Model Railroad Blog

The Next Adventure

Mock up of WWII era N scale scene to test color and cross section size.

 

With only one locomotive project remaining, work on the LAJ layout is drawing to a close.  As I mentioned before, I’ve been thinking a lot about “what’s next?”.  Honestly, I thought I’d drift and wallow for awhile  trying to find something that motivated me.  Ideas come from the strangest places.  I was tuning the layout in the basement and happened to glance down at my bookshelf.  There they were, the genesis of what will keep me occupied for the next several years….three books on the NY Harbor railroads plus the exceptional Ted Rose watercolor book.  It sounds sort of idiotic but my reaction was, “Wow, I forgot I had these books and had forgotten how interested I was in this theme”.

So that will be it, a proto freelance NY Harbor layout…..in N scale….WWII era….steam power.  Having done strict prototype layouts and proto freelance, I really haven’t noticed any difference in how much I enjoy one approach over the other.  They each have their pros and cons.  For this project I want to model the general look of The Bush Terminal railroad in the WWII era in the general vicinity of 1st and 2nd Avenue  between 34th and 65th Streets in Brooklyn.  Tight curves, soot covered brick, street running.  I’d like to capture the brooding smokey mood of Ted Rose and Hopper’s work.

The enormous advantage of N scale is how much you can easily fit in a small space.  There are no free lunches and N scale has some pretty significant challenges: lack of product availability, overly thick details, cast on grab irons, a lot of poorly running motive power, sketchy quality control of turnouts.  I do think though that with some careful planning and slight of hand I can work around a lot of this.

The Downtown Spur will remain due to it’s long run length and ability to host operating sessions.  I’ll maintain it but I’m not sure how much more work I’ll do on it.  The LAJ doesn’t take up any room at all and will remain.  The Brooklyn layout will go in the same room as the LAJ project and will be equally small.  I’ve learned the hard way that you have to really keep the shackles on with N scale when it comes to limiting layout size or it will eat you alive, especially with more time consuming urban themes.  More to come in the months ahead.

October 18, 2017

 

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I feel like I’m finally turning the corner on the Alco project.  I knew going in the hardest part would be the striping, and it has been. The commercial products aren’t a match either in terms of the barricade angle or stripe width so a lot of extra time was spent working around what is available.  Everything is in place so now it’s a matter of patience…applying Microset and Microsol, letting it dry, pricking the air bubbles with a needle and repeat the next day.

Alco’s!

When the LAJ bug first bit me in the 1970’s, they were running zebra striped Alco S-2’s.  Next on the project list is doing a backdated rolling stock roster so I can run them.  The Atlas S-2 is a superbly smooth runner, to which I just installed a Tsunami 2 decoder over the weekend.  Next up is the time consuming task of procuring detail parts.  As you know, no one supplier has more than a few parts so it becomes an exercise in a lot of three dollar orders doubled in cost with four dollar shipping.  It  becomes expensive.  The owner of Rail Graphics is retiring at the end of the year so I had him make up some custom LAJ decals before closing shop.  Those came in a few months ago and turned out really,really well.  I think I’m going to have to do the barricade striping myself from striping sheets.  After many hours of searching it appears that the barricades currently out there are either 8″ or 5″ (CP).  The LAJ’s were 6″.  If anybody knows of a source of white, 6″ barricades, let me know.

Can You Go Home Again?

 

The yard job shuttles past COD Seafood as it switches East Rail’s Sentry Chlorine on January 6, 2010.

“You can almost always return to Home, The Place. But — eventually — you can never return to Home, The Actuality. It’s as gone as gone can be.” John Simpson

 

There’s an old expression, you can never go home again.  In the quote above, taken from an online essay, John Simpson explains it succinctly.  Although the physical place may still be there, the environment that made it “home” is long gone.

I’ve been thinking about that this week in terms of how it might apply to going back and taking another run at a previously built, long since dismantled or otherwise disposed of, model railroad.  It’s tempting on a couple of fronts, especially if that previous railroad was a success.  I’ll define success as the enjoyment it provided, the friends that experienced it with you, and the enduring pleasant memories.  The other issue that factors in is that, if you spend a lot of time on any endeavor, you’ll get better at it.  The layout we can build now would be of far higher quality than what we did five years ago, both in terms of planning and execution.

I’ve reached the stage in life where I’ve done enough modeling to have a fairly firm grasp on the type of model railroading that is most interesting to me, modern era, moderately sized, switching layouts.  Other than a slight side track to build some backdated equipment, the LAJ layout is done.  When I get to this point my mind starts wandering to “what’s next” and in that vein Miami’s East Rail is a recurring thought.  It’s as compelling of a theme as ever, visually, romantically, operationally.  The size and layout are perfect for working into a variety of small to mid-sized layout designs.  I’ve enjoyed all my layouts but there was something about the East Rail project, hard to define, that put it above all of the others.  Should I take another crack at it?  My modeling skills have improved. I could do a better job on a second attempt.   It’s the ideal size.

But….can you ever go home again?  Can the things that made it so fun ever be re-captured?  The thrill of discovery, the excitement and interest other modelers felt as I gave it a coming out and documented it’s construction on my blog, the new friendships that evolved out of it.  You can’t recapture that.  You never want what others think to be the reason you pick a theme but I really enjoyed making my discovery and journey the discovery and journey of others. You know you have something when it inspires a number of similar themed layouts.  However, an East Rail 2 would likely be received with polite, been there, done that, seen it before yawns from other modelers.  Does that matter?  Somehow there’s a loneliness in that, very likely, reality.

The modeling bug really took hold in my teens.  Since then, Miami and LA have consistently drawn me in, an appeal spanning almost four decades now.  Is it likely another region would capture my interest as much as those two?  Possible but it’s really hard to imagine as I write this today.

So, what is next?  That’s the sixty-four dollar question.