2024 Tombstones

Pre-made "skinny" stones being bulked with foam.

 

Inspector Vulture approves.

Shaped and coated with joint compound over paper mache'.

Painted black and dry-brushed white.

While I have several ideas for scratch-built monuments, this was another year to simply "bulk out" premade stones to give them more heft and believability.  It is a simple process of building up the back and base of the stone with additional foam then coating with paper mache' and stippling with drywall joint compound mixed with art paste.  Not shown is the small block of wood and vertical PVC pipe I insert in the base.  This adds weight and a way to install the stone in the lawn over a short length of rebar, to keep it from blowing over.  Next year I'll be back to creating never-before-seen spooky-silly additions to the Golden Cedars Garden of Rest Pet Cemetery.

Two Words - Train Master

A Trainmaster is a person in charge of the movement of trains in a division or subdivision of a railroad.  A Train Master is a diesel locomotive, designated H24-66, built by the Fairbanks-Morse company.  Two Words.  Train Master.

This story began decades ago, long before The Shifter.  Facing the big Five-Oh soon I decided to revisit some old projects.  This quickly rose to the top of the list.  Look for more posts about this pair of locomotives in the next few months.

 

Full Circle

This is blog post number 200.  Rather than write a big blog recap or make some major announcement, I decided to spin a yarn about a mystery solved.  Let's start with this image:

I snipped this sliver from one of John Allen's photos of a scene at Port on his Gorre and Daphetid railroad, taken in 1971.  Yup.  That's all you get.  Running the image through Google image search gives you all manner of fun things, none of which help in this situation.  All I could make out was some text along the bottom beneath that colored logo, "Bay RR".  However, I could tell the steps are molded on, the side appears to be simulated wood and the roof walk tells me its a box car.  That's it.  Maybe another image might help:

This full-side view is from a John Allen photo of a train on the high bridge over Squawbottom, 1972.  Now the overall shape of that herald is clearer and some general text is emerging on the left side.  Perhaps a road name up high and a slogan below?  The images above are all I could find of this particular car and offered no definitive answers to what the full road name was.  That is, until I was searching for other surviving relatives of a totally different car:

More is known about the Virginia Midland, though not much more.  Still, I was trolling eBay, as one does when on the hunt for vintage models, when I found a listing for a Virginia Midland hopper.  I was not entirely sure it was the same VM as the box car on the G&D, but I figured if the seller has one private road name car, there may be more.  And I was right.  Check this out:

Look familiar?  This is a picture from the eBay listing and the photo quality is not the best, but it was certainly good enough to make out the relevant text!  Until this point I had no hope of ever identifying that mystery car I had been calling the "X Bay RR".  Now I knew it was the Seaford and Oyster Bay RR, "Trail to the Sunrise"! I was ecstatic. 

Fine.  Mystery solved, right?  Not so fast.  Whose railroad was this?  How did one of their boxcars come to be on the G&D?  That's hallowed ground on which not just any car trod, er, rolled.  How was it hitched into a train alongside such famous lines as the Alturas and Lone Pine or the Texas and Rio Grande Western?  Perhaps the internet, that great oracle of our age, could tell me more.

After a string of fruitless searches I found the goods but it wasn't a direct route.  However New York State Route 135 appears to be.  This road is commonly known as the Seaford-Oyster Bay Expressway.  We're getting warmer.  Model Railroader database?  Nothing, except that Seaford is mentioned in connection with the NorthEastern Region of the NMRA.  Hmmm.

Adding NMRA and NER to the search term "Seaford and Oyster Bay" brings me to "The Coupler", the publication of the NER, specifically the Summer 1981 issue.  There on page three is a fine article about newly minted Master Model Railroader #85, Frank Murray.  Click here for a link to the full issue, however this snip answers most of the pertinent questions:

That last line brings it full circle.  There it is.  "Trail to the Sunrise"?  A nod to the Sunrise Trail Division of the NorthEastern Region of the NMRA.  "A number of years ago" was probably at least 10, since the earliest image I could find of an SOB car was from 1971 and Frank completed his MMR certification in 1981.  

