Looking into the “Layout Gallery” from the door. The look will improve once the Brooklyn Terminal gets its pedestal supports and fascia.
In addition to the satisfaction we get out of building and running our layouts, they can also provide enjoyment through the simple act of just looking at them. That is, taking them in and viewing them as we would a work of art. In that vein I’m setting up the front room of my home as a layout “art gallery” for lack of a better term. The goal is to create an environment where I can go to take the work in or allow visitors to see it. I’ve been trying to visualize how a professional sculpture gallery is set up and follow the same approach. If there is one characteristic that stands out it’s the lack of clutter. You have the sculptures (supported on pedestals) and that’s it, generally no other furniture. The first step was cleaning up all of the light and computer chord runs with zip ties and chord covers. All furniture was removed from the room with the exception of the computer desk. I was going to move the desk but the fact that it is entirely glass does wonders in terms of making it essentially invisible. The support of the layouts is important visually. The LAJ is on floating shelves. The Brooklyn Terminal, my present layout project, will be supported on three column like pedestals which will be painted semi-gloss black. I really wish I could have made the Brooklyn Layout one foot shorter on the long leg of the “L” but it simply wouldn’t work out operationally so I had to make a small concession visually. By luck, the room has two large windows which allow light to stream in for a pleasing effect in the afternoon hours.
The layout of the gallery room, which measures roughly eleven by eleven feet.
Here’s one of the pedestals under construction. They are built of 3/4 birch ply and will be painted semi-gloss black when finished. I was struck by the symbolism stemming from the fact that the pedestals have the same outline as the Twin Towers but I doubt that will be apparent once they are painted.
While waiting for supplies to come in for the Brooklyn Terminal layout, I doubled back to other areas.
As a host layout for the upcoming ProRail national operating convention, it’s time to make sure all of my ducks are in a row. I’ll be running both the Downtown Spur and LAJ layouts simultaneously so will have my hands full. Since I’ve never had a guest operate the LAJ, I needed to put that through the paces while trying to get a sense for what the experience would be like for a newcomer. I’m not a big believer in random car movement generators because I feel you can create a much more believable operations scenario if you plan it manually. That’s not hard to do for a small layout.
Running running through the whole work order took about an hour without breaks. My guess is somebody that’s not as familiar with things would take longer and also need a break now and then.
Shown above is the work order I came up with. The column on the right represents “notes to self” and wouldn’t be seen on the copy the guest operator gets. The spot number refers to the location for unloading each specific grade of corn syrup. Each incoming tank car carries it’s own unique grade of product and must be spotted correspondingly.
I’m glad I ran the session as there were a few takeaways that need to be addressed:
Shelf couplers, while very prototypical, a very thorny to use in actual practice. All of the tank cars will have them replaced with standard scale couplers by the time of the convention
It would be super helpful to have enough length on the Sabor Hispano spur to stuff a third car in there during the car shuffling process. I’ll extend that lead about four inches.
It would be all to easy to get forward and reverse on the throttle confused and push an entire cut of cars off of the Sweetener Products spur into the great abyss. I’ll supplement the cosmetic rail stops with a nail spiked into the fascia.
Other than that, it was a thoroughly enjoyable way to spend a morning over a cup of coffee. Those interested primarily in industrial switching have life so much easier than those that prefer the more traditional approach of moving freight traffic from town A to town B. With a miniscule footprint, and for very little cost, the LAJ project has provided many hours of enjoyable research and construction time and is a joy to operate.
I wrote a blog on my business site on “Choosing Your Theme, Setting Your Project Scope”. You can read it HERE.
Latest iteration of the Brooklyn Terminal track plan. Layout dimensions are now 5’6″ by 7′ 0″.
One of the things you pick up after decades of modeling is a storied and lengthy list of mistakes that fall into the category of, “Wow, didn’t expect that”! Although the lessons weren’t fun at the time, having them in your arsenal is an enormous advantage.
One of the major lessons I’ve learned is that, when you go down a new modeling path, things aren’t going to play out exactly as you envision them. You don’t know what’s going to pop up, but you know something will. They aren’t always bad things either, sometimes things we worry about turn out to be non-issues. Knowing this going into a new layout, the last thing I want to do is dive right in, spend dozens of hours on a super-detail project, and then find out there was a conceptual problem going in.
To get around this, I like to start with what I call operational mock-ups. Once the bench work is done I get temporary track tacked down as soon and quickly as possible and start running trains. I’ll also add mock ups of the structures. With this approach you can uncover needed changes and make adjustments before you’ve invested a lot of time. Once your testing is done you can go back and replace the temporary track and structure mock ups at your leisure but you have an operational layout as you do so.
