Filito Cafeteria ca. 2007 sits alongside the Spur where it crosses 12th Avenue. It shows up in a lot of images and was the ideal spot to re-hydrate with a cold juice on a scorching hot, humid Miami day.
The nature of rail fanning is such that a disproportionate number of shots are taken from just a few locations simply because they are more accessible. As a result, even the most mundane structures become stars in their own right simply because they seem to pop up in a ton of photos and videos.
Such is the case of Filito Cafeteria sitting alongside the Downtown Spur where it crosses 12th Avenue. Catty-corner across the intersection sat Trujillo and Sons, the Spur’s busiest customer back in the day. I’ve been putting off modeling it due to its complexity, especially the awnings. The day has come though….time to get to it.
I’ve started with the cinder block core. The awnings will then project off of that. There was quite a bit of photoshop work and measuring just to get to this point.(Note to self and other modelers. If you think there is even the slightest chance will model a structure, get ninety degree angle, full-on photos to work from. I didn’t, and it made my job much harder).
An aerial image from the early 2000’s
Facing north. The spur is behind the structure. Trujillo and Son’s is under the transit bridge on the right.
It’s been an adjustment going from being in mission mode/get layouts complete to slowing down and just puttering with small projects. At least for now, I’ll put plans for any future layouts on the back burner and fiddle with smaller projects on The Spur and LAJ layout.
A coral sunset unfolds as the golden hour ends in Miami on my East Rail 2 layout.
Almost two decades ago (October of 2007) , during the early years of my original East Rail layout, Vianney Roge visited from Paris with a few members of the RMB (Rails Miniatures de la Boucle) model railroad club. They presented me with this custom-painted car done by member JPG JPG. I always loved that car.
Over the years, as I photographed the old East Rail layout, there was one image I particularly liked. The RMB car was spotted in front of the Colmar Warehouse as a coral sunset unfolded in the back. For reasons I’m not clear about, I saved the image in a relatively small format. To make things worse, the original sunset photo, taken in Cocoa Beach, went missing. I spent hours going through old files trying to find it, all to no avail.
The original Coral Skies image was taken fifteen years ago.
I always thought that if I could grab a shot of a similarly colored sunset, I could re-create the original shot on East Rail 2. How hard could that be? Apparently, fairly hard! Thousands of sunsets since, and the stars never seemed to align. One thing I learned is that when you see a sunset you want to shoot, you’d better act and act fast. You have a surprisingly short window, measured in a few short minutes, to get the photo before it’s gone. I thought I had my quarry on a business trip to Nashville a few years ago, but in the few minutes it took to find an open area to shoot, the scene vaporized. Wednesday, while driving about in the evening, what appeared to be just a regular day with very few clouds, transformed into the shot I was looking for. I hit the gas, looked for an open parking lot and…..finally….. got it!
The new photo pulls together so many happy memories: the evolution of the original East Rail, the friendships, trips to Miami, and trips to Cocoa Beach, the site of the original (and now lost forever) sunset shot.
Master modeler SebSG’s Smallwood County layout is among the best of the best. One of his hallmark skills is clean, tight, and neat workmanship. It makes an enormous contribution to the visual impact of his scenes.
You can’t achieve exceptional modeling results without being crystal clear on the elements that drive those results. At the top of the list are:
-Composition
-Element Selection
-Material Selection
-Mastering Color (including contrast, sheen, and weathering patterns)
Those are the foundational elements of an excellent scene. There’s a fourth, though, and it’s one that doesn’t get much notice; perhaps people take it for granted. It’s basic neatness and clean workmanship, if you will. Some examples of a very long list include:
-Invisible joints and tight seams between parts
-No gaps in your streets and sidewalk joints
-No lifts or curls at your structure bases
-Everything is vertical and horizontal
-No errant globs of glue
-Perfectly horizontal decals with no film frosting
-Clean paint application
-Clean ballast application
-All parts are completely and tightly seated in position
-No fingerprints
To get this subject in hand a) you need to be aware of how important it is b) you have to care and c) you have to execute. The last one is the fly in the ointment. Make no mistake about it, neatness is a skill and one that takes decades to master, if one ever truly does. You start out with the touch of a blacksmith and, with focus, hope to move to more surgical skills. After five decades in the hobby it is one of my primary points of focus when I’m working.