Only a few details remain and they're perhaps less important.  Did Frank mail his car to John or bring it with him on the "vacation"?  Oh, and there's a bonus G&D connection; in the same article are names of other modelers in the Sunrise Trail Division who had achieved MMR.  One in particular stood out: Waty House (#5).  Did Watson House have anything to do with securing an invitation to the G&D for Frank?  John considered House enough of a friend to name a major structure on the G&D after him.

The world may never know any more than what's been discovered and shared here, and that's okay.  And the car I found on eBay?  Why I bid on it of course!  And won, along with another private road name car, a reefer lettered for the "Busted and Maimed", Route of the Busted Pine.  No, I don't have any clue to its origins.  Yet.

Thanks to all who regularly read this blog, and any who stop by occasionally or stumble across it.  However you find it, if you would consider following along I'd appreciate it and as always, leave any comments or questions down below.  There will be more to come.
 

Patience, Risk, Reward

 

Work on the "Putnam", the 2-8-0 kitbash I had begun a couple years back and recently resumed, had stalled.  The nature of this hobby and the flow of my daily life during the summer had conspired again to remove me from the workbench and shift my focus elsewhere.  But truthfully I wasn't in the mood to do wiring, or really anything, on this engine.  

That's okay.  This isn't a race to some finish line, though I find competitions challenging and deadlines helpful now and again.  This is a hobby that can breed patience if a person sticks with it.  I may groan a little about projects that have been on-again-off-again for years but at the end of the day I don't mind.  As long as I'm engaged regularly with model trains in a hands-on way, I'm content.

Getting back to work on the engine meant tackling a risky wiring job.  I needed to splice in a micro-connector in order to install the headlight and separate the boiler from the chassis.  I've installed DCC decoders before and have done similar work with tiny wires, but this case was particularly risky.  I needed to strip and solder the wires and I only had so much wire to work with.  Thankfully the procedure went as well as I could have hoped, with no hitches or hangups.

The reward was not only a successfully wired connector but a return to the workbench, to a stalled project.  I once asked a fellow modeler how he managed to create such exquisitely detailed steam locomotives.  He replied, by sitting down at the bench and doing something - drilling the next hole, adding the next part, step by step until it is done.  Even if all you do that day is install the smallest rivet, count it as a victory and do it again the next day.  Eventually you'll have a completed model.

I would add one thing to this advice, a step that's crucial for me in overcoming inertia and restarting the modeling momentum.  The locomotive on the bench wasn't sitting idle alone.  All the parts to do the next step were out and ready.  The soldering iron, solder, flux, extra hands with magnifier, micro-connector, wire stripper, side cutters and heat-shrink tubing were all there too.  Setting out all these parts was a vital step, a necessary prologue.

A Selley Baggage Car?

For those not in the know about vintage HO scale rolling stock, Selley was one of the early manufacturers offering a set of short passenger cars.  These were kits with metal parts including the roof, truck frames, end platforms, really everything except the wood block floor and some clear acetate for window glass.  Producing cast metal detail parts beginning in 1941, the company made a small number of freight car kits but a wide variety of freight car parts including doors, sills, underframes, etc.  The coach and combine made their debuts, respectively, in February and March of 1960.

I fell in love with the combine at a train show in Ohio, buying the kit and bringing it home back at the turn of the century (is it too soon to use that phrase?).  Eventually I found another, and two coaches to match. However, that's all Selley ever made.  While other manufacturers added baggage cars, observations, parlors, etc. in their range of passenger offerings, Selley only ever made the combine and coach, marketing the combine as a complete one-car train.

These are short cars*; 6 inches long, an attribute that enables them to handle tight curves without that ugly overhang, according to the manufacturer.  So when I stumbled across a vintage metal kit for a baggage car with a similar length I was intrigued.  Who had made this?  It didn't take long to discover it was New One, a manufacturer from Japan.  These kits were similar to Selley's, only the roof was wood and the parts such as the end steps and railings were more crudely stamped metal instead of lovely detailed castings.

The New One car, or rather, "re-kit"** I bought is a real basket case.  It was missing the roof and one of the end steps and railings but no matter; those were parts I didn't need.  At first sight I immediately began forming in my mind a cunning plan to combine, pardon the pun, one of my Selley combines with these sides to make a "Selley" baggage car.  The big question was whether or not they would fit together. 

