Ideal (cottage) workshop

We are fortunate enough to be able to spend a couple of weeks as a family at a cottage near Parry Sound, ON.  With that much free time ahead of me, I seized the opportunity for some major catch-up on track laying.  Into the car went tie strips and switch kits from Proto 87 Stores, as well as a supply of paints and basic tools.

The first order of business was painting the tie strips. I followed the method Lance Mindheim outlined in his excellent book, How to Build a Shelf Layout. Before we left I had airbrushed the strips with Modelmaster light grey. At my outdoor cottage work table I tacked the strips to the sticky side of shelf cupboard liner and brought out a tube of raw umber oil paint and mineral spirits.

Lance's instructions are to thin the oil to the consistency of weak tea with the thinner. I washed the paint onto the strips, brushing in the long direction of the ties.  To my eye the resulting color was far too light, so I applied another wash. Better, but still too light brown.

Referring to pictures I took of the trackage in Elmira, even though the tops of the ties are all different shades of brown and grey, the underlying dark creosote brown is evident on the exposed ends and sides of the ties.  The question is, how do I duplicate that variety of color?  I can try another coat of the raw umber, but I'm afraid that the details in the tie strips will be covered too much by the time I get a nice dark colour. And selectively painting the sides and ends will be difficult, or at the very least very time-consuming.  Perhaps going dark and then dry-brushing the tops of the ties before gluing down the rail will be the way to go.

I'll have to figure I out, as I need the ties painted in order to be able to assemble the switches, which is the big goal to accomplish before going home.

More progress made than you'd think . . .

Quite a bit of work was accomplished on the layout shortly after my last post, it's just taken a long time to get around to writing about it. 

The first bit of progress was made with putting down the track support structure.  I chose to follow the advice of Jim Richards in the October, 2010 MR and use EasyMat, a foam underlayment available at Home Depot, instead of the more traditional cork strips.  I purchased a 4 ft wide roll that came in considerably less expensive than purchasing Midwest cork roadbed.  As shown in the article, I created a simple jog for cutting strips, but chose not to bevel the sides, figuring I could use caulking to more easily do that once the roadbed was installed. 

My original plan had been to lay the track directly on the foamboard base, but I was concerned about how I would accommodate the profile of the terrain at the module joints where the foamboard is level with the top of the end joists.  I was not looking forward to carving ditch profiles into the plywood.

In the July 2013 MR Tony Koester has an interesting article on using 3/8" thick foamboard to help shape the profile of the ground on either side of the track.  The pictures got me thinking and I decided to cut slightly wider strips of underlayment to place under the main support strips (which are basically as wide as the ties), thus increasing the height of the track profile.  This would give me the flexibility I was looking for in creating ditches on either side of the roadway to support the fact that the track usually sits above the surrounding terrain.  Roads will be able to come up to the level of the track at crossings and then go back down the other side, just like you see out in the field.  Where required, sidings could also easily drop down below the main.

In the pictures you'll see that I've laid the main and a portion of the passing siding in Elmira.  I've stopped short in the corner until I've proven to myself that I can build a reliable curved turnout. 

On the end closest to the steps I'm still undecided on the total length of the town.  To maintain a passing track length close to my desired 8 ft (which scales out to about 3/4 of the actual passing track length, accommodating 13 55' tank cars instead of 16), I might have to insert a 3 or 4 ft section between the end module and current end of track at the doorway.  This is necessary as I do not want every turnout on the south end of Elmira being on the curve leading into town.  That seems like it's just asking for trouble.

In future posts I'll add the current trackplan and talk a little bit about the genesis of the plan as well as the construction details.

Inertia is not on my side. Or, how to delay learning a new skill for a very long time.

It's amazing how long it can take to start something new.  Take for instance airbrushing.  Being shown how easy it is to spray track at the Nordel model railroad club in Hockessin, DE, I decided to finally build a booth to be able to put my Aztek to use.  I combined what I liked from the information offered by various people in the Model Railroad Hobbyist (mrhmag.com) forums and built a fair-sized booth. 

