspiration for many significant Canadian cartoonists. There’s even a cartooning award, The Doug Wright Awards for Canadian Cartooning, established in his honour. I remember reading his strip, Doug Wright’s Family, in the Toronto Star back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, but I didn’t know he had this connection to model railroading.

Here’re the cartoons I’ve found so far. As always, I’ll keep the list fresh if new items are found. If you see anything wrong or missing, please contact me and I’ll make appropriate updates.

MR = Model Railroader

1962

Dec: 1 single panel cartoon (MR) [reprinted from the Montreal Star]

1963

Feb: 1 single panel cartoon (MR) [reprinted from the Montreal Star]

Dec: 1 single panel cartoon (MR)

1964

Feb: 1 single panel cartoon (MR)

Jul: 1 single panel cartoon (MR)

1969

Oct: 1 single panel cartoon (MR)

Model Railroader also ran a little note about Doug Wright in the Bull Session column of their Dec ’62 issue. In it our pseudonymed columnist, Ray L. Rhodes, mentions that the cartoon they were running that month first appeared in an August ’62 issue of the Montreal Star to coincide with the Montreal NMRA convention, and to celebrate Montreal resident Dr. Roy Dohn’s layout, which was featured in How we rebuilt the Victoria Northern in the Aug ’62 issue of MR. At the end of the note they quote Wright as saying he found Bill Livingston’s article, My railroad just growed in the Sept ’62 MR, inspirational, and he planned to build a 5’ x 1’ scenic module over the winter. 

Did Wright build that module, or any sort of model railroad? Is it well known that he had an interest in model railroading, and maybe it’s just me who’s the last to know? The Off The Train Wire column in the Oct ’64 MR notes that Wright was selling colored prints of CN 4-8-2 No. 6065, one of the “bullet-nosed Betties”, available for decorating the railroad room or den, so it looks like his interest in railroading things continued, but did it continue in model form as well? Seth has written a book about Doug Wright. I need to get a copy and see what it has to say. Stay tuned.