The Selley construction was different from other manufacturers' methods.  Instead of offering sides and ends and roof as separate parts or casting the body as one piece, they cast part of the roof with the sides, leaving the top bit above the clerestory windows to be attached.  So in order to fit the baggage sides to the Selley "roof", the lower roof parts will need to be cut away from the old Selley combine sides and added to the New One sides.  Then the length (width) of the New One sides will need to be reduced by just about an eighth of an inch on each end.  A real kitbashing challenge!

My Selley kits are still unbuilt but from time to time I take them out, inhale that glorious vintage kit aroma, and admire all the gleaming metal parts.  I'll add the New One baggage parts to the same box as the Selley kits.  For now that's where they'll live, but someday they'll get their day on the workbench and after that, time on the high iron conveying passengers - and their baggage - to their destinations.  Of course I'll need to rebuild my New One ten-wheeler to pull the whole lot...

*While the Selley cars are short, they're not "Sierra" cars, a moniker often assigned incorrectly to any short combine/coach pair that vaguely resembles the cars used on the Angels branch of the Sierra RR.  Those cars were much shorter and sagged noticeably.  The MDC Overton cars are shorter than the Selley cars; the Binkley shorty cars shorter still.  The Ulrich one-piece cars, another combine/coach pair, are about the same as the MDC, maybe a little shorter.  There were other metal side cars; New One, already mentioned above, and Alexander alongside Mantua.  However, much longer than that and we're leaving "shorty" territory and getting into the 50' and larger range.

 **One of my YouTube videos is about re-kitting a Wabash box car.  Sometimes it is best to crack that old glue, clean off the parts and rebuild the car.  This baggage car is one of those cases, though I'm going to re-kit the car before kit-mingling the parts with the Selley combine.  Re-kitting is just the first step.

Caribou Southern

Hang on, this post is all over the place.  That is to say, the road is winding, with turns aplenty.  

Periodically I search eBay for a particular car; a card side refrigerator car that fits into a series of custom printed road names.  These often turn up in lots of old cars needing refurbishment, the sort of treasures you'd find buried in the junk box at a train show.  During one of these scans I stumbled across two cars that caught my fancy.  The first was indeed a reefer and appears to be hand painted:

It should go without saying, but I can't find anything about this car's origins either.

The second I almost didn't buy:

I had no connection to this car apart from my interest in collecting and preserving lost and forgotten private road names.  That is, until I began cataloguing John Allen's rolling stock.  While there has been plenty of interest in the private roads that appeared on the famous Gorre & Daphetid Railroad, no comprehensive list has been made of the plain ordinary rolling stock; the cars based on actual prototypes.  I set to this task when I was sick and couch-bound for a week.

During my research I dug back through the archives of the G&D discussion group.  There on a partial list of cars that appeared on the G&D was an entry for a gondola - a Caribou Southern gondola, number 55.  Hey...I know that name from somewhere.  About the same time a new set of slide images from the G&D was posted on the group and there it was, the CS gondola, on the RIP track near the Great Divide engine house.

From a photo by Jerry Drake.  Click here for the original.

Okay!  Now we're getting somewhere.  But let's take a step back...what about this Caribou Southern?  Whose road was it?  Where was it located?  How did John Allen come to have one on his railroad?  The Model Railroader archive has NO mention of it, though there's another fascinating Caribou-named model railroad with a car ferry that moved on a track in actual water.  Google turns up nothing.  It seemed to be a dead end.

Well, let's just say the road doesn't go much further but I can now answer two of those questions.  During a totally unrelated search as I rifled through my collection of model railroad passes I found this:

Yup.  There 'tis.  Ken Vere, Supt.  Vancouver, B.C.  And Google did turn up a little on Ken, with a mention in the Pacific Great Eastern newsletter from the 90s.  PGE?  Oh, you know, that Canadian road with the Caribou Head logo...

Tired Tropes or Tried and True?

Do you ever think about those tired hobby tropes?  You know the ones, "We've got to get kids interested in the hobby! (or it will wither and die)" or "A layout is never finished" (though if that were true custom layout builders might never get paid).  Recently I was perusing the 1941 Varney catalog, as one does*, and I came across this passage:

    "Did you ever stop to ask yourself why the small boy never had a chance to play with his electric trains on Christmas day?  I say it was because it took his "old man" just about that long to put it together, make it run, and get tired of it.  It is too easy."
    "At some risk of frightening a newcomer, I would like to say that, a MODEL RAILROAD is no pushover.  If it were, the children would have it, and it would fail to hold the adult interest."