That was a year ago.  With my shelf layout's benchwork completed and a desire to paint my Central Valley tie strips prior to gluing them down, I needed to get my equipment set up and start learning to airbrush.  All that was holding me back now was fear of the unknown.  So this past weekend I positioned the booth in my basement storage room next to the window, hooked up some dryer exhaust tubing out the window, and plugged my compressor in.

And there it's sat for the last 3 days.  Not for lack of time for me to get out the Aztek and start practicing on some cardboard, but mostly due to that inertia that keeps me from trying something new until I'm 100% sure I've got all the angles covered.  I feel like I need to now do a bunch of research on airbrush techniques, and how to clean the tool properly, and which air pressures and paint-to-thinner ratios to use, etc.  You get the picture.  Manufacturing myself a to-do list to keep from starting.

Well, my plan is to just get some paint, a piece of scrap cardboard, and some Windex as thinner/cleaner, and start messing about with it on Friday, as one son has baseball games the next two nights.  Because after this airbrushing hurdle, there's several other things waiting to be tackled, including handlaying track and turnouts.  Time to get going on this layout-building thing!

Why I chose to model what I model, part deux

I believe it didn't take very long after I decided in my early teens that model railroading would be my hobby for me to start planning a dream layout.  You know, the one that would fill my parents' basement and then some, requiring an addition to the house (not to mention a Lotto 6/49 win).  I've been carrying that dream around from country to country, house to house, for 30 years.  Have I built that dream layout?  Of course not.

Reality in the form of a fairly nomadic professional existence, a wife and four children, and the lack of free time that all of that entails, has limited me to starting several roughly 5'x9' layouts.  Two ovals of track so that my sons wouldn't necessarily crash into each other all the time, and a chance to practice building benchwork, laying track, and wiring up a DCC system.  Good experience to gather, but nowhere close to a dream layout.

So when we recently moved back to Ontario, I found myself once again in a rented home, no dedicated train room space available, but this time with two advantages that allowed me to start what I would call a long-term, serious model railroad.  Firstly, I now lived closer to the prototypes that I've always wanted to model, which is  a huge source of inspiration.  Secondly, I happened upon first the blog and then the books of Lance Mindheim, and through his writings to other folks sharing many of the same thoughts.

Lance's philosophy that immediately caught my attention was that you didn't have to have a huge layout to enjoy the hobby.  I'm a bit of a lone wolf modeller anyways, so I doubt that I would ever be able to scare up a bunch of people to run a regularly scheduled operating session.  But I knew from being a member of the Nordel Model Railroad Club in Hockessin, DE, that operating was hugely fun.  Operating what is basically a switching branch, following Lance's inspiration, should provide the ideal amount of railroading to fit my budget, inclinations, and schedule..

Budget: there's never enough money available for a model railroad(er).  Narrowing my focus down to one branchline in a specific time period suddenly made it possible for me to shed all the interesting but now extraneous models that I'd collected over the years.  In theory it should also keep me on the straight and narrow should I wander into a hobby shop or show.  And the freed up funds would allow me to build a high-quality, highly detailed small layout.  Bingo!

Modelling inclinations:  I hold myself to very high standards.  I want to build close to museum quality track, have very detailed & weathered cars, locomotives, and buildings, and really believable scenery.  Frankly, the only person I trust to meet those standards is me.  If I don't, I won't have a problem ripping it out and doing it better the second or third time.  I'm a perfectionist, which means I frustrate myself and others as I strive towards perfection.  It's unattainable, but in the striving comes the learning and improvement, and for me, the fun.

Schedule:  I travel a lot for work and also have four small children, so my hobby time should be quite limited.  Only by grace of an incredibly supportive, understanding, and patient wife am I able to devote as much time to my obsession as I have.  A small layout means that I will better be able to balance family, work, and hobby, while living within my means and being more likely to achieve a certain degree of completeness in a reasonable timeframe.

