Working outside the Home Road

Many of us have helped friends build their own layout in some manner or another. It might be the physical construction, adding scenery elements, or creating rolling stock/engines for them. I was challenged (or maybe just asked) by my fellow ONR modeler Bram Bailey to build Stroebel Enterprises Ltd.  Bram decided to add some interest to the Elizabeth Bay section of the layout by adding an agricultural industry. It is a grain elevator and potato warehouse owned by the Stroebel family. Bram tossed the challenge out to me see if I wanted to build the structures and I of course said yes. Then the challenge was extended to paint the switch engine which will serve the area.

I agreed and a few months ago made the trek to the other side of the Cleveland area to pick up the kits that Bram had for the area. The long brick building in the center is the Potato Warehouse and the white buildings on the right make up the Grain elevator complex. The HQ is a DPM kit that came from the estate of Jim Moore, the spud warehouse is two Columbia feed mills (Walthers 933-9030) bashed end to end and the Grain elevator is a Valley Growers Association kit (Walthers 933-3096) built pretty much to its design, but custom finished. The warehouse required a new roof, since the parts supplied by the kit were just about 1/16-in. to small and actually had been made so that the user could score the roof and bend the single roof piece to fit. So a quick dive into the spare parts and styrene box found a few pieces long and thick enough for the job. Placing the new shingles on the roof also proved to be a small challenge as I couldn't get them to adhere to the styrene quickly enough with the long sheets I was using. I tried using painters tape to keep them tacked in place for a few minutes, but even that came with its own problems as several sections peeled away the top of the shingle from the backing paper.  If you look closely enough you can see some darker areas on the roof, which are pieces of sheet metal which the company has used to patch the roof.  The roofline even has some lighting rods installed in case  some thunderclouds roll through the area.  

The HQ building was repainted to match the dark color of the warehouse, and then lightened by adding gray as the mortar and some weathering powders. The warehouse and elevator were also weathered using a variety of colors available from pan pastels.

Last week I decided that sufficient details, weathering and overall progress had been made and I was ready to declare the buildings complete.  As you can see, Bram is knee deep in other projects for the layout, so we unfurled the plastic cover and roughly set them into place. This is on the lower level which is undergoing some scenery addition by his crew.  I'm looking forward to see how the scenery crew finishes the area.

I'm presently in the process of finishing a Key Alco S-2 that will be the Stroebel Enterprises' industrial switcher. Now that I have some primer back in stock, painting the engine will come in the next few weeks. With Bram's layout shut down and no operating sessions until next spring at the earliest, I have plenty of time to paint the engine.  However, Bram has challenged me to design and build the Tryon Lumber complex on his layout.  A few months ago I gave him an extra planning mill from my layout. So after a few discussions, I'm going to tackle the design and build.  So I've been digging into the spec sheets and working on building configurations.  Looks like a good winter project to build all of those structures. 

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Yard Building

With the pandemic still in full lockdown mode, I finally got the time to build a small yard and retire a small temporary yard I had built years ago.  The new yard is 10 feet long and sits on two modules which are joined together.

As I was planning my new yard, which was to be situated at the end of the layout, I wanted to include some sort of yard office, as well as a freight shed that had been removed from a different part of the layout. Looking at some photos, I realized that I had enough room to make a fairly complete scene by using the Mechanical Building at Englehart as an example. The other side of the track would house my freight shed.

Drone view courtesy Mike Robin

South side of Bldg; scale house in right foreground

South side of Bldg

North and east walls of the Bldg

The build started with a general Pikestuff building kit, with a few extra side panels added and cut down in height to make a lower roofline. Unfortunately I only had photos of 3 sides of the building, and the pandemic cancelled two trips I had planned to get the info. So the west wall is a complete guess.

One detail that I noticed going back through several years of photos was that the roof and building sides have two different shades of blue, as well as downspout configurations. Perhaps due to a building expansion? Matching the weathering condition and color was a real challenge and although not a true match, the result is pleasing to my eye. Maybe I'll try to alter it at some later date.

One of the challenges was to match the various windows and their position on the wall without any true measurements.  Cutting the doors and windows would turn out to be fairly time consuming, as the Pikestuff panels are fairly thick plastic and required a steady hand and many knife blades to cut them all.

The challenge now is to complete the scene in the background by adding all of the details that you see in the upper photo.  I just finished building the small building directly behind the main structure, as well as removed the trucks from an old Athearn 40 foot ONR boxcar which has been parked in the weeds.

The gravel type pavement was created by pouring tile grout to the consistency of a slushy and then drawing it relatively flat and level across the area.   I plan to weather some of the gravel area with pan pastels to give it more of a well worn look.  Now I just have to find or build the suitable ONR service vehicle(s) to park outside of the building.

