News About the Trains I Ride Everyday

On previous occasions we've discussed the Washington Metro trains I ride back and forth to work everyday.  Metro is currently expanding out to Tysons Corner, Virginia, and will eventually reach Washington Dulles International Airport.  The expansion has necessitated acquisition of the first all-new cars in decades, maybe since Metro was built in the 70s.

Courtesy of the incomparable Unsuck DC Metro blog are these photos of Metro's new 7000-series cars.  That's an all-new paint scheme, window configuration and interior divider, for those who aren't familiar with the three or four previous series of Metro cars that are virtually identical, save for a few esoteric details and differently-colored interiors.

7000-series Cars begin to Take Shape:



More on the 7000s

Scott Kremer's Great Northern Electrics in HO

Trainlife.com's magazine section is lots of fun--kind of like discovering there's several decade's worth of model train magazines in your closet. Archives of several non-Kalmbach/non-Carstens magazines have ended up on Trainlife.com, such as Railmodel Journal, Model Railroading, and Prototype Modeler. And it's all there for free, as part of the Trainlife.com community,

Great Northern Z-1 i in the snow on Scott Kremer's HO GN layout.
Photo by Robert Schleicher/Railmodel Journal, courtesy Trainlife.com

One treasure I recently unearthed on Trainlife.com appeared in the December 2006 Railmodel Journal.  Scott Kremer's Great Northern layout features GN electrics under catenary in the snow! Like the mystery Milwaukee Road layout, steam and diesel roam the layout as well.  The photos show Z-1 and Y-1 electrics--wonder if Scott ever ran a B-D+D-B W-1 on his layout.  W-1s were later reincarnated as monstrous UP coal turbines

Click through and enjoy!

Progress on the Mineral Springs Grade Crossing

Before embarking on forestation of the backdrop area (plantin' all those trees that have been going together over the past month or so), I wanted to put in Mineral Springs road.

Blair Line laser-cut wood crossings. They've been stained and test fit.

But before Mineral Springs Road can go in, there needs to be a grade crossing. Previously, we test-fit and stained a Blair Line laser-cut wood crossing. Now the track underneath needs ballast in preparation for permanently mounting the wood crossings.

Highball HO limestone ballast on the track, glued down between the rails with Woodland Scenics Scenic Cement and on the roadbed shoulders with thinned Elmers White Glue.

Over at Model Railroader magazine, Cody and Dave have been ballasting track on their Virginian project layout.  Cody ballasts between the rails first, wets it down with alcohol and water using a pipette, and floods it all with Scenic Cement by Woodland Scenics. After that dries, he coats the shoulders of the roadbed with thinned white glue and sprinkles on a thin layer of ballast.  When that thin layer is dry a day or so later and he vacuums up the excess, it provides good 'gription' for another, final layer of ballast that he pokes and prods and shapes with a little foam paint brush.  That final layer then gets the wetting and Scenic Cement treatment.

A couple of layers of ballast, waiting for the glue to dry so all that excess can get vacuumed up.

We're pretty much using Cody's technique here, with the added step(s) of building up some extra layers of ballast in that gutter in the roadbed on either side of the center track.  I suppose I could have cut and glued in a couple of wedges of cork roadbed.

Check back in a couple of days when the Blair Line crossing is permanently mounted to the track and road building can commence.

The Mystery Marin County Milwaukee Road Electric Layout

Behold the majesty of electric railroading in the mountains!

Milwaukee Road box motors cross one of those epic Pacific Northwest chasms on the mystery layout.
Photo courtesy Interacting with Miniature Railroading

Milwaukee Road electric models have been offered in a number of scales over the years, but it's rare to see a Milwaukee Road electric layout. John Armstrong even offered a relatively compact Milwaukee Road electric track plan in his out-of-print Creative Layout Design. This prototype offers some really model-genic features: spectacular scenery, powerhouse motive, power, and occasional appearances by steam and diesel power.  Milwaukee Road even MU'd Little Joe electrics with GP- and SD40s in the 70s! 

So it caught my attention when I stumbled on this Milwaukee Road electric layout on the Interacting with Miniature Railroading blog. Unfortunately, IWMR didn't tell us about the owner or offer a track plan.  The layout is apparently located in Marin County, California.  Would be awesome to know more about this model railroad.

