Drug Store Saga, Part 1

I'm calling this a Saga right at the get-go because I can already tell it's going to be one of those builds.  The drug store in the title is the Scale Structures Limited Corner Drug Store.  A classic structure, to be sure, but the model is not without its flaws.  Even on its release in 1972 the folks at Model Railroader took note of how the angles of the bay walls don't match the angle of the ornate wall cap casting.  (More on that later.)  However they also noted one of the kit's strengths; the construction allows for easy rearranging of the walls.

Early in the process, before the fitting frustration set in.

In that regard I have taken things one step beyond.  The space intended for this structure in Ocala Springs is located on an intersection and bounded by a spur at the rear and the next building down the block.  I've got leeway down the block as that next building hasn't been decided yet.  But between the street and the spur I can only go so far.  However, the problem was not that the building was too wide, rather it was too narrow.  I envisioned an alley between the building and the spur, but this space was large enough to shoehorn in another structure.

The solution was to lop off some of the long end of the drug store and glom it onto the shorter side.  Now my structure is a bit more squarish.  Careful measuring meant the window openings could be kept evenly spaced without trimming and the surgery was relatively painless.  But I'm making it sound all too easy.  Before I even reached this point I had struggled with the aforementioned angle difficulty, and realized another aspect the folks at MR noted; the need to carefully read the instructions (many times).  

Note the original rectangular "floor" set onto the roof of my reconfigured structure

This freedom and flexibility in construction means the kit doesn't drop together in a simple sequence of tabs and slots.  The stiffeners inside the structure are the floors.  To begin with I cut new ones from thicker card as I couldn't see the thin stuff provided doing a good job for the long haul, even sprayed with sanding sealer.  This allowed me to correct the issue with the bay wall angles.  You are instructed to measure and mark the floor levels.  The plans give you an indication of where the first floor goes, and the roof along one wall, but not the others.  

And you're instructed to build the thing "upside down", aligning walls from the top.  That's fine for the front walls and bay, but not the back walls which are two different heights.  Add to that the challenge of a too-small wall and laying out the floors gets confusing quickly.  This tiny wall is some sort of mistake, a wrong part.  At first I thought it was N scale but a quick examination with my scale rule checked against the plans and no, I have no idea what this shrunken wall is.  I didn't lose sleep over it but, using the plans, I was able to fabricate a new one which is fine since I had planned to move that wall's windows to a different wall.

"Shrinky Dink" wall in the center, replacement on the left, relocated windows on the right. And all this before I decided to reconfigure the walls.

To recap at this point; building the original kit as instructed is already challenging and then I had to go and make it even more so.  But the problem became the solution.  I don't have a set of precast plastic walls that don't fit, I have cardstock.  Cardstock can be easily replaced.  The card in the kit for the die-cut walls appears to be good quality material.  It cuts cleanly and sands well.  No watermarks but I'd suspect a quality similar to Crescent or Strathmore board.  

This post has already gone far too long so I'll save the tribulations of working with the castings and printed wall textures for another part.  Thanks for reading.

Time to Think Again

It has been over a year since I wrote the post, Time to Think.  There I pondered what to do with the space I have been blessed with; a garage.  Since then I have determined that space is not so good for model trains.  In fact, it needs more work than I realized even though it isn't a bad space for a workshop and storage.  It will be a fine place to build Halloween props each year, work on home improvement projects or generally make a mess I wouldn't make in the house.  In fact, I built this year's NMRBO diorama in that space and the Pine Branch Park railroad has lived there since we moved in.

Can you find the diorama in this image?

But the trains can't live there much longer.  The winter was indeed cold and damp.  No leaks in the roof, but seepage from the concrete floor needs to be addressed eventually.  The summers have been hot and dry but thanks to our evening lows the mornings are pleasant and the garage can be used for a few hours.  If the weather is mild and the evening breeze picks up it is downright enjoyable with the garage door open (and a cold beverage!).  The spiders aren't too bad, nor the dust, and so far - knock on wood - no sign of rodents!  Still, it is a hostile environment for vintage craftsman structures and rolling stock!

So where will the trains go?  As I mentioned in my post "New Digs", this house has a second living room we call the den.  There I'll be sharing the space with my son's computer desk, a bookshelf with display cabinet, and a TV area.  The bookshelf was built last fall and just in the last month I installed new lighting.  My son's computer area is well established and he regularly plays VR games in that end of the room, wildly swinging his arms, working up a sweat!  The workbench has been moved to make room for the trains.

Percy enjoys his new bed atop a Helmer cabinet between my workbench and the sliding glass doors overlooking the back yard.  We both enjoy the natural light and the view.

 
All that remains before the trains come inside is to build some legs for the railroad.  In the garage, both this one and the last, it rested on metal shelving and that will remain in the garage.  In the den it will need legs with wheels; not that it will be rolled around that often, but it will be convenient for photo shoots and cleaning.  Beneath the benchwork will be space for rolling carts.  These will hold paints, supplies, tools, etc. that don't fit in the Ikea Helmer drawers at the workbench.