SP drew it, never made it, but Varney did!

The bug will bite a kid from time to time and due to their disposition or an early start with some tools and paint they may turn into model builders sooner than later.  But I suspect they're the rare case, not the average person who may have a mild interest early on that lays dormant until much later when time and funds become available to pursue the hobby in earnest.  I'd say Varney was making a statement in direct contrast to those "toy train" manufacturers that so often depicted kids on the floor, grinning from ear to ear as their grinding metal beasts clanked around the Christmas tree and the family looked on, beaming with pride.

The passage in the catalog continues:

    "A model railroad has yet to be built and finished.  That is one of the nicest things about it.  It's never done.  Virtually every model railroader who starts a layout, tears it up and starts over again almost before he has the bugs out of his first loop of track.  There are thousands of model railroaders who have temporary 'layouts,' or systems which are in effect only test tracks for the equipment which is being modeled.  The real layout floats nebulously in his mind like a mirage in the desert, to be reached some day, somehow."

The first commemorative car offered by Varney in 1948.

Keep in mind these quotes are from a Varney catalog, a company that sells trains, not structures, scenery, track or anything else for your layout.**  They also extol the virtues of how well their equipment runs and complies with NMRA standards so of course it was in their interest to encourage modelers to build something on which to run these trains.  But I think the quote above is for those folks whose layout doesn't look like more than a test track on a table top.  Perhaps it is also aimed at the person who resists buying more equipment because they don't have room for it.  Keeping the dream of "some day, somehow" alive creates a convenient justification in the mind of the buyer.

I suppose I resemble that remark.  Currently I have a small model railroad by most standards.  But that doesn't stop me from buying more trains.  Some day, somehow I'll have that big space for long trains.***  But I'm also that weird kid that got bit early and never let college, girls, career, etc. get in the way of spending some time at a workbench with a model train or structure kit.  Maybe you are too.  These tropes exist for a reason and sometimes they're even true.

The other commemorative offering, Varney, 1948.

*This post was prompted by a recent purchase.  Varney is not a sponsor, (LOL), but I do appreciate their contributions to the hobby and think their early card-side equipment is really cool.

**Varney does recommend you build a layout, and they even offer the barest of suggestions on how to do it.  I did find it particularly interesting that while no track or transformer brands were mentioned, they did exclusively recommend Ideal structures!

***Back in the real world, I do have an actual plan to build a nice storage system that not only protects my investment in rolling stock but makes them easily available to put on and take off the railroad.  I have already shown in this post here that it is possible and even fun to simulate a larger railroad's operations on a small pike.

Mocked-up Market

The early planning stages of my National Model Railroad Build Off diorama involve laying out the critical elements; roads, track, and major structures.  This year's mountain setting makes that even more critical as the land forms take up more room.  Realistic slopes push elements apart unless I rely on the mountain modeler's crutch, miles and miles of retaining walls.  I don't like that look personally so I need to plan for space accordingly.  

To do that I need to know the size of things ahead of time.  I've completed enough of the bridge work to know how tall and long that will be.  There will be three structures on the diorama and one is already mocked-up from a different layout a few years back.  It is small and will have no trouble fitting in the space allocated for it.  The major structure that needs the most consideration is the corner market.  I'm basing my structure on one I found in Charlottesville, Virginia, the Belmont Market.

This is clearly an old home that was once expanded then turned into a corner market.  This is just dripping with character and begs to be modeled, don't you think?  For my structure I'm starting with an RDA stone mill building and will be adding scratchbuilt elements for the extension and storefront.  Here's my mockup:

After reviewing the images I collected from Google Earth, I realized I needed to make the storefront wall extend above the roof, or rather, to keep the roof behind the wall.  This is an important element in telling the story of this structure.  The main roof also needs an eave.  The "original" house on the model is stone while the upstairs extension is wood, likely clapboard, and the storefront will be brick.  I haven't decided yet if I'm going to include the external freezer addition...that'll depend on how it looks in the scene.  