This layout gets me wondering: the Great Northern and the Virginian also had electric lines in the mountains of the US--so are there any GN or VGN electric layouts hidden away out there? As much as American model railroaders love their Applachian coal haulers, I'm surprised we've never seen a VGN electric layout. There was that VGN track plan in one of Kalmbach's planning annuals 15 or so years ago . . . did that layout ever get up and running?

But meanwhile, click through and get to beholding some of that majesty.

Sidetracked to San Diego for a Few Days

If there are pantographs and wires, I will find them. Here's the San Diego trolley at twilight, an hour or so after
our arrival.

There are regular ol' trains
too-- this is San Diego's
downtown Amtrak station.

My wife had a conference in sunny San Diego, California over the past week, so my son and I flew out for a long weekend. Everyone thinks San Diego is a Navy town--but it's really a railroad town too. The city is served by Amtrak, a world class light rail system, and is host to a world class model railroad museum.

The MTS--San Diego's trolley--is slick, not just in appearance, but in operation as well. It has a distinctly European feel, far more than the other US light rails I have known in Baltimore and Denver.

Oldest (left) and newest (right) MTS cars at Old Town station on a sunny Friday afternoon. 

San Diego MTS yard and shops at night.

The San Diego Model Railroad Museum is host to five model railroad clubs and features a few small exhibits of important early model railroading artifacts, such as Minton Crokhites's excellent, early Santa Fe streamliner models (aged but impressive) and a few sad surviving relics from John Allen's seminal Gorre & Daphetid layout. The five layouts represent scale and tinplate O, N, and HO

The huge majesty of the La Mesa exhibit at the San Diego Model Railroad Museum.

From the standpoint of model railroaders (as opposed to the viewing public and little kids), the majestic main attraction is the La Mesa Model Railroad Club HO layout. Go visit the club's website to learn more, but my in-person impression is that it is HUGE! And MAJESTIC!

Dudes running their trains on the La Mesa club layout. Those are HO F-units, to give an idea of how much layout
is going on there! My wife, by the way, graciously pointed out to me that Dunes Junctions trees are superior to these.

How the sausage gets made.  The in-progress portions of the La Mesa layout are fully visible, and club members
chat with visitors of all ages and interest levels about how the layout is built and operated.

A scale-radius curve on the La Mesa layout

SuperTree Assembly, AKA 'Man Crafts'

Nothing says Appalachian modeling
like a wall of foliage. This is Tony
Koester's old Allegheny Midland--a
great look, but it won't work on the
Dunes Junction!  Photo: Allegheny
Midland Historical Society

The state of the art of model railroad scenery has really improved over the past two decades or so, with miniature trees and foliage textures getting better and better. Early on, I decided that my small Dunes Junction layout would have late-generation scenery textures--no sawdust, lichen, or monochrome blobs of green foam. That's a practical issue, really--the layout is small, and my Northern Indiana prototypes never had walls of mountainous rock of Western layouts or forested hillsides of Appalachia as backdrops. So treelines--as opposed to hilly, forested vistas--and weed fields (coming later) are the order of the day at Dunes Junction.

On top: gigantic SuperSage trees!
On hangers below:
SuperTrees that have been
dipped in matte medium, drying
and awaiting bark-colored paint.

A tree line in front of my photo backdrop was thus my first major scenic texture effort. My tree building adventure took off around five or six years ago when I bought one of Scenic Express' SuperSage starter kits, which contains SuperTree foliage, a few sage trunks, various green foliage and leaf  flake materials, and matte medium.

I broke out the SuperSage kit a month or so ago and one of the first things I discovered is that the SuperSage trees, when completed, are freaking ginormous! After assembling a couple of these gigantic trees--they would be at home on an S or O scale layout, or as a 'landmark' tree in front of a plantation--I realized they would dominate my planned background treeline.  Fortunately, SuperTree foliage can be worked into smaller, less iconic trees, so I picked up a box of SuperTree material and got to work.

My objective was two or three dozen trees, 2" to 4" in height. I carefully separated the SuperTrees (actually a weed from Scandinavia) and removed large, skinny, out-of-scale leaves with tweezers. Then each SuperTree took a dip in matte medium for strength and to seal them.