With all this in mind, I was able to settle on a prototype (CN), location (Waterloo spur St. Jacobs & Elmira for now), timeframe (1988 - 1993), and layout style (sectional, around the walls on shelf brackets).  That's pretty much the hardest part.  30 years on I'm ready for some serious modelling!  Let's go!

A few words on how I ended up choosing this branch line as the subject of my modelling.  There were two main sources of inspiration for me: 1) having attended the University of Waterloo myself, whose campus the spur runs through, and 2) Lance Mindheim's (and others') writings on the play value and interest to be had in running a small, prototype-based layout.

The first point is pretty much self-explanatory.  I would venture a guess that most modellers are drawn to the trains they watched in their formative years, when they first had the freedom to go out into the world and could choose where to go to watch trains.  For me that was initially Canadian National's Oakville sub, running through my hometown.  I made many GO train trips to Toronto in the mid- to late '80s and '90s to scout out the track layout around Spadina and the CN Tower, and actually drew many trackplans to fit an expanded version of my parents' house.  I wonder where those pieces of paper are right now.  I'm pretty sure they've not been thrown away.  Looking back, one has to wonder how I thought I would be able to manage modelling a 3- and 4-track mainline, pre-DCC to boot!  We'll leave that to Jason Shron and others.

It was while attending university that I came to appreciate CN's secondary mainline through Kitchener and the occasional short local that scooted through the UW campus.  Unfortunately I did little to document it, and remained ignorant of the CP operations that were abandoned just as I graduated.  However, those times and trains have kept coming back to me over the years as I've planned layouts, started the occasional layout, and certainly as I've collected rolling stock in anticipation of having my dream layout.

There have been many distractions along the way, in terms of deciding on which prototype to follow.  Living in Germany, there was no shortage of small branch lines with healthy doses of picturesque scenery, steam and/or electric motive power, plenty of passenger trains that I'd actually had the chance to ride, and interesting freight operations.  

In Georgia an absolute gem of a prototype is the former Gainesville Midland RR, now CSX.  Multiple six-axle diesel consists pulling long strings of feed hoppers through the razorback hills between Gainesville and Athens, small-town Southern stations with big-time Amtrak & NS operations, shared switching of the local feedmills, and kudzu everywhere!  I might still come back to that one.

A move to Delaware introduced me to the former Octararo branch of the PRR, which was operated by a series of shortlines with interesting motive power pulling short trains through the beautiful countryside near Kennett Square, PA - mushroom capital of the world!  Just as Gainesville was chicken capital of the world!

Upper New York State offered the water level route of the NYC/CSX, but more interesting was Susquehanna's Utica branch.  The list of fantastic prototypes could further include the Delaware Lackawanna in Scranton, the Maryland Midland in lower Delaware, the Ontario Southland/Guelph Junction Railway, the Livonia & Avonville in the Southern Tier, and many more that would each make a fascinating history lesson as well as intriguing model railroad.

In the end, it always seems to come down to what you feel the most connected with.  Model railroading is very much an exercise in nostalgia, even if you're modelling what you see outside your window right now.  You are capturing a moment in time, and for most people that moment recedes into the past with each day that the railroad in the basement exists.  We look for ways to capture a favourite location/motive power/operation, or perhaps just the feeling we ourselves experienced at a particular time in our lives.

For me, that time was my university years, where the trains were captivating, not yet obsessively so as they are now, but where the adventure of being away from home was the larger picture.  Building a model railroad based on the CN operations of that era allows me to also think back fondly on the friends, cars, travels, and adventures of that time with each trip into the basement to work on the railroad.

More on narrowing down the choice of a prototype and the role my second source of inspiration played in the next post.

Welcome to my blog.  I am just starting an HO scale model based on late 1980's Canadian National Railway operations on the rail line from Waterloo through St. Jacobs to the end of the line in Elmira, Ontario.  I hope to post prototype information as I find it, get questions answered as they come up, and provide a means of documenting the hows and whys of building my modular railroad as it is created.