From rehash to remarkable

At some point as a model railroader, you find certain aspects of the hobby that are your area of specific interest. For some, it is operations. Others prefer building structures, and others yet enjoy DCC programming and the electronic side of things. The beauty of model railroading is that you can bounce around from project to project if you would like to, and get in a little taste of everything. This develops a highly varied skill set, and you learn far more than you would in say, knitting. Personally, I love building models - be it rolling stock or structures - from kits or scratchbuilding, so that I end up with something unique for my layout or modules. Unfortunately, too often modelers take what they can get and just use it in the form it was purchased in. This is why you see the same structures and rolling stock over and over in the pages of MR and RMC. Its called "STBS" - "Shake The Box Syndrome", where modelers just assemble whats in the box exactly as the instructions indicate. If you're happy with that, and it suits your abilities, then great - enjoy! However, there more you can do, you just have to think outside that box!

I like to revisit old projects and "spruce them up" to avoid this problem. 10 or 15 years ago, I followed those instructions to the letter and built many Walthers Cornerstone buildings. They're great kits, and when starting out they make creating a large structure far less duanting than using DPM wall sections or plaster castings. One of my earliest jobs was the good old George Roberts Printing Company. You remember this one - SO cool because it had the indoor dock for loading & unloading, despite the building not being that much longer than a boxcar anyway! Well, I assembled & painted it something like this:



When I started working on the new layout, I couldn't really find a spot for this, and I hate it when people end up designing a railroad around the footprint of their stock of assembled structures. So out came the razor saw, with the intent of making this into a background building along the yard. Essentially, I disassembled the structure at the wall joints, resulting in a series of flat panels. These were then toyed with until a suitable arrangement was found. The part of the structure that wold have been over the tracks wasn't appealing to me, with the closed sides. So I grabbed some drinking straws on a trip to the local burger joint, a couple pieces of scrap wire, and made a series of concrete columns with steel rod bracing between them.



Some styrene strips were used around the base of the overhanging floors to conceal the connection, and then I built up some blocking from styrene for the column bases. From there I popped out the windows as best I could, choosing to leave them in the molded color as they came in the kit. I grabbed an extra loading door from the scrap box, and some corrugated metal for patch work in a couple of places, which were painted before the rest of the structure, and installed later. I wanted to create a gray brick and concrete structure, so I studied a bunch of photos on line to see what sort of colors and tones were prevalent. I sprayed the newly formed structure with Rustoleum Gray Auto primer, then brush-painted Badger "Concrete" onto the pilasters and beams. With that color applied, I mixed up a few random tones of gray, brown, and white paints to highlight individual bricks here and there. This was followed by weathering with AIM powders to show some age, dust, and grime. I added some decals of graffiti and signage from my collection, though admittedly I need a new sign for the top of the building once I can dig up some old logos from the late 1970's.



I stepped back and looked at the project, thinking that it still looked like it needed some things. Then I remembered some photos I took on a visit to Amsterdam, NY where there's a treasure trove of old warehouses and factories still in use. In particular, notice the windows:



Unfortunately, I wasn't about to take the time or expense to replace the windows that came with the kit. But knowing that you wouldn't see any light through them, I cut out scraps from a black cardboard box to cover the backs of the windows. Before attaching them, I raided the kids' construction paper and grabbed some bright colors to glue in random individual panes to replicate replacement glass that had been added over the years. When BLMA released their etched metal air conditioners a while back I bought a set, and this was a perfect opportunity to use one, where the original window frame had broken. Perhaps a shift boss was getting too warm up there on the 3rd floor.

Some minor touch-up weathering work, a couple of roof vents, and fixing of scenery around the base, and we're done for now. Still some work to be done on the track and getting rid of the awful color left by some paint pens I tried. But this short project ( only took a week of evenings at the most ) renders a great structure along a wall, and it cost me absolutely nothing to create. For a sense of scale, this is where it now sits, affixed to the backdrop:



I have since done similar work with a pair of Front Street Warehouse kits, and with that project nowhere close to being finished, I'll try to post some in-progress shots along the way.

So dig through the bins of old structures and have at it. Chances are if they're sitting in a box somewhere, they're not doing you much good anyway. There's nothing to lose except for perhaps a miscut wall, and the potential of gaining a one of a kind structure for your layout.

Rolling stock, the old fashioned way

Back in the day, quite a few models were available that are rather hard to find right now. Specifically, Walthers made some great rolling stock pieces that were pretty good for their time; the PS 4427, Waffle boxcar, Jordan Spreader, are all great models if you're willing to put some TLC into them. One that I was not really aware of though was their 5-bay pressure differential covered hopper model. For its time, the tooling was exceptional, resulting in a nicely detailed model. I came across a cache of these a while back, including a pair of undecs, and picked them up for flour service on my layout. Here's one of them:



I added a Plano roofwalk, new wire grabs, air hoses, cut bars, and some extra detailing on the undercar piping, and this model looks even better.

