Model Railroad Blog

Floating Bench Work

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For the layout of East 38th Street’s junction railway I want a cleaner, sleeker design when it comes to the benchwork. Traditional shelf brackets work fine but they’ve always struck me as a little clunky, especially when the layout is in a living area or den. It’s a little hard to move them around or fully appreciate them, at least in some people’s opinions. The one thing we have going for the traditional shelf bracket layout for the model rails is that our models are extremely light, certainly much lighter than a shelf full of even a few books.

But we can take advantage of this relatively lightweight property of our model rails and utilize a floating benchwork system. The ace in the hole to make this happen is the appropriate choice of wall fixings to mount the shelving setup with. With my go-to choice being hollow wall anchors. The reason being is that these anchors can be removed and reused at another location quite easily, making it less clunky than the standard design. For this shelving project, I chose a product from The Hillman Group designed for half-inch thick drywall.

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This design is ingenious. You start by drilling a 7/16″ hole in the drywall. Next, insert the sleeve and push the cleats into the drywall. Finally, and this is the cool part, drive the threaded screw and the anchor expands tightly against the back of the drywall. Remove the screw and replace it with all-thread and you are good to go. I’ve found that the all-thread can be a tad wobbly in the sleeve, a situation easily remedied simply by running a nut down the all-thread and tightening it against the face of the anchor. Each individual anchor is rated at 80 pounds which is more than enough. After the all-thread has been inserted into each anchor, your supports are in place. Put some adhesive caulk on the top of the rods, place your extruded foam slab on top and you are good to go. The supports are virtually invisible.

If you’ve found traditional shelf brackets to be as unwieldy as I have, why not try out this floating benchwork system for your model rail setups.

The 80/20 Rule

I can’t remember if it was Al Gore, Mark Cuban, or Leonardo  Da Vinci that “invented” the 80/20 rule.  Either way, it is one of the more universally applicable concepts to roll out of a R&D department in years.  It even applies to our leisure time pursuit.  At least eighty per cent of the visual impact is obtained from twenty per cent of our modeling efforts.  It should be a source of encouragement to modelers of all skill levels that some of the most effective modeling techniques are relatively simple to apply.

Are you a middle school student, high school student, or recent retiree jumping into the fray for the first time?  My consistent drum beat has been one of starting with a simple plan that guarantees success, develop skills and confidence, and then progress to more complex layouts over time.   What’s one formula for success?

  • A one foot by eight foot shelf style layout with no more than three or four turnouts
  • Micro Engineering code 70 turnouts painted with Rustoleum “Earth Brown” camo paint
  • Arizona Rock and Mineral Ballast
  • Heki 1576 Wild Grass Fiber for your grass surface
  • A pale blue, cloudless, backdrop with a low horizon
  • Obsessive neatness
  • Knock the shine off your rolling stock with dullcote and accent the panel lines with the Tamiya Panel Line paint I mentioned a few posts ago
  • Apply an India Ink wash to all of your structures (1 teaspoon of ink per pint of alcohol).

If anybody goes this route, I’d love to see some photos of how things turned out for you.

How Much is a Good Idea Worth?

How much would you pay for an idea that made a dramatic improvement in the appearance of your layout?  Five dollars?  Twenty? Forty?  The latter number, forty, corresponds to the ballpark subscription cost of a hobby magazine.  I hear it all the time, “I stopped subscribing to magazine X” because: it wasn’t inspirational, it didn’t cover my area of interest, etc., etc.  Understandable, but this attitude loses site of the fact that no periodical can hit your area of interest every issue, every quarter, or even every six months.  Taken as a group however, read over time, the steady drip, drip, drip will ultimately serve up enough ideas to steadily move your skills forward.     You can’t model in a vacuum and print (or ezine) media is one of the most efficient ways of acquiring knowledge.  For this reason I encourage modelers to subscribe to the big three of MR, MRH, and RMC.  Take the long view and set aside the attitude of cancelling a subscription every time you hit a six month run where you don’t see anything that moves the needle for you.

What sparked this week’s topic was an exceptional two part article in RMC by Dan Lewis on modeling a Milwaukee Road passenger station.  The model really jumps off the page at you so obviously he did something different.  Sure enough, he used brick paper laminated on the surface instead of painting it.  Wow!  I’ve literally gone a year of reading RMC and most issues get a quick scan and dump.  This article alone made it worth being patient.

Subscribe to all of them and stick it out.  Long term it will be worth it.

Panel Line Accents

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Before posting a modeling technique, I look to see if it can meet two marks.  First, it must be simple enough that an entry level modeler (middle school student, recent retiree, etc.) can easily employ it.  Second, it must create a fair degree of visual impact.  Panel line accents meet both criteria.  Forcing shadows into the crevices of your models makes a tremendous improvement in their overall appearance and is a very simple technique.  Essentially you are wiping black over the crevice and then wiping off the excess.  Tamiya even offers a dedicated product for this.

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If I had to pick one area where I’d apply this technique to first it would be the side panels on a diesel loco.  As with anything, do a few trials runs on a scrap first and then move over to your actual model.  This isn’t a marginal technique to employ on occasion but really a standard that should be employed on most of your models.

More Utilities

 

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After my last posting, I was contacted by Paul Cooledge who was kind enough to share with me his exceptional utility pole model above.  He explained his methods as follows:

“I completed this scratch-built  1/87th scale model on March 4th as part of a Railroad-Line Forum challenge and thought that being a fellow utility pole enthusiast you might find it of interest.  The poles and structure are made from tapered wooden dowels and scale lumber made from coffee stir sticks.  The transformers are styrene and brass and copper wire; each one is constructed of 39 individual parts.  The insulators include eight appropriated from a Walthers utility pole kit and the balance were made with sterling silver bead caps, glass beads and styrene.  The gang switch is constructed of brass and copper and operates via linkage from the handle at the base.  The mercury vapor lamp is a silver bead cap with a plastic diffusor and is illuminated with an 0603 LED.  The electrical wires are made from single strands of copper from a lamp cord for the heavier wire, and single strands of 30 gauge ‘decoder wire’ for the primary lines and twisted pairs to represent guy wires.”
There are a number of advantages to modeling these structures and, when you do so,  putting the effort into doing it well.  First, the cost is nominal.  Second, the visual impact is very noticeable.  Third, this is something you can work on even if you don’t have a layout yet.  Storage would be simple and you know you’d use them immediately.  There is a ton of data online on top of which you can simply walk outside to see an example.   Low cost, high impact….sounds like a great modeling subject.  Thanks Paul!