 

New Yard

 As I discussed in a previous entry, I had decided that the railroad really needed a much larger yard. The old yard was an afterthought and once I started operating from it, I realized its limitations.  Therefore, after some review, I opted to build two new modules, which totaled 10 ft in length. 

The Yard consists of a 5-track receiving yard using the Micro-Engineering ladder turnout system, a main line, plus two ready tracks for either building a train or taking one apart. So a total of 8 lines.  The last spur on the ladder will be storage for my vans.  Since the yard was planned to connect to an adjacent two-line module, an extra turnout was added to connect all tracks and make the yard accessible from two tracks. I don’t have room to make a ladder on both ends of the yard, which is a limiting factor, but when you’re out of real estate, you're out of luck until you can move into a different house.  Maybe the next house will allow for about a 20ft yard or larger.

After several weeks of laying cork and track, it was finally time to wire it.  Now I don't mind wiring, however, being under the layout night after night can be touch on the body, especially the eye sight.  However, I pressed on and wiring was completed late Saturday evening. Tested each track using several different engines and all was good. The final steps would be weathering the track and adding ballast. Started to weather the track at about 0100 Sunday using the paint pens I had purchased years ago. The plan was to avoid spraying all of the track and just apply some rust or grime to the sides via the pen method.  All good and I got two tracks done before realizing that it was late and I was running out of energy to complete.  Next morning I started to finish the weathering and actually loaded the yard with every caboose or van in Ontario Northland terms that I own, plus about a dozen freight cars.  Success!!! Completed the task by installing some ground throws.

This week I will start on some scenery work. I still need lots of cinder ballast to complete the track work and adjacent areas.  The green foam and sculptamold shown on the left side of the photo will become scrub grass and weeds, as well as some new trees to make a barrier for the module and regular basement storage items.

 

Here we grow again !!!

 2020 has been the year of the pandemic, which has seen model railroad show after show cancelled, as well as friends operating sessions put on hold.  However, for those in this hobby it has also allowed more time to work on the layout or build some models, as there just wasn't much out-of-doors socializing going on and working from home became the safest way to avoid the virus.  I took the opportunity to paint and decal various pieces of rolling stock, work on some general scenery and more.

I kept looking at the layout and wondering how I could build a bigger yard as well as add a few more industries.  While I had built a small yard next to my work bench, the optimal word was that it was small and had become a bottleneck for moving traffic.  In my mind it came down to two solutions: 1) build a second level above the island which houses the paper mill and lumber mill (via the addition of a helix) or 2) tear out some areas and build some new modules that would allow a larger yard and possibly some industries. Thus began a review and evaluation of what I really wanted the layout to finally look like, as this is realistically the final time I will be able to expand into basement space used for other purposes. During some recent plumbing problems, I heard the message that my hobby has taken up too much of the basement.  I will say that the plumber seemed to like my railroad, as on his second trip to the house in 6 months he was heard to remark "oh the house with the model trains. I'd like to see them running".

Adding a second level was problematic for two reasons. The first being that I would have to move my island area outward from its position, so that I could add lateral supports to the 2x4 framing that was used to construct them. While I could move the modules and install another set of vertical supports followed by horizontal supports to lay the upper level on, there was a pesky metal column support for the steel beam which supports the house in the way.  The other issue with this modification would be the need to construct of a real estate eating helix.  Using a 30-inch radius, I would easily end up with a helix that was close to 6 ft in diameter. Lots of wasted space there and I have already torn out a helix about 5+ years ago due to its wasted space.  Definitely not high on my priorities to go through the exercise again, although I had saved all of the hardware from the previous helix.. 

Building new modules also came with a few problems. First and foremost would be that the space for the Nephton mine complex would have to be changed.  Actually it turns out that it would be lost. While hated to lose this industry, especially since I have built a fair number of rolling stock to support it, it simply wouldn't fit. So all buildings have been boxed up for its construction in the next version of the layout.

On the plus side, several months after starting my review process, fellow Freemo modeler Tim Moran got in touch and said he had a couple of 45 deg modules that he would be parting with. A quick email and Tim and I were arranging to meet at the local Walmart parking lot complete with our Covid19 masks in and put them into the back of my car. So parts of a previous 2x4ft module were re-built, becoming a new small rural Ontario town complete with grain elevator business, and this new modules spliced between the two 45's. Although still unnamed and in need of some details, a number of wooden buildings have found a new home of the layout.  

Trackage and wiring completed...on to scenery

One step closer, I still needed to build some modules for a new yard.  But wait, nice weather days in November allowed me to do that. Therefore, yard construction will be included in a new blog entry.