In their “Flashback Miami” series, the Miami Herald ran an excellent, photo laden article on the Seaboard Airline in town. Included are a lot of photos of the station at 7th Avenue, the location of the east end of the Downtown Spur. Thanks to my mentor David Orr for the heads up.
Click HERE for the article.
One of the great planning fall backs is, when stuck, just copy the prototype. I’d been struggling with one aspect of composing the foreground structures. Specifically, if I put a row of foreground structures end to end on 50th street it would be difficult to see the background structures. The solution? Remove every other foreground structure and replace it with a parking lot. The lot would be framed on both sides by a building. To make things even more interesting, at least one of the lots could be a container storage yard as per the photo above.
Walther’s Grocery Distributor would serve as an excellent foundation for a first kitbashing project
One of the questions on my commercial layout design questionnaire is, “what aspect of the hobby do you enjoy the most?”. The most common answer, one that invariably is given a “ten” by most modelers, is structure building. Across the board it is the area that consistently provides the most enjoyment to model railroaders. As the design progresses and takes shape using the modeler’s givens and druthers I’m often asked, ” I love kit “X” will it fit in spot A?”. Often the answer is no, followed by my reasoning that structure footprints shouldn’t drive layout design. Taking it further, the more detailed answer is “No, but….” No but if you modify the kit it WILL fit and you’ll have something unique on the layout. The discussion typically ends there.
For whatever reason, many modelers have a distinct discomfort with kitbashing (modifying a kit from it’s out of the box appearance). At first I though it was cost-related but really what it boils down to is a lack of confidence in one’s abilities. However for the modeler’s that can get past this, it opens up an entirely new world of possibilities. It really just takes a leap of faith to give it a go, a realization that an average outcome on the first few attempts is the price we pay for advancing our skills.
Look at the cost of a few kits (that may need to be discarded if you botch the attempts) as money well spent in our ongoing quest to get better, an “educational investment” if you will. However, we have several ways to get around this educational investment cost that some price-conscious modelers might benefit from. Some model kit stores offer multi-buy discounts (to encourage kitbashing, of course). You could also consider buying used or damaged kits on eBay, if you can find an eBay coupon that applies then this cost can be reduced further. All in all if you play it smart then you can get into kitbashing for a lower cost than you might think.
Here’s an idea for a sample project to get you started. Let’s say you need a large, car spot driven industry up against your backdrop to provide operational interest. For structures against a backdrop shorter and longer looks better. We also want a little depth, say 3.5 inches, as opposed to the narrow inch or so typical of most commercially available backdrop structures. One of my favorite kits is Walther’s Grocery Distributor (933-3760). This model would serve as an excellent foundation for a kitbashed backdrop building that looks like it “fits into the real world” and would provide a lot of operational bang for the buck. I’d approach it as follows.
-Purchase two or three of the Grocery Distributor kits.
-Glue the back walls (with the loading doors) from the kits together end to end. Put a strip of 1″ wide, .060″ styrene behind the joints to reinforce them. Make a thin slurry of Testor’s modeling putty and lacquer thinner and work it into the seam to disguise the joint. After construction, hide the joint with a downspout or section of .040″ spring wire (representing electrical conduit)
-Trim the width of the side pieces to roughly three and half inches. This is done by using a utility knife guided by a straight edge. Make multiple shallow passes until you are most of the way through the plastic and then bend and snap. Clean up the cut edge with sandpaper.
-Glue the now shortened side pieces to the now longer back wall.
-Discard the roof top structure and billboard
-Replace the doors with metal roll up doors from Rix/Pikestuff
-Replace the awning supports with .015″ spring wire.
-If you’re particularly ambitious, and comfortable with photoshop, replace with the windows with photos of prototype industrial windows. (actually you could do the same for the doors, use photos that is).
-Paint and “plant” on the layout.
Work with scene composition continues with the latest efforts being the creation of mock ups of the 4722 S. Everett and 4799 S. Maywood structures. In the real world these buildings are about a block apart but for the layout I’ll likely take some liberties and put them on opposite sides of the same intersection. As before, I’ll handle the transition from S. Maywood to the backdrop with the use of a “T” intersection. Backdrop transitions are easier with one story structures. Fortunately these shorter structures are the norm in this area of town. The Everett Avenue structure, at two stories tall, is an exception so I’ll need to give some thought to how I’ll handle that.
Damn. The last thing I wanted to do was have to modify the bench work. After a few days of rationalization I swallowed the bitter pill, realized I hadn’t made it deep enough, and added an extension which adds three inches to the depth.
In the continual quest to be more effective in our efforts to “model a railroad” we are constantly trying to root out and eliminate modeling approaches that tip the viewer off to the fact that, “hey, that isn’t real”. I’m not sure which is harder, developing an eye for things that don’t look right or fixing the problem once you know it exists. In the last post I emphasized the critical importance of layout to backdrop transitions, the difficulty of handling roads that meet said backdrop, and the importance of background structure height and depth.
This week I’m dealing with foreground structure depth. I’m often asked if there are formula’s or procedures that can be applied to effectively compose a scene. Unfortunately, a lot of it falls into the “I’ll know it when I see it” category. In my case it resulted in a case of having the mock ups in place and knowing what I had didn’t look right. My shelf width was limited to begin with. I decided to leave a gap between the backdrop and background structure to suggest a cross street. The three track right of way is a signature element of the LAJ in the part of town I’m modeling. I decided I needed to add a sliver of 50th street in the foreground. It’s a lot to squeeze in and I simply ran out of room. Since you aren’t getting a direct view of the sides of the buildings, you can fudge things a little and compress the depth, but there are limits. The space limitations were such that the depth of the foreground structures was too compressed hence the need for the extension.
The sketch above shows how things look graphically. Dimension C was too narrow. The extra three inches of bench work depth looks much better, it’s done, and now I can move on to the next phase which is creating mock ups to perform the same type of testing with respect to structure width and spacing side to side (left to right). Over time the only way I’ve found to effectively dial in scene composition is to make heavy use of mock ups for real time visual testing.