SuperTrees before leaf flake . . .

The SuperTrees dried on hangers, attached with clothes pins.  Upon drying, I sprayed all the SuperTrees with Montana Gold Manila Dark spray paint, which I found at a local art supply store. Montana Gold comes in a large spray can, and the line includes hundreds of colors, including several good tree bark tones in addition to Manila Dark.

After letting the spray paint dry for a few days, I removed the trees from their clothespins and hangers and stuck them in floral styrofoam.
I sprayed each with matte medium from a pump sprayer and sprinkled on ScenicExpress coarse foliage from the original Super Sage kit. On smaller trees, I used Aqua Net super extra hold unscented hair spray before and after sprinking on the foliage. I switched up dark and medium green foliage for visual variety.

After the first layer of ScenicExpress coarse foliage dried, I sprinkled on a layer of Noch leaf flake, which was included in the original SuperSage kit.  These flakes really add a lot to the texture of the trees, as well as introduce very slight, but noticeable variation in hues.

. . . And after application of leaf flake.

The hairspray, floral foam, and delicate SuperTree material caught the attention of my wife, who noted the un-masculine smells and the 'craft-iness' of my tree making endeavors. She wondered it there wasn't something Martha Stewart-ish about the whole thing.

My reply: "This is man-crafts, dang it!"

The dirt
compart-
ment is
full of
foliage
material!

She was impressed by the first stage of results. Delicate, whispy trees with realistic foam foliage caught her attention.

So did the crumbs of foliage that accumulated under my workspace. Which leads me to that one last  essential tool to tree making: a vacuum cleaner. Best to have one on hand for this kind of project.

Scenery Progress Odds and Ends

The holidays are passed and progress at Dunes Junction continues. The past few weeks have seen construction of trees (of all sizes), a start on the Mineral Springs Road grade crossing, and a preview of catenary span bridges to come.

First, a preview of the reason for all this rush to get in scenery: catenary! Dunes Junction will eventually be under a web of wire, which will make scenery construction very difficult. A test-shot catenary span bridge hand-made by Oberleitungsbaumeister Don Silberbauer of Model Memories arrived this week, and I've had loads of fun posing it around Dunes Junction. With clothes pins holding up the poles, it sits a little high, but Don did an outstanding job of getting the lines and proportions absolutely perfect.

Model Memories South Shore catenary span bridge. Excellent capture of the proportions and shapes of the proto-
type by Oberleitungsbaumeister ('Catenary Construction Master') Don Silberbauer.

SuperSage and SuperTrees in progress.
The smaller SuperTrees have been dipped in
matte medium and are drying.

Assembly of ScenicExpress' large 'SuperSage' trees commenced a couple of weeks ago; I've since obtained a box ScenicExpress 'SuperTree' material. By 'SuperTree' material, I mean magical dried weeds from the great north beyond the wall.  These will make up the bulk of medium and small trees in front of the backdrop. The SuperSage trees are so large, I'm afraid they may visually overwhelm--stay tuned for some experimental placements.

SuperSage trees in progress.  Building these
takes time and patience

Blair Lines laser cut wood crossing test fit into position.

Blair Line laser cut wood crossings have been prepped and stained.  Several coats of A-West Weather-It gave the crossings a weathered, stained look.  Once these are fixed into place and the adjacent track is ballasted,  Mineral Springs Road will go in.

Stay tuned for more progress!

Traction Comes to the Model Railway Show Podcast

Something I missed over the holidays was the appearance of traction and electric railroads on the Model Railway Show podcast. Tom Piccirillo, the famous traction modeler who is also the owner of MicroMark Tools, talked with Trevor and Jim via telephone.  Tom discussed the roots of his traction interest and traction/electric modeling in general.