Next to the structure will be a gravel parking lot on the opposite side of the old house entry.  And next to that will be this gem:

I found this near one of our favorite restaurants down in Hopland, California.  (The Golden Pig, by the way, and if, like my wife, you need Gluten Free food, this is the place.  ALL the deserts are GF.)  Again another structure with an interesting past.  On the broad side I'll paint an advertisement of some sort, perhaps for a county fair or local event.  Slightly faded, but not a ghost sign.  Not going to mock-up this one as it is pretty easy to visualize and the size can vary as needed.  Sheds are like that.

Stand-ins Part 2

Behold, the Ocala Springs Chero-Cola bottling plant.

I decided to sneak in a quick palate cleansing project between the sidelined Drug Store and the beginning of the National Model Railroad Build Off 2024 diorama project.  I had already photocopied the walls from my Walthers Greatland Sugar Refinery as they seemed a good match for the brick style of the prototype Chero-Cola bottler in Ocala.  All I had to do was heat up the glue gun, pull out some foam core board and get building.

Glue stick for minor changes; 3M Super 77 adheres the paper to the foam core.

In truth I've never done a mock-up with a foam core base, but it really was easy and fun and as usual, quite instructive.  I discovered two major changes I'd need to make before cutting the actual plastic.  The first was choosing to reduce the height of the back wall by cutting away the top row of windows with the more decorative double window instead of the middle row of plain windows.  Otherwise these special windows would be hidden by the loading dock building.  No need to let them go to waste; I'd move them and the back double-door around the side.

Replacing the decorative double window row with a plain single row.

The second was moving a spare large door to the main large building along the spur side.  I had already reduced the loading building by one bay to fit the space on the layout.  I decided to include that big door on the main building in order to create a receiving door as well as a loading door.  Now switch crews can spot inbound carloads of bagged sugar or bottles at the main building and empty cars for shipping out finished soda at the other.

A car spotted at the receiving door.

This is as far as the structure will go now that March has arrived and work will soon begin on the NMRBO24 diorama.  But this is enough to tell me I really like this structure in this spot.  It has the right mass for the scene, visually anchoring the near-center of the layout area.  The building is large enough to be feasible as an industry capable of receiving carloads of supplies and shipping out a carload of soda.  This will be a fun kitbash when the time comes!

Drug Store Saga, Part V

This is the final Drug Store Saga post for the present until the NMRBO24 diorama has been constructed, and perhaps long after that.  I did recently have to resist the urge to throw the uncompleted structure.  It has become time to set it aside, not only due to the impending diorama construction period (March 1 - July 1) but also for reasons to do with the structure itself.

Even if I had not decided to modify the thing into a different shape I can say with some certainty I'd have still struggled at this point.  The problem lies with the storefront entrance and windows.  I thought I was doing a good thing when I made this jig:

The notch on the corner holds the doorway in position so the windows can be glued to it - glued on a thin sliver of metal at a sharp angle.  I used gel superglue for its gap-filling properties but still the dadgum assemblage managed to break loose twice.  

And once I got it all to hold together, even tenuously, and could offer it up to the building, I realized that the entryway, though at a 45 degree angle, did not match the corner bay window.  Not even close. To add insult to injury, the walls adjacent to the windows weren't long enough, by about 1/8th of an inch.  

I can make new walls; there's plenty of wall texture card.  I can make a new jig and reinforce the weak joint and get the thing to align with the tower.  All of these problems have solutions.  But right now I'm not going to.  I'm stepping away.  As I'm writing this the kit parts have been back in the box for a few days and the structure sits in place on the layout, propped up by a bit of sidewalk because the metal castings on the facade make it tip over without its entry door and windows there to support it.

Sometimes just walking away from a project is the right thing to do.

Drug Store Saga, Part IV

I began adding color to the trim using a palate similar to what I used on the Queen Anne Cottage for the NMRBO22.  In fact, the colors are identical - Black Cherry, Almond and Butter Cream (doesn't that sound delicious) but the placement is not.  Whereas on the Queen Anne the windows were Butter Cream, here the windows are Black Cherry, though they look more like Cranberry.  See, I was going to make them white, so I primed them gray and applied the white paint sprayed from above allowing the gray to make an artificial shadow (aka, the zenithal highlight technique).  Then I changed my mind and decided to airbrush them Black Cherry.

