The observation shelter at Inspiration Point

The finished shelter awaits placement on the layout.

On the Mt. Lowe railway there was a large, open air shelter at Inspiration Point. It allowed visitors to get out of the weather while they had a look at the spectacular views of the San Gabriel Valley, Los Angeles, and Santa Catalina Island in the Pacific Ocean. 

For reference I loosely based my shelter on the photo of the real thing found on page 192 of Mount Lowe: The Railway in the Clouds by Charles Seims.

Suitably inspired I set about designing a much smaller version for my little layout.

Preliminary sketches and working drawing for a small, S-scale observation shelter

The structure is built more-or-less entirely from styrene except for the corrugated aluminium roofing and 3x5 card roof flashing.

Speaking of the roof, that's where I started.

Roof panels in jig.

I made up a foam board jig for holding the roof pieces in alignment while the glue set up. Each roof piece is cut from 0.020" thick sheet styrene according to the dimensions in the working drawing.

It seems like a complicated structure, what with those intersecting angles in the centre, but appearances are deceiving. The trick is to first layout the 'straight' edges of each piece using the dimensions from the front and side elevations on the working drawings, then connect the remaining 'opening' with a line that will then become the edge of the angled side. No measuring of angles is required. 

The roof holds its shape once the glue is dry.

Once the glue has hardened the structure holds its shape without any additional supports. I did add rafters and trusses to make the roof look right, and they did firm up the structure even more, but the structure can be handled without them. Any inaccuracies in gluing can be sanded out at this stage to yield a rather uniform structure.

First round of roof trusses installed.

The roof trusses were built up in the same manner as those made for the Poppyfield Flats station to give the two structures something of a family look.

At this stage I wasn't sure how many trusses to add, and only glued in the minimum number. I was trying to decide if I should make the inside roof truss detail representative of a real roof, or just add enough to suggest everything was there. I eventually went with the latter. I think if this was an O-scale or larger structure, it would be necessary to add in all the detail for the sake of appearances, but S is still relatively small to just suggest it.

All trusses added. The ones second from ends have their bottom stringers thickened.

So, here's the roof with a few more trusses and beams added so that casual glances inside suggest structure. 

You may notice the trusses that are second from the ends have had their bottom stringers thickened. I discovered an alignment problem when I placed the roof on the support posts, and the easiest way to correct it was to add more stringers to the inside bottom of both trusses. Ideally I should have repositioned the trusses, but by the time a test uncovered the problem, it wasn't going to be easy to tear them out, so I cheated :-)

Roof is panelled with corrugated aluminum.

The roof is panelled with pieces of Campbell corrugated aluminum glued on with Weld Bond. Flashing is cut from a piece of 3x5 card and held on with 3M transfer tape.

Building up the front and back walls.

The walls are simpler to make than the roof. The posts are cut from 0.125" x 0.125" square styrene strips and sandwiched between two pieces of 0.040" thick sheet styrene that make up the inner layer of the half-wall. 

At first I thought the back wall would have openings so visitors could wander onto the rock behind the shelter. Well, test placements showed the shelter took up nearly all the area on Inspiration Point. Allowing visitors to wander out back was just an invitation to falling off the cliff! So, I changed the design and made the back wall just as solid and contiguous as the front. 

Gluing up the walls. Now it's beginning to look like something!

The stone surfacing is just pieces of stone-textured styrene sheet glued onto the styrene sub-structure.

Concrete capping for the stone wall is pieced together from styrene scraps.

The concrete capping is made from pieces of 0.040" thick styrene scraps. Once trimmed to size, any gaps were filled in with putty and sanded to give a uniform surface.

And that's basically it for construction. Before gluing the roof to the posts, both assemblies were painted. The white is Vallejo's cool white acrylic. The capping is a mixture of some old Model Master aged concrete and camouflage grey. The rock walls were painted with acrylics used to paint the mountains. Rock weathering and mortaring was added with Tamiya brown panel liner.