Watching the crews over the past few op. sessions I could see how the operational fusees (Logic Rail Technologies) added realism without coming across too much like a gimmicky gameboard token. Since they played an integral role in the session, I went on the hunt for a cleaner, more streamlined on/off switch to trigger them. I came across these push-button toggles from Parts Express and really like them. The loco. pulls up just short of the intersection and stops. Hit the push button switch and the fusee lights. Do your work and hit the button again to set the fusee LED into its fade-out mode.
Here’s a view from below showing how everything is wired.
A stellar crew made up of the “Three J”s”, L to R Jerome, Jarrett, and Jeremy flawlessly put Y320, the Downtown Spur yard job through the paces.
I’ve been giving a lot of thought this year to the long-standing approach to operations in the hobby. Although well-intended, it’s analogous to putting a blindfold on somebody, throwing them in a pit, letting them marinate for three hours, and seeing if they can dig themselves out. Can they orient themselves geographically? Can they figure out the paperwork? Can they figure out all of the hidden traps and artificially complicated moves? “If” they survive, they get a pat on the back along with a “Wow, see how much fun ops. are!!” Well…..actually….not so fun to be honest. I’m as guilty as anybody. No wonder so many people are turned off to the operational side of the hobby. Time for a different approach.
As I wrote previously, the biggest change is something Kelly Regan suggested. The layout owner is the conductor. In one fell swoop, this solves so many problems. The crew no longer needs to worry about orientation. It insulates them from figuring out, often in just a few minutes, the arcane paperwork that will drive the session. When the host is “boss”, the new crew doesn’t even see the clipboard. So odd, crews don’t even ask to see it! Go figure. Kelly also suggested capping the session at ninety minutes, give or take. Better to have people wanting to come back than looking at their watches.
I made a few more tweaks this go around. I cut two moves out of the switch list to shorten the session. I’ve also had a bit of an epiphany about doing loads-for-empties switch moves. Yes, loads-for-empties swaps are the way things are done with larger industries (my scrap yards, the LPG dealer, Trujillo). However, not so for the smaller concerns that may get a car every month or two. In these cases, you either drop a load there or pick up an empty. You don’t do both. Think about it, if they only need a car every ninety days, and you just picked up an empty there, they aren’t ready for a load right away.
Small industries, such as Pan Am Frozen Foods, only get a few carloads a year. In previous op. sessions, I’d do a loads-for-empties car swap every time. This isn’t realistic. If you’re pulling an empty, they are nowhere remotely close to needing another loaded car anytime soon. In these situations, I either pick up an empty during a session, or drop off a load, but not both. In a similar vein, if you have a number of these small, infrequently served industries on the layout (and The Downtown Spur does) you wouldn’t switch every one of them every session.
Some other notes. There are no operational tricks or “gotchas”. None. I don’t work every industry every session. I’ve also eliminated the annoying task of having to dig out a car when there is another one blocking the way. This does happen on the prototype (especially with corn syrup and logistics warehouses), but it’s not the norm. For the most part, incorporating them (digging out a car from behind another) into most op. sessions is a case of not the right time, not the right place, especially with a crew unfamiliar with the layout.
At today’s session, even with the trimmed workload and no errors, we ran closer to two hours. We’d run for awhile and then I’d stop the guys, give them a brief rundown on what the prototype would be doing in this case, and then resume.
In summary:
The layout owner is the conductor, handles the paperwork, and directs all moves. The crew handles the throttle and work on the ground (coupling, switch throws, distance callouts, flares, etc.)
Limit session length to roughly ninety minutes.
No artificial “gotcha” moves or tricks. No weird problems the crew has to solve. Doing so is totally unrealistic in the grand scheme of things.
Don’t work every industry, every session.
Small, infrequently served industries either have an empty picked up or a load spotted, but not both.
No cases of having to dig out a car from behind another. This does happen in some cases in the real world but it’s more appropriate for when you’re running solo or have a highly experienced crew. Even then, limit it to one instance per session.
This concludes the latest installment in my ulterior motive-laden, not-so-hidden agenda of recruiting modelers to the dark side…..modern era industrial switching operations. I’ve been thinking about the best frequency to hold these sessions. The two most recent sessions, the ones I’ve had since implementing the updated approach, have gone very well. I’m thinking quarterly probably.
This is the work order from today’s session. The crew never saw it (and didn’t seem overly eager to see it!) I only glanced at it occasionally since, by now, I’ve committed to memory most of what’s going on.
