The last several weeks have centered on scratch building palms, scenery detailing, and some Alkem chain link fencing. Momentum is building and I can see the look of the old layout coming back to life, albeit in a subtly refined form.
A close up view of the canal leg. Miami Iron and Metal will be in the foreground.
Just for fun here’s a shot of the original layout taken around 2011 or so.
The corner “L” of the layout.
Here’s an overall view of the canal leg. The logistics warehouse is a stand in. The final version will maintain these dimensions and door spacing but will likely take on a much different overall look.
A more refined and updated version of the track plan.
One of the reasons Miami continues to be a popular destination for tourists and travelers is its close proximity to Latin America and its even closer proximity to the Caribbean.
Now, who else would figure out and work with such a geographic advantage? Businesspeople, shippers, and logistics personnel.
As Miami International Airport grew as a premier travel destination following the post-World War II boom, global trade has too. One of the results of this? Industrial development west of the airport, in the form of Cargo City and Commerce Park.
Both Cargo City and Commerce Park initially had ample rail access. It appeared the Seaboard Coast Line took advantage of Cargo City more, based on the orientation of the track switches to the several dockside industrial leads. However, in the late 1980s through the 1990s, the needs seemed to shift more towards plane-to-truck (and intermodal, for that matter), and the entire area was reconfigured to boast warehouses transloading straight from cargo plane to truck. No train, sadly. Commerce Park, served by the FEC, webbed out south and west of the initial juncture at NW 25th Street near NW 67th Avenue. A few lineside customers lined the Kendall Branch mainline, but the majority of leads swung into warehouse canyons developed in the 1970s in about a square mile of land, reaching as far west as the Palmetto Expressway. Despite an incredible scaleback, some portions of this development remain rail served, with the main apex really situated at the NW 25th Street crossing.
Naturally, the premise of this entry will be on the tangible, and still somewhat extant, FEC Commerce Park region.
Caption 1: The map of the entire built-out Commerce Park district. Up to three switchback operations made for interesting switching. Sadly, two of those faded away in the 1990s, leaving just the one in the following image.
Caption 2: Rough estimate of present, somewhat serviceable track. The lead extending past the red curve still exists but was taken out of service.
Larry Burk sums it perfectly: “That used to be a really hot job. You needed a lot of seniority to hold it. On duty 7:30am with Sunday/Monday off. And it was a fun switch. Lots of one and two car spots.”
By the 2000s it seemed railcar service became marginal to almost nonexistent. As a trucking solution the park seemed to thrive. However, it seemed that nothing really west of Milam Dairy Road supported freight rail service, or FEC just didn’t want to go through the trouble of operating over all this circuitous trackage to serve them. They would park a GP9 or GP38-2 around the curve close to the 25th Street and Palmetto Expressway interchange, but that’s about it. Maybe there were a couple customers deep in the park which did get cars, but were out of view of the main artery. The park’s fate was sealed around 2006 when it was all pulled back to just shy of NW 72nd Ave, Milam Dairy Road.
Two line-side customers on the mainline south of 25th Street continued receiving cars until the mid 2010s. Amerigas had a sizable distribution facility at the crossing, viewable from the road. Airport Brick also had a spot about a quarter mile down. A team track frequently handled transloads at NW 16th Street before moving up to NW 25th Street, the present location. Both of these folded in the mid 2010s.
Alpinos Distribution for the longest time handled boxcar service in a lengthy warehouse by 25th Street. Banner Supply, still rail served, receives gypsum and building materials in centerbeam flats. Next to it was a warehouse which regularly received boxcars. Beer is my guess. However, when the owner changed in 2010, there went the rail service. It’s in the background in this January 2017 image of a rather unusual move….
Unusual, but not as much as one may think. In recent years the Ringling Brothers Circus train used less active Commerce Park trackage to park their train. I had a field day catching the very scrappy last departure pull, which unfortunately came with a small derailment due to the erroneous choice to use an SD40-2 to pull it.
A more favorable move in less favorable weather…
Caption: The 2016 Red Unit of the Ringling Brothers Circus Train spots the passenger portion on the “Jordan Marsh” lead, presumably named for the department store having a distribution facility here. It is always the original or old names that stick.
We hit the present day. Alpinos became the second location of Omni Transloading and Logistics, and is served almost daily. Banner Supply still gets cars a couple times a month. The team track serves a variety of clients which now include Ocean Lumber, FP&T (for NS), Associated Waste Services, and Raven Environmental.
Caption: FEC job 10 (11:00 AM job) works Omni Transloading, which here receives beer in boxcars from Monterrey, Mexico. The contract sends the beer from Ferromex over the road on a nearly dedicated Union Pacific manifest and on to CSX and FEC. This industry also occasionally handles centerbeams, open flats, and reefers with potatoes.
Caption: FEC’s 12:30 am yard job pulls two empty centerbeams from Banner Supply, which receives gypsum drywall by rail. Two potential customers sit in the immediate view of the shot, but do not ship by rail. The warehouse to the right was last served by FEC in 2009, but has not reeled in a tenant that needs their services ever since.