Oh I was so happy with how well my new compressor worked, how I was able to dial in the pressure and thin the paint just right to achieve a smooth even coat.  Yes, craft paint can be airbrushed as long as it is thinned and strained and sprayed using a higher pressure than say, oils or inks, but not so high as to spatter.  The appropriate thinner, in my case I used Liquitex Acrylic Airbrush Medium, will allow the paint to lay down and spread out before drying instead of going on all speckly.  It all looked so good.

The windows have been "washed" but still appear slightly brighter than the other parts.

But then I compared the Black Cherry on the windows to the Black Cherry on the other details, the ones I had only primed gray.  Reds are usually translucent (relatively) and this red was no exception.  Over the white primed windows I had a brilliant sanguine glow and on the gray primed parts, a dull purple.  Ugh.  So to fix this I've been slopping on a thinned mix of Black Cherry, black ink wash and brown ink wash to fill the recesses.  I like the brighter red on the raised areas so I'll keep it while darkening the shadows and filtering the whole paint job overall slightly darker.  On the gray-primed Black Cherry bits I'll simply dry brush highlight with a lighter shade of Black Cherry.  Fingers crossed.

Still needs paint (and roofing material).

I rolled a little snake of Miliput to create a fillet behind the parapet wall castings.  They weren't really deep enough to cover the thickness of the wall itself.  This repair looks realistic, like something masons would do to cap off a wall and tie in the ornate front detail.  I also began painting that detail, opting for a simple Butter Cream background and Black Cherry on the raised bits.  In studying actual Victorian paint schemes, I found that most original schemes were not as ornate as we've painted them since.  What we think of as "Victorian" color schemes today are really quite gaudy and complex compared to what was often done originally.

I also added the quoins to the corners between the upper and lower trim.  Let me tell you...that was the easy part.  Fitting the parapet trim was challenging, but not terrible.  Fitting the lower trim where the bay window section must be made from three pieces took some forethought and engineering.  Fortunately I could follow the example of the upper detail and miter the corners to match.  I think it looks pretty good.

Up next?  Who knows.  This project has been all over the place in terms of any logical sequence or lack thereof.  I've got the floor/base cut to fit.  Maybe LEDs.  We'll see.  Plenty of painting to do and some details still to make.  I'm going to try applying dry transfer letters to clear styrene for the big storefront windows.  Still shooting for a March 1 completion in order to begin work on the NMRBO24 diorama at the starting line.

The Italians Get It.

Well, at least this fellow.  By "get it" I mean grasping the crucial concepts that make a model railroad bridge the gap between strict prototype adherence and playing with toy trains.  I've discussed some of these concepts before on this blog and they're my opinions, naturally, but I believe they have value for anyone seeking to better enjoy the hobby by understanding their own motives and how they derive pleasure from this activity.  Take this railroad, for example:

When I view some non-English-language videos on my laptop I can see the captions automatically translated.  This is especially helpful in this case as it allows me to understand what's being said as the videographer interviews the layout builder.  The modeler describes some of his rationale in creating a pastiche of scenes from his past, all tied together by a track plan that allows him to run a variety of equipment including a narrow gauge section and streetcar.

But even if you can't understand what's being said, the video itself does a pretty good job of showing what's there.  There's a connection to what must be a staging yard somewhere.  There's a large visible yard with facilities for servicing (displaying) locomotives.  There's a Parade Route for watching those trains glide along a graceful curve.  There seems to be a desire to strike a balance between track and scenery, though there's plenty of track.  There's no divider on the peninsula; this grants an unobstructed view across a deep scene allowing the distant section of railroad to provide a natural backdrop, tying the visible railroad together as a whole.

There is another side to this coin, however.  The shelves of locomotives lining the walls illustrate a common "problem" I suspect many model railroaders have; we're collectors and we end up with more equipment than our layouts can hold.  I'd be curious to know if the layout builder in the video runs this equipment or if they're simply on display.  Even so, this type of layout does a good job of managing many trains, cycling them on and off the visible portion of the railroad and offering each a chance to make an appearance or do some work.
 

