Today I was able to get most of the core assembled and, of more importance, braced. A Gatorboard panel is inset as the base to keep things square. I also used a piece of it in the middle. After yesterday’s post I found some pieces of 3/4″ C channel in the shop so used that instead of the aluminum rulers for the side bracing.
Sometimes the hardest part of a project is simply launching and making those first few pieces. I found a new source for large slabs of .060″ styrene sheet on Amazon. With materials in hand, I’m able to start. For larger structure projects like this I prefer to have a large, clean, work surface to spread things out and keep them organized. Shown above is a 36″ wide hollow core door set on sawhorses. I brought the mockup in from the layout room to serve as a sizing guide.
In this view I’ve carefully marked the dimensions of the side wall slabs and checked for squareness. Styrene sheet is slippery and straight edges have the nasty tendency to slide around in the middle of a cut. To prevent this, I clamped both ends of the yardstick in place, re-checked the cut marks, and then made the cuts.
Larger sheets of styrene are very prone to warping, buckling, and wiggling. They need to be stabilized. I spent a few weeks thinking how I wanted to handle the issue. Ultimately I decided to go with what’s worked in the past, aluminum. The corners are 1/2″ C channel from The Home Depot. The other pieces are from an aluminum yardstick which I cut into smaller lengths. Both will be glued to the styrene with CA.
My first encounter with The Downtown Spur was in February of 2006 where I caught GP38-2 #2639 (above) heading light back to Hialeah Yard. Clearly it was a shuttle of some sort, the details of which I have no clue. I think it’s safe to assume he had a car (or several) that needed to be taken down the line to be spotted and had nothing empty to take back on the return trip.
Frequently operating our layouts keeps the rolling stock in shape and allows you to uncover any maintenance issues that may be out there. Copying this type of shuttle move is a good way to keep the wheels shiny. It’s also a way to keep yourself engaged with the layout when you may not have a lot of time.
In the above image I’ve taken two empty reefers out of staging, run them to the end of line to be stored, and then ran the unit light back to staging. Not a complex op. session by any means but, even so, it took over twenty minutes, and uncovered some dirt patches on the rails that needed to be addressed.
This older view of the layout is a classic example of visual chaos. The eye dances around a sea of pastel cubes and struggles to make sense of the mess.
Some of the most enjoyable, and useful classes, I took at The Smithsonian were on artistic composition and visual literacy. The applications to model railroading are very direct. A key concept that is discussed often is that of avoiding visual chaos, taking control of your work, and directing the viewer’s eye to where you want it to go.
When I originally planned The Downtown Spur, my focus was on being prototypically accurate, capturing the sense of the place, and providing a framework for interesting operations. Although individual scenes and industries turned out fine, I gave zero thought to the overall look as a whole. When you walk into the room you were presented with a sea of pastel, one story, cubes. It was exactly what art professors tell you to avoid, visual chaos. So, how do you fix a mess like this?
From a compositional standpoint there are a number of ways to direct the eye towards a subject. First, is its size. Simply make it bigger. Second is color. A bright, saturated tone will stand out more than a gray or beige. Closely related is contrasting a subject with its neighbors. Five red brick buildings side by side won’t contrast with one another. Throw a faded brick building into the mix and it will stand out.
In the above mock up you can see how I’ve attempted to apply these concepts to my layout’s viewing experience. 1) The shear size of the Jai Alai fronton draws attention to it. The size also blocks out all of the noise behind it. 2) The red coloring of the signage on top draws the eye towards it. An added bonus are the words Miami and Jai-Alai which tell you where you are. 3) The container stack storage yard blocks out more visual noise behind it. In this case we want to take the opposite approach to color. I want the containers to serve only as a view block, not to draw attention. By using only grays and beiges, such as the containers on the right, they fade into the background. 4) The tree provides the extra few inches needed to block the bench work in the back.
With these changes, when visitors walk into the room the eye is naturally pulled towards a central subject that tells them they are in Miami.
As I mentioned in my last post, the last thing anybody wants to do is spend hours and hours on a structure only to find that, after putting it on the layout, it doesn’t fit in the way you expected. It’s not something that can be worked out on paper either. Mock ups are a quick way to get a sense for overall shapes and proportions, possible problem areas, and features you may want to omit. The mock up above was made out of foam board and is more developed as far as final shapes and lines than what I posted previously. It wouldn’t make sense to model the entire Jai Alai complex but, as luck would have it, I do have space for the primary structure.
Here’s a closer look.