Signs ( & other details)

One nice thing about smaller shelf layouts is that since you are not spending the bulk of your time building tall mountains and foresting them with thousands of trees, you get to spend more time on details, such as signs. It's the details that make the scene. In this case I have had multiple Bachmann sign packs sitting around for decades. You can tell they are old because the stop signs are YELLOW, exactly the way they existed in the early 1950s. Stop signs had white backgrounds until 1924 when they were ordered to become black letters on yellow signs. After 1954 the rule was changed to white letters on a red background.  Since this layout is deemed to be representative of the 1950s, the yellow signs fit in perfectly. This week I got to install a bunch of signs, RR cross-bucks, and crossing gates. The details add a lot to the scenes.

The South Westville - North Woodbury module is moving along. Grass and roads are in. The tracks have been wired but not yet tested, so the track ballasting remains on the "To Do" list. The houses of North Woodbury have been placed but the lights have not yet been connected.

The Holloway lumber yard in North Woodbury has been installed and stand-ins for the DelMonte food distribution center (South Westville) and the John Hack Pipe Supply (or Cornell Steel Fabricators (final vote not in yet.)) have been placed. I have some oversized Micro-Machine trucks at Holloway Lumber that actually fit in quite well.

Westville - Population 13

If you count each car's driver: 31. Far short of the current (2009) town population of 4,466. But at least my town now has some people. (Even if the people are outnumbered by the 34 trees on site.)

I trimmed the stores to fit the room available. I still need to rename the one to Mary Jane's Florist and letter the water tower but progress is our most important product (or is that General Electric?) Barry Brothers coal dock is in. Need to make something to fill the spot for the Buzby Bros. cement plant. The Texaco Refinery is waaaaay down the road.

N Scale magazine - Musings on Writing a Magazine Article

Wow! Dreams can come true! Received a courtesy copy of the November/December issue of N Scale magazine. It contains my article "Smoke Along the River - 50 Years Later" which highlights my now defunct old model railroad layout, the Schuylkill Division of the Pennsylvania RR.

Years ago I had submitted a contest article to Model Railroader which was quickly returned without comment. Last year, I was trying to get hold of an old issue of N Scale magazine and while communicating with the editor, Pamela Clapp, I asked if they would be interested in an article on my old railroad. She looked at the photos I had on the "My Railroad Dream World" site (http://myrrlayout.com/R/Aspfiles/DetailPage.asp?Xfer_Code=20001280&Scale=N). When she indicated that she would be interested I began writing the article.

To get published I think the main ingredient is a good photographer. My photos with an 8 Megapixel Canon camera were just OK. My daughter, who is a professional photographer, had taken pictures of the layout but her specialty was people, kids in particular. Her shots did not have the depth of field and lighting necessary for model work. Fortunately I had a friend at work, Bob Manning, who was also a published photographer. After a little coaxing (actually a lot of coaxing) he agreed to help out. Practically every picture used in the article was from his work.

As you can tell from my blog. I tend to be wordy and include excess parenthetical expressions, so I kept trimming the word excesses until I was comfortable enough to submit it.

Working with Pam was a pleasure. She is an expert at declining your suggestions without making you feel like you have been told "No". The magazine ends its articles with a silhouette of a caboose. Since this was a Pennsylvania RR article, I asked for a silhouette of an N5c cabin car. They just ignored that suggestion! :-)

What I learned is that if you want a certain photo design layout, you had better make that clear up front. To me the most glaring mistake is that the pictures did not capture the theme of the article. What I would have done is take the top picture on page 28 and spread it across 2 pages with an inset of the November 1958 picture of Carl Apple's Norfolk & Ohio "Smoke Along the River" centerfold. After all, that was the theme of the article. I brought this up when I received a mock-up of my article, along with a request for captions. When I asked for that, I was told it was too late in the process. So make clear your requests/suggestions up front. I thought I had done that when I submitted the initial article highlighting those 2 pictures but I think that concept got lost when the graphic artist began his work. (And I still haven't figured out why the track plan river was converted from blue/black to purple. Also my 4' and 2' aisles became 4" and 2" (kind of skinny :-) respectively).

My only other objection was the lack of overall pictures. My personal preferences is to see an overall layout shot or two so that you can visualize where the close-up shots fit into the big picture. Again I was told my suggestion was too late in the process (and the magazine also has capacity issues).

So if you want to write an article, DO IT! All they can do is say no (and Pam can do that so politely you won't even realize it). But first, get a good photographer (I'll send you Bob Manning's number :-)).

What a Difference a Day Makes, 24 (55) Little Hours (Trees)

                               Trees

           I think that I shall never see

          A poem lovely as a tree.

