30th Avenue in Miami looking north. Sun Gas is in the upper right.
Work begins on the 30th Avenue scene starting with the road and grade crossing itself. It’s a little tricky to model effectively because of the fairly distressed look of the pavement. In addition, the street goes right over a turnout.
To model the complex patterns of the pavement, I’m going to laminate a photo of an actual street onto styrene. The image above is a composite of a street photo from my own file (which I lightened) along with the edging from the prototype. I’ve uploaded a full size version of this image in the photo wallpaper section of the help section (scroll down to the last image).
There are seven pieces involved with the crossing and I now have the first two done. The timbers are from Blair Line. I heavily distressed them with a thick wire brush.
View of Sun Gas on The Downtown Spur taken from 30th Avenue and facing east.
It’s been a busy few years on the modeling front. As I wrote previously, with the Brooklyn Terminal layout now fully complete, I do find myself feeling a bit of “what now”? There are really no other themes or scales that are pulling me towards them at this point.
If anything has arisen lately it’s been the increasing and excellent documentation of the Miami rail scene I model by Tolga Erbora, both on Flickr and YouTube. Tolga has recently created a separate playlist tab on his YouTube site focusing on East Rail and The Downtown Spur. The imagery has reminded me of how fascinated I still am with the area and, despite the cutbacks all lines are facing, how vibrant it continues to be.
For the near future at least, I’m going to forget about new horizons and resume my Miami modeling. An East Rail reboot has much appeal and is something I am strongly considering. However, the Downtown Spur layout isn’t done so, for the short term at least, I’m going to go back to puttering with that.
Here’s the Downtown Spur track plan. The Sun Gas area I’m working on now is in the upper left.
First up will be finishing the Sun Gas/CBI area as this is one of the largest customers on the line.
In the past week I went back and removed all of the temporary Atlas rail I originally placed in the area and replaced it with permanent, painted and detailed, Micro Engineering code 70 track. I also added frog juicers to all three turnouts. Next up will be the 30th Avenue street itself, a tricky project in that it runs right over a turnout.
Tolga recent produced the video above showing the local working Sun Gas (starting at the :24 mark).
Trying to put myself in my readers shoes I couldn’t blame them for thinking, “This guy is all over the place. What’s he up to? Where do things stand?” In summary we have:
-Los Angeles Junction: 100 per cent complete.
-Brooklyn Terminal: 100 per cent complete.
-Downtown Spur: 70 per cent complete. Working on now.
-East Rail Reboot: Seriously considering building but haven’t started
I’ve been trying to think of a way to organize this site to improve clarity for the reader but no decisions as of yet as to how to do that. I’m open to ideas.
For the Miami rail fans and modelers in the group, Tolga Erbora has just produced a new video. Among other places he highlights East Rail and the Downtown Spur. He really does a great job of laying things out A to Z. You can watch the video HERE.
This weekend I wrapped up the last big project on the layout, the harbor tug. It was hard to pick which color scheme to go with given there are so many striking prototype options, the NY Dock and Erie being favorites. Now that I see the finished vessel on the layout going with the New York Central scheme was the right play in terms of contrasting with the existing scenery without being too over the top.
The Sylvan kit is really well done and comes at a bargain price to boot. If I were willing to allocate more time to the project I would have rooted around online for more aftermarket etched brass fittings, especially the ladders and stairs. I would also have bit the bullet in the patience department and gone with the kit supplied etched hand rail stanchions instead of using a substitute from my scrap box.
As I mentioned in my last post “if” I do an East Rail 2 it would be placed in the same location in my shop as the original. My biggest concern is dust control. It took awhile to find this photo but it shows my previous attempts to get a handle on things by draping plastic sheet down from the valence and then clipping it to the bottom of the layout. It wasn’t as effective as you’d think which is a real head scratcher.