I'll likely need to do some colour corrections on the stonework once the shelter has been installed on the layout, but it'll be interesting blending it in.

Well, that's 2 of the layout's 3 structures done. The one remaining is the circular bridge. Before I step up to that challenge, I'll need to mellow out. While working on the shelter this version of the Foster Sylvers' classic Misdemenor by Admad Jamal came up on an 'Round Midnight show I was listening to and it did the trick and will no doubt do it again in the future.

It all begins and began at the Painted Post

No, the Painted Post Smoke Shop wasn't located between Coles and Thrifty's. They're just for scale

Over the years I’ve had a few conversations with Vince where I’ve lamented the fact that there seems to be very few layouts inspired by the TTC’s streetcar network. Maybe none. I’ve seen a few model railway layouts with some streetcar track added, prowled by TTC streetcars, and sprinkled with a few of Toronto’s signature buildings, but nothing completely Toronto and TTC and streetcar. Nothing that makes a statement or has a singular vision. I think Little Canada comes the closest, but it’s a commercial tourist attraction for children. Personal layouts, built by dedicated amateurs or folk artists, that focus on Toronto's TTC streetcars and environs, well, I haven’t seen any - if you have, please let me know, my knowledge is quite scant in this area and I'd like my strong statements to be wrong.

Memory drawing of the '60s / '70s version of the Painted Post Smoke Shop

I’ve toyed with adding features reminiscent of the Toronto I knew to my layouts. The Lost Ocean Line, the Alta Vista Transit Commission, and the Way Out Layout, all had some features, but they were always diluted with other very non-Toronto, non-TTC aspects. They never fully communicated what I had in mind. 

Walls are laminated from 3 pieces of 4-ply Bristol board + 1 piece of brick embossed styrene

As I’ve become familiar with micro-layout thinking, selective compression, observation, and abstraction I’ve tried to use those concepts to design a Toronto and TTC inspired streetcar layout, or at least come up with the broad outlines of one. In retrospect getting familiar with those concepts was crucial to making such a layout achievable. 

Testing wall fit before gluing.

Look, the TTC and its streetcars date back to 1921, and Toronto streetcar service in general goes back even further to 1861. So, you’ve got this streetcar system with a long history, a vast network of track, many types of vehicles that have operated on it over the years, and many, many different areas the cars rumbled through. To build anything you have any chance of completing you’re going to have to make decisions, and those decisions are going to reflect a personal view. There are no absolute right or wrong decisions regarding the layout's theme and design, which means there is no definitive Toronto streetcar layout. Any layout will reflect the concerns and interests of its designer. Given the TTC's long streetcar history there are conceivably many possible layouts in all sorts of styles, genres, and scales, so TTC streetcar system layout designs will be hard to exhaust.

1/16" thick clear plastic for the front wall. Walls are now glued together with Weld Bond

My layout won't be a micro, but it will be small, much smaller than what is considered small over here, and will focus on places and vehicles that have some sort of meaning to me. Operation isn’t a priority, but story is. Liberties will be taken to tell it, which is where micro-layout thinking, selective compression, observation, and abstraction come in, not to mention other things I’ve learned over the years. 

Front window framing drawn on a sheet of 0.010" thick styrene.

I’ve decided to stop scribbling and commit to building, beginning this year. It’ll likely take 2 or 3 - hopefully not 4 - years to construct, but I need more non-worldly, complex tasks to help take my mind off things now and then. The Toronto and Mt. Lowe layouts should do the trick as these are both layouts I’ve wanted to build for a long time. I figure if I can get the base built and track installed this year I’ll be doing well.

Transfer tape was stuck to the back of the window frame piece. It will stick the frame to the 'glass'.

Like I said, it isn’t going to be a big layout, likely only slightly bigger than the family room coffee table as far as foot print is concerned - cities are dense packed after. It’ll be roughly rectangular with Scarborough at one end and downtown at the other. My Scarborough includes the old Painted Post Smoke Shop where I’d buy my model building magazines and comics in olden days, so I thought I’d construct that little structure first to ease into things, and to provide some counterpoint to my ongoing Mt. Lowe layout work. 