          A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

          Against the sweet earth's flowing breast;

          A tree that looks at God all day,

          And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

          A tree that may in summer wear

          A nest of robins in her hair;

          Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

          Who intimately lives with rain.

          Poems are made by fools like me,

          But only God can make a tree.

                             Joyce Kilmer.   1886–1918

Trees, I love them!

I spent an evening planting 55 of them on the Westville and Timber Creek modules and am stunned with the difference they make. I can't afford the "Super Trees" but the Heki versions still do a presentable job.

 

I did overdo the pine trees in the second Brooklawn circle area. It makes it look like more like a forested area than the moderately dense suburbia that it is in real life. But on the other side of the ledger, it is a dead space that needs to both  be filled in and hide the wall transition.

The PRSL is a totally new challenge to me. My previous layout  represented the moderately mountainous region along the edge of the Appalachians north to Allentown, PA. This layout is condemned to the relatively flat southern New Jersey plains (i.e. I probably won't get to reuse 99% of the 2,500+ puff-ball trees used on the PRR Schuylkill Division).

Tree placement is an art form in itself. This is to be more of a switching layout than my previous railroad, so it is imperative to not put the fragile, easily knocked-over trees in locations around the manual turnouts. I've tried to follow the recommended "group them in 2s and 3s" routine and also use them to hide the transition of roads into the "wall". I understand that needs to be balanced by avoiding them casting shadows onto the wall. Just how you do both  in a slanted ceiling loft I haven't quite figured out yet.

The Brooklawn Circles

New Jersey once had a love affair with highway traffic circles - a devilish device designed to keep traffic moving quickly in multiple directions. Quickly, that is until you got a lot of traffic. At one time NJ had 101 traffic circles. Wikipedia still lists 64 of them, but 20 are marked as defunct, and 15 more as modified (traffic lights, etc.). By the mid-1950s the state no longer approved of their use. Part of the problem was: who had the right of way? It made sense that the car in the intersection should have the right of way or the circle would soon max out capacity. But what do you do when a major highway runs through the circle? I once asked the right of way question to a state trooper friend. His reply was that, in an accident, they would just give tickets to both drivers and let the courts figure out the blame.

New Jersey's first circle was built in 1925 in nearby Pennsauken. It was known as the "airport circle" since an airstrip adjoined it (until around 1960). How's that for an additional traffic distraction/hazard,  piper cubs buzzing your rooftop while zipping between cars trying to go in other directions?

Well when the two Westville roads cross the Timber Creek they are dumped into the twin Brooklawn circles, an odd affair separated by a short attached road section divided by the PRSL overpass (girder bridge). These circles have memories attached. I once hit one with my High School Driver Training car. (Not my fault, the instructor kept distracting me with his "watch out for that car" shouts.) Now who could possibly leave that out of their area modeling?

Anyway here's the early efforts for modeling the Brooklawn twin circles, greatly shrunken with a lot of work left to do. The overpasses need girder bridges (and the roadbed removed). The PRSL needs to have a trestle installed over Timber Creek, the Bachmann cars need to be replaced with CMWs and the Buzby Bros. cement plant needs to be built and installed. A Walthers Medusa kit will hold the fort for the short term. An N scale version of the Faller or IHC cement plants would be much better - if they existed.

The prototype track had to be bent to allow me to turn the room corner and prepare for the "Great River Crossing" of the twin loft windows.

The Missing Piece

Ever try to look at a scene you are creating and keep thinking something is missing?

I kept looking at my North Westville scene and having that feeling, something is missing!

Eureka, I have found it. The water tower!

It's construction was always on the back burner: it wasn't a perfect match, it's tedious to CA the metal bracing, it needs to be painted, the white paint doesn't look white enough, yada, yada, yada.

Well, I finally completed it and put it in the scene and it was the missing link.
It balanced the power house on the left. It is a signature Westville icon, and it just plain looks right.

Still need to cut the individual decal letters to spell out the town name on it (another signature detail) and possibly add an American flag decal, but it just plain fits.

Meanwhile the Timber creek module progress continues. I still struggle with roads. Tried the Patch N' Paint lightweight spackle recommended on Railwire and the first coat is still unsatisfactory. I patched it with regular spackle and am waiting for it to dry so that I can repaint it a concrete color. The highway circles are in.

Painted the rivers. They again dried darker than expected. I am now putting on a matte medium gloss coat.

Soon it will be ready for the garage to loft move. I fear the line-up to the Westville module may have been miscalculated so cross your fingers.

Meanwhile the "To Do" list continues to grow (add trees, cut down background buildings, etc).

'Till next time.  :-)