My morning beverage, an Americano with cream
This is the time of year when the evenings and the mornings are beautiful, even if the midday heat is just a bit too much. Our Spring was wet enough and warm enough for mosquitoes, but that doesn't deter me. California skeeters seem to be slower and less aggressive than the quick little biters I grew up with in Florida. Or maybe I'm just not as sweet as I used to be. ha.
My morning companion, Maggie
Anyway, I used the lovely weather as an opportunity to advance the progress on the Fallburgh Station kit. I decided to build an interior. This meant diverging from the instructions and using 1/32" plywood as full-wall bracing instead of square strip stock in the corners. I will also be including a floor and ceiling that will serve as stiffeners to keep the walls from bowing, hopefully. The coup de grace will be a strip of specialty stock I found in my pile of dollhouse wood that I will use as bracing disguised as crown molding.
Walls coming together!
There will be an office, a waiting room and a baggage room on the first floor, along with an un-modeled stairwell to an un-modeled second floor. That space will serve as a wiring conduit to run to LED lights in the ceiling. No indoor plumbing, but electric lights! I haven't decided how far I want to take the detailing inside, but there will be rudimentary furniture and some figures.
This kit has now passed what I am calling, the "structure kit Rubicon". That is, the point of no return beyond which the kit will not go back in the box. Most rolling stock will go back in the box it came in after you build it. Most craftsman kit structures will not. Alia Iacta Est.
They say that to a man who has an E. L. Moore fixation, everything is somehow related to E. L. Moore :-) Without an Americano to jump-start my neurons, it took me awhile to click that the Fallburgh referred to in Fallburgh Station might be Carl Fallberg of Fiddletown & Copperopolis cartoon fame, which bears a striking resemblance to the Fiddletown station in the cartoon. The E. L. Moore part is that he did a rendition of it in his Dec. '64 MR article, Down by the Depot, which in turn became the Elizabethton station on his layout. You've got a great outdoor set up there and I'm looking forward to seeing future instalments of this project!
ReplyDeleteIndeed you are correct, it is as you have sussed out. From the instructions:
ReplyDelete"In the 1960's, Carl Fallberg wrote a book on the Fiddletown and Copperopolis Railroad. It was a satire on railroading through the 49er country of upper California. In the book are a few drawings by the author illustrating the imaginary townspeople, the train and a few structures within the town. From this book and its illustrations derive this quaint yet functional Station House. We call it "Fallburgh Station" as a play-on-words, but to give credit to Mr. Fallberg - changing the 'berg' to 'burgh' thus relating to a small township of the size described in his Fiddletown and Copperopolis Railroad."
Thanks for pointing me to that article. E.L. did something Sherry Collins, for all her skill, did not. (This was Sherry's final drawing before her death in 1980, and this kit was dedicated to her memory by Sequoia Scale Models). Moore planned for an interior. I perused my copy of the F&C book and found a couple interior shots, but they don't really match up with the drawing. I managed to work one in, but it is far from ideal. Still, it will suffice.