Unfortunately the transfer tape resulted in a very rough cut that required lots of clean up. Next time I'll go back to individual styrene pieces for window frames.

I realised recently that when I lived in Toronto it was full of excellent bookstores and libraries - maybe it still is - and I had developed routes I would travel between them. Those routes varied with my age and circumstances over the years, but I was an inveterate bibliophile from my earliest memories - I still am :-) - so I would regularly travel my routes looking for treasure. Cars were rarely involved so I didn’t get chauffeured around - I didn’t have one as a teen - so it was always my own two feet, buses, streetcars, and subways that provided transport. Even when I did own a car, its only job on one of those trips was to get me to a subway station parking lot. My little layout will be inspired by those routes and modes of transport in some way. If you’re a regular reader here you’ll know I’m keen on using pathways as a design strategy, which will come in handy. 

I was still in denial about the rough window frames at this point. Sign is a printout laminated between 2 pieces of very thin, clear plastic using transfer tape as the bonder.

I wasn’t a snobby reader. I read whatever seemed interesting from low-brow to high-brow and all the brows in between. As a boy and young teen the low to middle brow magazine and comic book offerings of the Painted Post Smoke Shop, a short walk from our house in Scarborough, exerted a magnetic pull. I bought a lot there, and got kicked out a few times with a loud reminder that the store wasn’t a public library :-) That’s where I bought the issue of Model Railroader magazine that introduced me to the work of E. L. Moore, so naturally it needs a place on the layout.

Everything's glued in place. The end of the grey area marks where a false back wall will be added.

The model is just a rather elaborately decorated blue box with a removable lid for a roof. The prototype was a unit in a strip mall, but I've sliced it out from its brothers and so felt I had to panel the new exterior walls with the same mottled blue brick that I recall surfaced the façade. 

The roof is a removable lid glued up from 4-ply Bristol board. An LED strip is used to light the interior. That white piece of paper used for the ceiling diffuses the LED's light. 

I had the 4-ply Bristol board out from the Cape Breton Island FireHouse project and decided to use it on this build since I was on a roll. All the wall laminates of 4-ply you see in the photos were made with transfer tape, and Weld Bond was used to glue up the walls and floor into a single structure.

You can see the LED strip attached to the false wall at the back. There's a strip of thin clear plastic glued to the front of the LED's light box.

The prototype still exists, but it appears the only part that's the same as in days gone by is the metal window framing on the façade. So, I used that as a guide to layout and dimension the building. Everything else is from memory - you've been warned :-)

A hole was drilled in the bottom for the LED's wires.

The model still doesn't have an interior. I have some sort of mental block when it comes to them. I leave room for interior detail, but it's hit-and-miss as to whether I ever get around to providing any. Maybe in a year or so when the layout has some sort of rudimentary form I'll get some interior inspiration. 

The façade after a lot of scraping on the window frames to de-fuzz them. Results are mixed.

It looks a bit forlorn standing there empty. I know, I'm fixating on the window frames, but once posters appear in the windows, and shelves in the interior, I think my focus will shift. And then there's that old issue I have that digital cameras can make things look worse than in real life.

Hmmm. Some trim needs repositioning.

I don't recall what the building looked like out back. This is all minimalist guess work on my part. Some weathering will be needed when the time comes to place this in a layout scene, but until then I'll just contemplate its blueness. 

That's all for now. Coffee's brewing. To wind down, de-interiorize, de-fuzz, and enjoy the blue, here's the legendary Holly Cole, the 2013 winner of the Montréal International Jazz Festival's Ella Fitzgerald award, singing an equally legendary Johnny Nash song.

From the 'Time Marches On' files

1980, through November 2012, to 2014

October 2016

February 2025

2013 to ?