The latest and greatest addition to “The Park” is Quality Container. They have been a slowly looming presence in the area, a mini inland port if you will. They took up a lease of about 200,000 sf of land south of 25th Street and ramp intermodal. Most of it comes from and goes to PortMiami but there have been contracts with domestic destinations as well.
Caption: A Florida East Coast yard job pulls a cut of wells from Quality Container.
Quality Container uses land that once held the former south yard leads that would continue the line down to Florida City. Despite having a good carload base, it did not seem profitable enough for FEC to sustain it for much longer. FEC’s push towards more intermodal and rock service in the 1980s led them to sell the right of way to the County and truncate rail service to Bird Road, where three customers still remained south of Miami Int’l Airport. This line handled whatever carload business remained, whatever interchange they had with CSX at Oleander (just south of here) and swing moves for autoracks being switched at the old autoramp, which is now the South Florida Logistics Center. FEC would also store cars on the loop by the airport, a practice they do to this day. All of this activity faded away as time went on, with only storage moves and special interchange happening south of here.
This facilitated making Quality the primary use of this stretch of track, as well as realigning the track to serve their needs, an interesting operational move. It’s clear the track would have had to be more arrow-straight than in the picture above.
But the silver lining is a more visually appealing scene.
This storied history, the childhood memories of the old activity that I used to see, and the incredible similarity of these scenes to the impressions that Lance has laid out inspired a layout to be made. It is nowhere near presentable at the moment, but the video above does give the gist of what has been done so far. Unsurprisingly, it is a concrete and asphalt jungle, so the scenery process has to be done patiently. However, the process is quite enjoyable and encourages the relaxing pace that should be philosophized for layout building.
Momentum is building on the East Rail 2 project. Short term, my focus will be on the canal side. There are still a lot of layers to be added but it’s starting to become recognizable.
Ninety degree side view of the canal leg.
The canal has been poured and the first layer of scenery to the banks has been applied. The large logistics warehouse is a mockup. The spur in the foreground is for the team track.
View of the corner. The empty space between the trees and warehouse will be the trailer park.
Here’s the track plan. Although there are some refinements, it stays pretty true to the original version.
Looks can be deceiving. The above scene is far from simple and modeling it effectively would involve studying and truly seeing what is going on, understanding the challenges, and coming up with methods to re-create it in miniature. Note the subtle color blends on the shoulder. Note the way the grass feathers into the shoulders. Note the complexity of the pavement tones. The mesh on the fence is so fine you can barely see it (meaning it can’t be represented with window screen).
“Good enough”? Is the approach you’re taking in fact “good enough”? It may very well be. It may very well have to be. But, it’s worth thinking about. Is it a conscious, pragmatic, decision or did you arrive there by default?
Modeling railroading has an embedded culture which, for the most part, really hasn’t changed much in the last half century. It works and serves the largest percentage of hobbyists, the casual recreationalists, well. It comes from a time when layouts were much larger and, if you wanted to get anything done, you couldn’t spend two weeks weathering a manhole cover! In a nutshell it’s the “good enough” approach of “let’s get a decent representation of the prototype down, move on to the next section, and run some trains”. Nothing wrong with that. A slippery slope comes into play though when people move from thinking, “hey, not bad” to “Wow that looks amazing!”. It does the job, it serves its purpose, it may be a fit for your available time and commitment level but to think it’s “amazing” is a reach.
Let’s break down the “good enough” approach. At the execution level you are dealing with a relatively small range of color tones, (usually just a single color), hard line transitions between colors, and generally more vibrant and saturated hues. To reach the objective of more speedy, “get ‘er done” modeling, it emphasizes very few textures. It emphasizes a “check the box” aka “placeholder approach”. For example, scene ABC has a fence in it. Drop a 1/87 fence in the scene, check the box, and call it job done. The fact that the fence posts are twice scale size and the mesh is five times oversize is considered irrelevant because the placeholder box has been checked. We are also strongly oriented towards a caricature philosophy that feels any scene needs to be amped up. It’s a salt your food before tasting it, dump hot sauce on everything, culture. “I can’t have a quiet street. Too boring. I’ll put a cop chasing a robber in there to liven things up.” There is also a fair amount of inbreeding as far as information sources and techniques go. We operate in a bubble where the same methods and materials are used over and over and generally only taken from within the model railroading hobby community. On a good day we may steal something from our more skilled cousins in the military modeling aisle. Again, that approach works pretty well overall but not at the upper levels of execution.
Getting back to my “Audience of One” mantra, if you’re happy, that’s all that matters. If you have a larger railroad, you realistically need to stay on that path. Although this is our culture, it’s important to understand that it comes nowhere close to approaching what can be achieved, even by the typical modeler. Achieving those far better results has to matter to you though. There is zero shame in not wanting to move to the next skill level. For example, I’m a runner. I’m content with the status quo (i.e. pretty damn slow) and have no interest whatsoever in getting any better or faster. I still enjoy it though.