This is my kind of project, using these older kits to create a knockout model. It often doesn't take much, even if starting with a decorated car, and it is well worth the effort when you're putting these on the same rails as newer models. After all, isn't this hobby "Model Railroading", rather than just "Model Train Collecting"?

Build something - you'll like it.

In the Beginning.....

A lonely boxcar still lettered for Penn Central is spotted at the Market Basket warehouse in Geneva.

I suppose thats how all blogs start - sort of cliche, but thats how it goes. I've been lucky enough to be a part of a couple different modular layout groups from across New York, first with NMRA-type modules, and most recently with Free-mo as the standard. While the latter has certainly provided more operational flexibility, prototypical modeling, and dedication amongst participants, there are still limitations. You can't build that awesome kitbashed warehouse thats 5 stories tall. OK, you can, but try transporting it to more than one event without having to re-assemble it. You can't have a yard with relatively tight curves. You have to be careful about placement of switches, heights of the railhead, scenery completion...the list goes on. Don't get me wrong - I love my modules, and I look forward to the one or two shows a year that bring them together with those from other fantastically gifted modelers and all around good friends from across the Northeast.

There's a room on the back of our house, one that appears to have been added on somewhere down the line, but was likely the victim of a budget-minded renovation during the depression. A couple of inches out of level, un-insulated, and in bad need of some TLC, we had used it more or less as a storeroom for toys for the kids. But as they had grown a bit, they liked playing in their rooms more, and my wife didn't like the idea of using it for a scrapbook room. You know, her feet might get cold or something. This gave me a space that was readily available, and I was certainly willing to give it a well-needed facelift. The old carpet came out, and some over-run wood flooring from Pioneer Millworks was installed. A fresh coat of paint, some crown moulding, and a couple of new outlets and it was ready to go. An oil-filled electric space heater provides necessary warmth, and the summer months allow for open windows and a nice south breeze. The only stipulation to these newly acquired trackage rights was the storage of my wife's elliptical machine, which tucks out of the way just fine.

With a blank canvas before me, as well as some 2 x 4's and 3/4" cabinet grade plywood, my good friend Andy and I got to work. We started by ripping 2 x 4's in half and placing them 2 corners of the room, and at 2' intervals in between. These provided the anchor points for the benchwork, rather than screwing into the wall and repeating that with any changes that would inevitably happen. Using plywood for the benchwork is crucial. Not only does it save a bunch of money, but it gives you a far more stable layout. In my environment, where the temperature would be changing frequently, along with humidity swings common in our area, this would make for a layout that would stand the test of time. I used similar techniques to those used when building modules. You're basically building a box, and then placing support joists at 12" intervals in between. The frames were then screwed to the 2 x 2 posts, and then angles brackets carried the load from the front of the layout down to the posts. Where the depth of the shelves were pretty narrow, 12" or so, I didn't use any other supports, just screwing the inside of the framework directly to the walls. The peninsula that came out into the middle of the room was supported on the rear by the wall-mounted benchwork, and on the end by a pair of 2 x 2 legs with angled braces.

Notice......there's been no mention of a trackplan, yet there I was framing up a layout. Huh? Well, at that time, my goal was to pack as much track as I could into this thing, and did I ever. My friend Dave and I talked about the design a lot, and I fixated on a plan that published in Model Railroader quite some time ago. It had switching, a diamond, a yard, everything I wanted. Yeah - did I mention that this room is only 9 x 10 feet? After adhering my 2" foam insulation board, I went to town getting track installed. No roadbed here, as it was going to be looking like a well-worn branchline or spur in the late 1970's.

I proudly declared trackwork complete before the snow flew, about a month after starting, and invited a couple friends over to operate on the layout. Ouch - you had to break your train in two to run around it, curves so tight that 1/2 my rolling stock didn't operate properly let alone locomotives larger than a 44 tonner, and each industry ( I think I crammed 12 of them in there ) barely had room for one car to be spotted. Sound more frustrating than enjoyable? They told me they liked it, but I knew that it needed a lot of work.

Phase two involved re-building 3/4 of the layout to make fewer industries, with longer spurs. However, there were still issues with curves being far too tight, and overall it looked like there was just too much going on. I left the layout alone for a few months, focusing on rolling stock projects, constantly bumping into the peninsula every time I was going in and out of the room. Then one day this past January, my nephew and I were staring at the layout talking about how I wanted to make it work better. Painful as it was, we removed the peninsula and the tiny wing on the West wall, breaking it down to an L-shaped layout with a overall length of a whopping 19 feet. I cleared the layout of track all the way back to the yard, which was the only thing I had been happy with all along. With a wide open room, and a much smaller area to focus on, I began looking at the work of Lance Mindheim, well-known for his modern layout depicting Miami's urban appearance perfectly. Beyond the perfect structures, creative techniques, and superb attention to detail though, there's a certain simplicity to his modeling. An 8' section of layout might only have one industry - and thats really OK!

Pondering the industries I really wanted, the timeframe I wanted to recreate, and developing the story behind the layout, the Seneca Terminal Railroad was born.