After spending an enjoyable weekend running the mocked up layout hard it became apparent that I needed a better flow of track coming off of the car float and a longer run around. Doing so required adding an additional foot to the long leg of the layout, something I didn’t want to do but was necessary. My plan is to have the sun room be a layout gallery of sorts and as the layout grew in size it took more room than I would have liked. To compensate I’ve decided to round the two outside edges.
Central to the theme was street running using the Kato Unitram pieces as a foundation. Brilliantly engineered, they do have the downside of excessively tight curve radii keeping in line with it’s trolley theme. Some gentle passes with a file to open up the flange ways in a few spots resulted in an enormous improvement.
If there has been one pleasant surprise it’s the superb running quality of the recently release Model Power Mogul. It’s an absolute jewel, and features all wheel and tender pick ups, which is particularly helpful when you have slow speed running through complex track work.
I’m now confident enough in the plan and composition to start fastening things down permanently. Once that’s done I’ll gradually start the detailing process.
Momentum is building with the Brooklyn Terminal layout. When it comes to layout planning I find that there are limits as to how far you can take scene composition with a two dimensional sheet of paper. Although I start with sketch something out in CAD, I go in knowing that the final rendition will need to be planned with 3D mock ups.
Overall, the front spare bedroom of my home (sort of a sun room) will serve as a layout gallery of sorts housing both the now completed LAJ against the wall, and the new Brooklyn Terminal in the center of the room. In it’s final form, the BT will be supported on flat black pedestals and the shelving you see in the photo will be removed.
Testing over the weekend with the Kato Unitram street track and the new Model Power 2-6-0, although slightly glitchy, was very promising. Both are excellent products.
Power has been fed to the rails giving me an operational mock up. I’ll run thing for awhile, likely making some slight changes to the overall track plan after seeing how operations play out in real time.
Despite its relatively small size, planning the Brooklyn layout has taken a fair amount of time. I’ve been balancing the often competing goals of capturing the sense of the area while at the same time keeping the overall scope from getting out of control. Urban modeling takes a lot of time to pull together because you can’t just lay down some static grass, plop down a few trees and be done with it. Structures need to be built. Streets, lots, and sidewalks need to be laid down, all more time consuming than natural features. “Time”, in all of its iterations, has become a big part of planning my personal designs. How long do I want it to take to get at least up and running? How long do I want a session to last? Do I really want to bite this much off? For the Brooklyn project my key planning objectives were:
Capture the flavor of the New York Harbor’s Brooklyn Terminal railroads in the WWII era.
Have at least an ” operational mock up” up and running in a few months.
Have the capacity to sustain at least a 45 minute operating session.
No scratch building with this layout.
I plan a layout for myself using a combination of site visits, studying photos (aerial and street level), studying maps, reading whatever literature others have put together in print and online, and full scale mock ups. Particularly for small layouts, laying things out 1:1 becomes especially helpful in terms of scene composition and visualizing how things will look once the actual model gets built.
The plan above measures out to 5’6″ by 6′ and is a “free standing island” format located in the same spare bedroom as the LAJ railroad. For those familiar with the area, it draws its primary inspiration from the Bush Terminal but I “stole” the yard and float configuration from the Fulton Terminal, especially the yard located on a pier. Street track will be modified Kato Unitram. I’ll probably slap down some sectional track in the rest of areas to get me running quickly and will decide on permanent track later.
Structures will be primarily Walthers and DPM as they are close matches for what is typical for the area. Realism will be driven by scene composition and carefully thought out color selection of the structures.
For small layouts, I really heavily on full size mock ups to make key planning decisions. Here I’m checking layout height and shelf width. To compensate for the smaller size of N scale, the layout will be set at a relatively high 57″. After laying out the street, structure, and pier widths, a shelf width of 20″ was established. The LAJ layout is in the same room just out of sight to the left.
In looking at the mock up photo above, I can’t emphasize enough how much thought goes into carefully considering the scope. With the mock up in place, I spend a lot of time studying it, coffee cup in hand, thinking through the construction steps, and asking myself, “Do I really want to bite this much off”. I’m continually looking for ways to reduce scope, not increase it. For example, most actual car floats are three tracks wide and longer than the Sylvan model. I decided to go with the smaller Sylvan model because it was one of many ways to trim back the scope.
One of the advantages of selecting the Bush Terminal as a theme is that most of the signature features have escaped gentrification and are still there.
With the plan complete, the next step will be the bench work. I’ll keep everybody posted!