Some King St. streetcars in their natural habitat*

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*Observed on a anthropological field trip in late February 2025.

Delving into the Mysteries of Model Railway Illumination

It weighs in at a slim 59 pages

Back in January I was rooting around Abe randomly looking for unusual model railway books. I'm always curious to see what might turn up. I was not disappointed on this expedition. 

As soon as I saw the title of this book I knew I had to have it. It's not a subject you typically see an entire book devoted to. Especially when you consider its year of publication, 1955. It's written by E. F. Carter and published by Percival Marshall of London. An inside page tells me Carter wrote 15 other model railway books for this publisher.

Of the 15, Carter hints at this book being a little unusual in his preface:

"It may be said by some that Model Railways already give sufficient satisfaction in operation without any additions or complications, and, in one sense this may be in part true. Yet there must be an intense and added interest from watching railway operations in full scale being carried out after dark. There is a subtle fascination due to not being able to see all that is going on. An engine is then only recognisable by its running lights and the indication of a semaphore only by its lamps. There is an air of mystery over the whole railway scene.

"The running of a railway - real or model - during the hours of daylight is only half the story, and if it was only fully realised that as much, if not more, activity takes place on our railways during the hours of darkness, there would undoubtedly be a whole-hearted attack on the "night running" problems of our model lines.

"It is this end that the present book has been penned, and it is the writer's sincere hope that the reader will through its medium be tempted to explore a most fascinating field. The work involved is simple and not in any sense meticulous; moreover, the basic cost of materials is low, and the writer has - as usual - endeavoured to show how the greater bulk of the auxiliary apparatus can be made from "bits and pieces" usually to be found in the junk box or around the house"

An example of 'piping' light into a building via a tube or glass rod

So, in the junk box or around the house in 1955 - well, let's call it the early 1950s - there were no LEDS or fibre optic cables. And, they weren't for sale or in use on model railways. The internet tells me the first practical LED wasn't produced until 1962, and the first fibre optic cable was invented 10 years earlier in 1952. Without those mainstays of today's lighting systems, we're looking at lighting with small incandescent lamps enhanced with some interesting tricks, some of which Carter presents in this book.

I was particularly interested in the tricks discussed in chapter 2, On Lighting Station Buildings. Carter outlines three. The first is what he refers to as 'piped lighting', which one might think of as a rather rudimentary way to channel light in the pre-fibre optics era. Basically, a metal tube or glass rod is placed in front of a light bulb and pointed to where you want to the light to go, usually towards something that will disperse the beam, like the suspended clear glass jewel shown in figure 12. This allows light to be piped into relatively confined spaces with the bulk - and heat - of an incandescent bulb remaining outside the structure. Carter also notes the building's interior should be painted matte white to aid light dispersion, and the pipe, whatever its material, should be at least 1/4" in diameter. I suspect light losses, either in a tube or glass, would be considerable. 

Other examples of using light piping for various sorts of lighting fixtures

Carter also mentions that mirrors can be used to light a building's interior by mounting a mirror "at an angle of 45° to the underside of the baseboard, reflecting the light in "bulk" upwards through a hole immediately under the building to be illuminated, on to the surface of a faceted bead or beads hung by a wire from the roof, as well as to the white-painted ceiling of the structure."

Carter ends the chapter with a third lighting method, and one I certainly wouldn't recommend experimenting with: luminous paints that make use of strontium compounds and uranium nitrate. He gives recipes so you can mix your own! If I'm reading the text correctly these were available at the local chemist's [aka pharmacy for us here in Canada] at the time, although he mentions some might need to be special ordered :-) Different times indeed.

Overall it's a fascinating look at lighting methods in the immediate post war era prior to LEDS and fibre optics. 

The back cover and spine are blank! Cost saving I assume?

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The videos illustrating this post were sourced from the following three YouTube channels:

Havelock Yard

Eric Gagnon

Steve Boyko

All are excellent and highly recommended.