Drug Store Saga, Part III

Here's the belated but as-promised continuation of the Scale Structures Limited Drug Store project.  Let's start around back:

 
The windows and doors in this image are merely set in place for now to avoid dings while heavier construction continues.  The vertical gaps will be covered by drain pipes with scuppers near the top and the horizontal line will be hidden by a wide sign attached to the wall.  In this way the wall can remain removable to access wiring and details inside the building's second and third floors.  I had thought I might use magnets to hold the wall in place but a simpler solution will be sticky wax or even double sided tape.  Below, the view with wall removed:

Access granted.  You may proceed with detailing.

The above image shows the structure from beneath being braced before the brick had been applied.  I have since broken one joint in order to "straighten" one wall.  Just like real house construction, there's no such thing as a truly straight wall.  Everything must be shimmed and even then it doesn't quite make it true, plumb or square but in the end it looks pretty good.  More on shimming and imperfection in the next post where I discuss the fancy trim. <shudder>.

I'll close this post with an image I shared on Instagram recently.  I'm quite happy with how this little bar turned out.  The actual serving counter is complete as well but isn't shown here.  Still need to make bar stools and a display stand for the middle of the room but otherwise the detailing for the interior is coming along nicely.  Oh and of course it needs paint - that should go without saying but I'll mention it to be clear.  Probably a wood stain, but we'll see.

Stand-ins

The drug store project has led me down a path I hadn't intended to take just yet.  Well, two, actually, but one (LED lighting) is the subject of another post.  I put the under-construction drug store in place on the layout only to find its presence altering the way I perceived the rest of the scene.  That is, I'm really happy with how it looks, where it looks; a tall, ornate gem on a prominent corner where the detail can be appreciated.  But Strickland's Service Station suddenly didn't look right across the street.  The Purina building adjacent to the drug store didn't fit right either.  Hmm.  

Two things were at play.  I had grown accustomed to seeing the Purina building and Strickland's on their diorama.  That setting was more rural and both structures were in different orientations to their respective streets as well as having a bit more room to spread out, so to speak.  On the Pine Branch Park layout the orientation was different and the setting more urban.  Strickland's sat on a corner on the diorama and that suited its odd porch/drive-through design.  The Purina building was on a dirt lot, set back far from the road.  

The white demitasse cup stands-in for the bandstand. Note the trolley on the street.

It was an easy decision to replace Strickland's with a bandstand.  I had already found great photos of Winter Haven, Florida in which a city park, complete with bandstand, is bisected by the Atlantic Coast Line main, complete with station.  A block of storefront businesses stands nearby.  I can put the (Campbell) bandstand at one end and the old horse-car at the other.  Voila, a trolley park located along the Orange Avenue line.

On the left, pool hall, lunch counter, ice factory.  On the right?

But the Purina building...that's harder for me to imagine a replacement.  Both structures could easily find homes on future versions of the Ocali Creek.  But the problem remains; what to do about the current situation?  In order to help me parse out a solution I decided to bring in some old structures I've been storing from previous layouts and, well, lay them out as stand-ins.  That's what's shown in these pictures.  

The tan paper behind the Purina building is the instruction plan for a pipe yard.

Each structure has its own story and some will get dedicated blog posts, no doubt.  But even this hurried-together approach has shown me I want to push the scene into a more urban direction.  Sure, in many towns there was a feed mill right near downtown, so there's good precedent for keeping the Purina building as is.  But even pushed back from the street it just doesn't fit.  What this location needs is a rail served business with a storefront that faces the street(s), right on the sidewalk, preferably two stories tall.

I haven't forgotten my previous post on fitting in the Chero Cola bottling plant somewhere, so maybe this is the spot.  That was back in April of 2021.  My, how things have changed since then.  Things are likely to change again a few times before structures get mounted in place.  Stay tuned.

Decommissioning a Diorama

My National Model Railroad Build Off 2022 diorama has served its purpose and now, for the greater cause of reorganizing my garage, has been decommissioned.  All the structures, trees, people and details have been saved.  One of the structures will find a new home in Ocala Springs on the current railroad, but another that was headed that way will find a different home.  More on that in a future post.

I tried to save the brick street with its track but was unable and that's okay.  While the brickwork was sufficient for the diorama, I'd not have been entirely happy with it on its own.  That is one reason to build a diorama - the chance to try new techniques without any pressure.  I salvaged the rail but naught else.  I did manage to save the spur next to the Purina building and will be incorporating it into a display stand...someday.