I'm also going to make some shelves to go over the workbench.  The lowest will include a section of cork board for tacking up instructions (or maybe a metal strip for magnets).  As I've used this smaller bench I have discovered the need to set large plan sheets and even smaller instruction pages...somewhere.  Now that the cat is sharing the space, there's really no good place to put pages of plans.  My desk lamp seen in the photo above will be relocated and strip lighting will be attached under the lowest shelf.  This will not only give me a few more inches on the work surface, but the shelf will provide a place to attach a camera looking straight down onto the bench, should I decide to shoot a video or two.

Hopefully all this will be accomplished in September because October will be for building new Halloween yard haunt props and that time will be here soon!  Feel free to leave comments or questions down below and thanks for reading!

Found One!

I'd love to visit Japan someday, though the thought of spending 12 hours in a pressurized aluminum tube at 40 thousand feet over the Pacific does not thrill me at all.  So until that day when the stars align and time, funds and courage meet, I resign myself to exploring the land of the rising sun with Google.  My son got an Oculus VR headset for Christmas two years ago and we put Google Earth on there.  Warning, if you get vertigo, the feeling is real when you select a region and suddenly you're hovering in low Earth orbit next to the planet with empty space all around you.  <shivers>  Better to type in a street address and not be so high up.  Once you drop into street view the experience is pleasant, providing beautiful vistas, interesting structures and of course, trains.

Anyway, when walking in Kamakura one day I came across this:

Can you see it?  No?  Take a closer look:

Yes!  It is a model railroad.  I have no idea what this store actually sells, but they've got trains.  Maybe someone with better Google hunting skills can discover and let me know.  Some folks hunt for garden gnomes; I hunt for trains and this time I found a tiny railroad in a store window.

Pictures I Didn't Submit

Here are a few shots taken during the construction of my entry into the Walthers National Model Railroad Build Off contest for 2023.  These didn't make the cut.  I'll say more in the captions.

Doesn't everyone wash their walls?  This was to try and scrub away the tape residue from the window panes.  Yes, I masked every single window pane in order paint the bright blue windows white.  Because they're cast as one molded piece - clear, blue and white all together.  Who thought that was a good idea?

Fans of the 90s comedy "Frasier" may recognize this coffee mug.  My folks bought it for me at a yard sale, not knowing the connection to the show.  Neither did I until a fan pointed it out to me.  I use it nearly every Sunday.

This was the point in the process where I was considering a printed backdrop.  Didn't go that route, but was inspired by the imagery to model two Bald Cypress trees on the diorama.

And here are those Cypress trees being constructed outside, because my family couldn't stand the aroma of the super glue kicker.  Woodland Scenics tall columnar pines made a great trunk and armature.

The NMRBO Hurricane.  My workbench in the throes of scenic application.

My son Andrew was a great help setting up the photoshoots and used this opportunity to take some images of his own.  And I thought my hair was long when I was in high school.

Just One Tub

Here's a potentially troublesome thought.  If you had to evacuate your home in the event of a fire and could only take just one plastic storage tub of trains, models or railroad memorabilia, what would you put in it?  What would you deem irreplaceable enough to put in the car as you drive away from the house knowing you may return to a smoldering husk?  Let's say you had warning and the time given for selecting these items was 24 hours.  What would make the cut, and what would be left behind?

I faced this choice last year.  Thankfully we didn't have to load the kids and pets and precious few personal belongings into our cars and drive away, not knowing if we'd have a house to return to.  But this year's (early) fire season has once again raised the specter of this issue in my mind.  A few weeks ago a fire bug made a line across the south end of town, setting small fires as he went, only a couple miles away.  Thankfully our local crews were able to extinguish those before they grew. 

Then last week the wind shifted and the "August Complex" turned the sky orange.  This fire in the Mendocino National Forest north of our town has been burning since, well, early August.  The new reality in a world altered by climate change is a hotter, drier, more flammable California (with more intense but fewer rainstorms in the winter).  Times like these make a person reevaluate priorities, and a hobby gets moved down the list.

However, I'm not willing to abandon everything, particularly not the models I've customized.  I take seriously my role as steward of the rare finds I've acquired, lovingly crafted by modelers long gone.  Then there are models that speak to me which I prize more highly than their monetary value.  So when I began packing a tub last year I chose the contents based on their rarity, the emotions they conjure when I hold them, or the unbuilt kits and their potential to bring me joy as I build them in the future, possibly in a new home.

I won't itemize here the things in my tub, but merely submit this post as a way to raise the question for you, dear reader.  What would you put in just one tub?

Layout Alternative

When did a model railroad become a train layout?  I'm no model railroad historian, but I bet there was a time before we called it a "layout".  I've seen it described as a "pike" and this term seems even more dated, as if I should be wearing an engineer's hat with my shirt and tie and smoking a pipe as I run the trains while my family gazes on adoringly.  If I told a non-model-railroader I'm building a train layout in my garage, would they know what that meant?  Would they wonder if I were planning to set it up for a while then take it down, like a train around the Christmas tree? 

