Model Railroad Blog

Dolton Junction number 3, an Athearn SW7, was my first serious effort at building a decent model. I was sixteen at the time, which puts it at almost five decades old. Note the faded lettering on the grill and the custom logo.

Time, and our recollection of it, is a funny thing. I’ll be 65 this summer. I imagine like many my age, you find yourself in periods of reflection more often. It’s during those periods of reviewing the past that time seems almost elastic. What we remember and what we don’t, seems so bizarrely arbitrary. Why do we remember some distant events with such precision (or at least we think we do), and other, often very long periods, just don’t conjure much up?

For reasons I haven’t fully processed, the model above stirs up some hard-to-define emotions. It’s amazing to me that I was able to build something of this quality at the age of sixteen. Many decades passed afterward before I could get back to this skill level. I’d even go so far as to say that if I tried to replicate it now, a full five decades later, the end result would be about the same. I have such vivid memories of how it came to be and the process of building it (said from the person who can’t find his car keys).

We lived in the South Pacific (Guam to be precise) during my teenage years in the 1970s. This was still the golden age of hobby stores and there was a pretty darn good one in Tamuning, Guam. I remember going there one afternoon. The day had started with me having no interest in model railroading. I walked into the store, was drawn to the magazine rack, and a switch clicked. I went from zero to full immersion in the hobby just like that. Weird. I imagine others have had similar experiences.

I became an avid rail magazine reader and started building models. The results were what you’d expect from a sixteen year old newbie, not ready for primetime to say the least. Ouch, they were rough.

We returned to Indiana for my last two years of high school. There was another well-stocked hobby store in Bloomington and it wasn’t long before I was at the magazine rack. I picked up the December issue of Railroad Modeler. Inside was my hobby game-changing article, a piece on the LAJ by the legendary Don Simms. I couldn’t put it down, reading it over and over. Inspired by the article, I decided to build myself a freelance switching layout similar to the LAJ but called The Dolton Junction (based in Chicago). I remember drawing up a track plan but have no memory of what it looked like. I do know the layout was never built.

Here’s the weird part about memory. I recall so vividly making the decision that I would build an LAJ-like switcher that wasn’t a soap carving. Total focus and concentration. I recall getting the detail parts mail order. I recall getting in touch with Rail Graphics, sending them the freelance logo, and having custom decals made. I recall the owner (I believe his name was Ron) sending me a friendly note saying the lines on my initial drawing were too thin and asking if I could redo it. I recall getting into a total “zone” from start to finish building the model. It’s still astounding to me that I pulled something like that off at age sixteen given it would take a lot of work for me to replicate that degree of finish even now.

Getting back to the subject of time, it’s sort of a weird melancholy feeling to look back on the life of fifty years that have elapsed since then, the changes in the hobby and the world. I could never have guessed that five decades later I would still be holding that same model in my hands. Five decades later I finally have that LAJ layout and am still fascinated by the line.

The Dolton Junction switcher is in surprisingly good shape but has some minor damage. My fun project of the month will be carefully restoring it. I wonder if it even runs. I pulled the shell off and there isn’t a hint of rust on it. Stay tuned.

The “new” LAJ layout room, renovated into a Mid-Century Modern (MCM) interior design style. Mid-century modern elements are the bullet planter and faux succulent (from Hip Haven), Z chair (Wayfair), painting (Bed, Bath, and Beyond), and lamp (MCM Gal).

---

A better title tag for today’s post would be “renovated” layout room. There is no new room per se and certainly no new layout. Although only indirectly related to modeling, my efforts in the past six weeks have been spent giving the room that contains the LAJ layout a total makeover and repurposing.

I was getting tired of crawling over the Brooklyn Terminal that was also in the room. I wasn’t happy with the dark closet which contained a ratty old desk. My second computer was in there and I was getting tired of walking from room to room to use each machine. I gutted the space and gave myself a clean slate.

Interior design can fall into the same traps as layout design. “Here’s an empty space, what can I fill it with”? Instead, it’s worth taking a breath, examining the room, and thinking through what its ultimate purpose is. By virtue of its orientation, the LAJ layout room is flooded with magnificent light at the golden sunset hour. I needed a library upstairs. There was my purpose, a library/sun room/space for the LAJ. I hate useless clutter. I hate climbing over crap I don’t need. When I walk up to the window to take in the sunset I don’t want that nagging feeling at my knees of leaning over furniture. I’m a minimalist. If an element doesn’t serve a purpose I don’t include it. I’ve always liked the feeling of walking into a room at an art gallery and being enveloped by the openness. Nothing in the space except art on the walls and perhaps a single bench. The smell of the wood floors. The slight echo of the acoustics. I wanted that.

Facing the opposite direction. In the back is the mini-library mentioned in previous blogs. The “Bellet” print on the left was a generous gift from fellow modeler and friend Fred Scheer.