But what if achieving exceptional visual results does matter to you? How do you move the needle? Skill does matter….to an extent. However, what’s lost in the shuffle is the big first step, the skill that is generally skipped. It’s understanding what the critical visual issues are in the first place. You can’t focus on something if you don’t even know it exists. Without this understanding as a starting point, there is no way to move to the next level. For example, being skillful at detailing the interior of a structure isn’t going to change the outward appearance of the layout that much. Being able to skillfully model underbrush, or color a street, will have a major impact.
Beyond “Good Enough” means:
Attention to Color Selection: Selecting the correct hue and saturation level is not easy. There is a tendency to go too dark and overly saturated. What color is that road? Think you know? Guess again. It’s probably much lighter than you think.
Increasing Color Count: In any given scene it’s exceedingly rare to be looking at only one color. There are numerous hues all very close to on another on the color spectrum. The model railroad approach is one or two colors. The artistic approach will probably entail a half dozen or more.
Focusing on Color Transitions: This is a hard one. Particularly with scenery and weathering, transitions from one hue to the next are very, very subtle. The blends are feathered in. Learning how to do that takes both awareness and practice. In model railroading the tendency leans towards hard, sharply defined, borders and transitions. It’s a skill worth learning.
More Textures. As with color, in the real world (scenery specifically), we are dealing with not one texture, which is the model railroad approach, but many subtle textures. Many of those textures are very fine.
Avoiding Caricature: Our subject is enchanting enough without turning the volume up on every scene. It worked for Hopper, Vermeer, and Da Vinci and they made out o.k.
Being Wary of “Placeholders”: It’s not enough to check the box. The element has to be the right size, shape, and color. If achieving that isn’t possible (utility lines for example). Just leave the element out.
Focus on Overall Scene Composition: This deals with the elements you select, their relative size, and the space between them. It makes or breaks a scene. Our model railroading culture is one of way too many elements packed too closely together. The skills needed to master composition come from the art world, not the hobby world.
Shown above are some pavement samples for a section in my upcoming book, “Scenery For Switching Layouts”. The top piece is for a higher traffic street. The bottom would be more representative of a street weaving through an industrial park. There are around a half dozen shades of gray and emphasis was put on subtle transitions and blending. Although there are a half dozens steps, they go quickly and could be achieved by a motivated high school student just entering the hobby.
Finally, the subject of information “inbreeding”, limiting your information sources solely to the model railroad orbit. I can see the eye rolls already, but if you are a “one per center”, somebody that is driven to get the absolute best results, that won’t work. You need to move to the art world where the quality of the practitioners, and teachers, is light years ahead of anything you’ll see in a hobby environment. Last month I went to a lecture on Vermeer. A large portion of the discussion was on brush strokes and color transitions. The application to what we’re trying to achieve is 1:1. When looking for information consider the source, trained professional or skilled (or maybe not so skilled) amateur. For many hobby topics you will need to stay in our world. For issues related to color and composition you need to spread your wings.
That’s enough for today. Can somebody help me load my soap box in the car.
CSX has shaken up their service plan in Hialeah, particularly for the Gardens Lead. Previously split between jobs Y220 and Y322, Y220 was abolished some time ago in favor of a remote control job, Y190. Also heard from time to time is an evening Y290.
I was out and about and from listening to the scanner audio, heard Y19003 get permission to occupy the Amtrak Lead. CSX yard jobs typically use the Amtrak Lead to either shove to the handful of customers on the east side of Hialeah Yard, or work the Gardens Lead.
The Gardens Lead continues to be a hive of activity, with at least a dozen customers sprinkled throughout seven leads and a main track. The congestion around Hialeah Yard and demands of the Gardens Lead perhaps make remote control operations a viable answer, for now. Due to traffic conditions, and a full Hialeah Yard, cars continue to be sprinkled wherever they can, even on unused leads.
CSX Y19003, the first RCO symbol in quite a while in the Miami terminal, spots a boxcar at Kam Long on track GL3 within yard limits. Boxcars with various foodstuffs go here to be distributed by Kam Long through wholesale.
We also see it spotting one of the largest customers, Gulf Atlantic Warehouse. It may be your typical box with doors, but takes in and warehouses a whole variety of dry food products. The track leading in isn’t in the best of shape, evident with the cars leaning one way. I was anticipating seeing the TBOX scrape the wall of the building, but it was not close enough for that.
The switching action took about 40 minutes in total. A lot of details can be implemented to make the switch more exciting.
If these two customers don’t make the GL appear convincingly busy enough, Altira takes in pellets behind Kam Long over two leads.
The door spacing and spotting at GAW requires a lot of little nudges. I’ve seen the 2063 nudge back and forth to spot the boxcars no fewer than three times. This takes about 20 minutes for about four cars.
The track layout on GL3 alone makes for a 1.5-2 hour long operating session, especially if you have to spot and pull all customers, or rearrange cars.
You can see more of Tolga’s work on his Flickr page HERE.
Map showing location of The “Gardens” just north of Hialeah Yard
Close up aerial showing the lead with Kam Long and Gulf Atlantic.