As someone who has worked in a field with specialized language, I also recognize that some words don't mean much to the average person.  If you go to a traditional church on Sunday you probably enter the narthex before going into the sanctuary for worship and perhaps afterwards spend time in the fellowship hall.  However, you didn't go to church, you went to a campus.  The church is the body of people, not the building they meet in, but how many folks know this distinction?  The narthex is the foyer or lobby or entryway and the sanctuary is the auditorium.  The fellowship hall is a different auditorium, but sometimes resembles a gymnasium or large meeting hall.  Some churches work hard to eliminate "churchy" language and label their spaces accordingly.  Others stick with traditional names and expect newcomers to learn them.

Dictionary.com offers TEN variant definitions of the word "layout" and NONE of them reference model railroading.  Not that this is inaccurate for our use, as most of the definitions refer to the arrangement of elements in a space whether on an advertisement or in a room.  I don't think "layout" presents the same difficulty in understanding, but I wonder if there are better words that describe what we're building and perhaps even what we're doing.  Language is important and if we model railroaders want to share our hobby with a non-modeling public in a straight-forward way perhaps some more useful language is in order.  Even within our ranks it might be helpful. 

Miriam Webster does include a reference to model trains in their definition of layout, but there's an issue with that one.  "Something that is laid out".  Sounds like something that is set up only to be taken down later.  When we build our model railroad do we do so in a temporary manner?  Very few times have I seen articles about model train setups that are meant to be run then put away by taking the thing apart and putting it back in a box.  And, I'd bet we wouldn't call those things "layouts", but train sets or something similar.

So what is the alternative?  What about simply calling it a model railroad?  If we are scaling down reality or some version of it, and running scaled-down electric trains through that setting, then we are modeling a railroad and railroading in miniature.  In light of my previous post on a track plan, I'm going to make a conscious effort to change my language from now on.  I'm not building a train layout in my garage.  I'm building a model railroad.

Garage Railroad Plan

I've always looked at those 4x8 project railroads in the model train magazines with an eye for what could be.  Sometimes there is great potential, sometimes they just don't work that well.  Granted, there has been much ink spilled over how to create a better plan using the same space required for a 4x8 (much greater than 4x8, considering aisles and access to three sides) so I won't go into that here.  But I will posit a contrary view for the utility of such plans as they are - a rectangle in the middle of a room.  When you have a room in which you can't use the walls, one of these space-hogging 4x's may be just the answer.

I have space in our house for a nice railroad on a shelf, but barring some sections that must be put up to run and taken down when done, that doesn't make for easy loop running.  Sometimes (quite often) I like to just sit back and watch a train roll.  In order to do that I need to build something larger, and the only space for that is our garage.  Bob Smaus once wrote an article in Model Railroader about the hazards of building in the garage, and I recommend it if you can find it.  Summer heat, winter cold, dust, spiders (black widows, and not the Southern Pacific RR kind!) and clutter all make for a challenging environment in which to build a model railroad.

However, I have decided I'm up for the challenge.  I recently set up a test loop of EZ track in the garage, ostensibly for testing the 2-6-0.  This is actually our Christmas loop but only when there's a tree in the middle.  I've been having so much fun running trains on that loop - despite the rough conditions in the garage - that I decided I could be very happy with a layout out there.

After much cogitation (the details of which I will spare you), I returned to a simple plan.  Behold the HO scale Morgan Valley RR, first featured in the January 1989 issue of Model Railroader in an article by Rick Henderson (click for larger, or right click and open in a new tab):

This plan has always stuck with me, dating back to the first days of my subscription to Model Railroader.  However, I've learned much since then about railroad operations, model and prototype, and right away I knew I'd need to modify this plan.  I started by removing the short switchback siding and a few others.

I added a parallel siding to an existing one, and shifted a few tracks to align on 90 degree lines.  This was because I was already envisioning a grid of streets.

The dark gray are major roads while the lighter gray are secondary alleys and parking areas.  I believe this should be a consideration in the earliest stages of a plan, as this is often how city planners would view development.  People inhabit cities, and need a way to get around.  On so many model railroads, particularly smaller ones like this, roads seem to be an afterthought and consequently the scene lacks believability.  Roads lead to structures, or in the case of the driveways, connect structures to streets.

Here the olive drab colored shapes represent industries or railroad structures, the blue colored blocks represent city buildings and the dusty rose colored shapes are residential homes.  Trees and water features have been added and some track features labeled.   It is my intention that the streets and buildings will provide a strong grid-like structural element.  The tracks interact with this structure as if, in some cases, they were put in place after the grid was laid down, and in others in concert with it or before it.  The tracks follow a small creek in one corner and pass through a low cut in another, next to the orange grove; otherwise the topography is essentially flat.

While I will discuss operating this layout in another post, suffice it to say for now that the railroad can handle both freight and passenger trains as it stands.  With a connection to staging (most likely a train-length turntable) as a fiddle yard, the variety of equipment increases.  For now it can be built using track I already own, and using many key structures which I already own.  One final note - the 'Motorcycle Cop' is a nod to a scene from an extinct Epcot Center attraction, the World of Motion.  Find a good video of this ride on YouTube and see if you can spot the cop behind the billboard.