Many years ago my close friend Tom Klimoski introduced me to the mid-century modern design style. The style is synonymous with Los Angeles, especially in the late 1950s and early 1960s. You’ve seen it on the series Mad Men. It’s Stahl House. It’s Palm Springs.

I’ll never own a mid-century home but thought it would be fun to have one room in my house designed in that style.

Here’s a view of how the LAJ fits into the space. I run it several times a week but view it more in terms of “3D wall art”.

Several years after Tom Klimoski introduced me to the MCM scene, another modeler, Fred Scheer brought to my attention a magazine dedicated to the subject, Atomic Ranch. I spent a year or so reading through it to get a better sense of appropriate design ideas.

Stahl House in LA is the personification of MCM design. An argument could be made that it’s the most famous home in the US.

The mini-library I first mentioned in my April 3rd post is now complete. Our hobby is heavily research and media-based. If you can’t find something, or it takes forever to dig it out, you’re always behind the eightball. Mounds of unused items become something you need to continually crawl over. I spent a number of days going through decades of old magazines and books and really thinking through which ones I actually use. In the end, not many. A good measuring stick is that if you don’t know what’s in a box, magazine, etc., and you haven’t looked at it in a decade, you can live without it. I’m not a hoarder and it was time to fill up a few full-sized trashcans with things I’ll never use again.

The library is located on the first floor of my house in a room next to my office. I gutted a clothes closet and rebuilt it to make it more suitable for its new purpose. Shelves and cabinets are positioned ninety degrees to the entrance, creating a walk-in alcove. 1. Lighting is provided by a very slick, lithium battery powered, motion activated LED.

Here’s a view of the left-side arrangement. The rolling cabinet was picked up from The Home Depot’s online catalog. I made the shelves myself out of finished shelf slabs, also from The Home Depot. Going through the labeled callouts we have:

1. Vintage 1950’s Official Guide. I use this a lot for work. It’s fragile so I bought a special book sleeve from Bindertek to hold it. 2. Magazine articles on the LAJ and other favorite branch lines. These are held in the binders with the special magazine holders I mentioned in the April 3rd blog. 3. Feature articles on my personal layouts. If I were to do it again, I’d use more binders, but thinner ones rather than putting everything in one big binder 4. Diesel loco guide 5. Frequently used art supplies (pens, rulers, etc.)

Here’s a view of the right side. Unlike a clothes dresser, having more drawers, that are shallower is desirable.

Going through the callouts on this side we have: 1. Frequently used books, books on historic layouts such as The V&O, John Allen, etc. 2. Issues of Model Railroad Planning 3. Frequently used soft cover books 4. Hard plastic SAYEEC desktop magazine holder & organizer (this is much stronger than the traditional cardboard variety. Nice product!) 5. Open top staging for the LAJ. 6. Recent magazines (note our buddy James McNab on the cover of this year’s GMR!) 7. Drawer holding camera equipment (batteries, etc.) I can’t remember where I bought this cabinet.

The new mini-library has made a noticeable improvement in making the media I use the most, much easier and more pleasant to access. It also protects some of the print stuff that is starting to age. I still have plenty of empty shelves. I want to get used to what I have so far before filling that out.

I was about to write a blog on this subject only to find I’d written it already in the 2013 issue of Great Model Railroads.

New library in my under-construction mid-century modern layout room.

Understanding how the brain works, how it reacts to visual material, experiences it, and remembers things plays a major role in our hobby. For deeper dives, subjects that warrant closer study and reflection, print is more effective than digital. The experience has more depth and we remember things longer. Each has its place, but it’s important to know the distinction between how we interact and process them.

Over the years our collection of print media piles up. Without realizing it, archiving becomes an issue. It’s human nature that we aren’t going to access something if a) we can’t find it in the first place and b) we have to dig through mounds of crap to access it.

This is my current (unworkable) system. Look familiar? First, it’s in the Downtown Spur layout room in the basement. If I want to browse, I need to walk downstairs. Second, those large magazine sleeves make it hard to tell what’s in the box. Plus, the cardboard ones fall apart over time. The big pile on the bottom shelf? What’s in it? Your guess is as good as mine. The system sucks and, as a result, I don’t access my content as much as I’d like.

The topic is important to me and I thought it through over a fair amount of time, as an overall system. Step one was to identify the magazines I access the most. Second, I needed a better binding system. Finally, I needed a library on the main floor of my house.

I gutted and renovated a closet in the upstairs LAJ layout room and modified it to be the library. Second, I separated out the most used magazines. Those ones featured articles on the LAJ, B&O Georgetown Branch, Canton RR, and Brooklyn. I purchased some ingenious magazine holders from Amazon, mounted the magazines in 1 1/2″, three-ring binders, and labeled the spine.

Here’s the first binder. I’ll make additional ones grouped by subject (MRP, specific layout features, etc.)

I can already tell this will be a much more user-friendly system that will result in me accessing the content much more frequently.