Jim cited Bob Hegge's Crooked Mountain Lines as a principal inspiration for Jim's excellent Somerset County Traction System, which features O scale traction operations under pantographs. The Crooked Mountain Lines--an HO version in the 50s, more famously in O scale into the 70s and early 80s--appeared on the pages of Model Railroader and Railroad Model Craftsman during those years, as well as in at least one long-lost coffee table book on model railroading. By the late 70s, the CML appeared in the background of Bob's lavish construction articles, such as a monstrous four-truck freight motor piece that ran in the October 1979 MR. Turns out though, that the CML was actually a fairly modest layout in terms of space and simple track plan. Bob reportedly passed away sometime in the early 80s, before images of his work would have found their way on the the web.

Bob's influence on the Somerset County Traction System shows--especially in the way stout-hearted electric locomotives just seem to be passing through the beautifully executed and proportioned scenes. Unfortunately, I cannot offer a link to photos that show why the CML seemed to have such a great impact on so many model railroaders.  As a testament to how beloved was Bob and his CML, the National Model Railroad Association offered a limited edition 'Heritage Car' in CML livery a few years ago.  It's too bad we don't have more to remember Bob by, but Tom's Somerset County Traction System is doing a bang-up job of carrying on the Crooked Mountain tradition.

Sneak Peek: South Shore Catenary Span Bridge by Model Memories Catenary

Test shot of South Shore catenary span bridge made by
Model Memories. Photo by Don Silberbauer. 

Coming up at Up Dunes Junction: catenary construction featuring components from Model Memories, North America's premier supplier of prototypical mainline catenary products in HO and O.

Don Silberbauer, the big boss at Model Memories, and I have been emailing and calling back and forth about pantographs, custom South Shore catenary bridges, and the state of the world for a few months now.  Based on our exchanges, Don crafted this span bridge, which will serve as a test shot for a few more that MM will make for me.

The real thing will be mailed to me this week--this photo has me very, very excited for Dunes Junction.  Few things say 'South Shore' like a lattice span between two poles, and Don's awesome work will make Dunes Junction look like the South Shore.

Quick and Dirty Photo Backdrop for Dunes Junction

The quick and dirty photo backdrop in place and permanently mounted.

Before any more scenery building can take place on the Dunes Junction layout, something had to be done about that empty expanse of sky backdrop.  My earlier experiments with a mocked-up treeline made from color photo prints showed that I could fill that sky void with something that would fill the space with some visual 'noise' cheaply and quickly.

The treeline takes shape in Adobe Photoshop, but any old photo editing
tool will do the trick.

The first step in making my quick and dirty photo backdrop was to take some photos of an actual treeline and configure them into a usable treeline for the backdrop.  I took my treeline photos near Ocean Pines, Maryland and then used Adobe Photoshop to combine them into a single panoramic image.  Some newer digital cameras have a 'panorama' or 'photo-stitch' feature that will do this automagically, and there are plenty of cheaper alternatives to Photoshop out there.

The techniques I used to fashion my photos into the backdrop could be the subject of a whole new blog, and there are plenty of resources available online, in print, and elsewhere (such as continuing education classes in your community, and if you are serious enough and want to pause your layout building for a few years, post-graduate degree programs in digital graphics). But what I did was select, move, and scale sections of my panoramic treeline photos to match measurements from my layout, and then used various stamping and healing tools to fill any rough or mismatched spots.  It's not a perfect image, but it is a reasonably convincing 'woods' image.

The next step is to make a correctly sized print.  Based on my previous treeline experiments, the overall height of the treeline needed to be 5" to 5 1/2". I used the scaling and ruler features of PhotoShop to ensure that my treeline conformed to this dimension, and then I switched over to the free Google Picasa program to print the backdrop, because I am too stupid to figure out how to control printing in PhotoShop.

Half of being smart is knowing what your dumb at: Using Picasa
for printing the backdrop cuz I suck at PhotoShop.

Mark Twain reportedly said, "Half of being smart is knowing what your dumb at," and decades later Dirty Harry said, "A man's gotta know his limitations." So I go with what works for me, thus my printing via Picasa. By the way, Picasa has an editor feature that would probably make this whole project do-able with just the one program, but I know my limitations and made things work the way I know how.

I do all my color printing on my trusty Canon IP1600 inkjet printer. Any photo-capable color printer will do, but I picked up this printer on one of those 'free after rebate' deals' that came up at a local electronics or office supply store.  Such deals seem to turn up every week or so here in Washington, and I suspect that if you have a Best Buy, Office Depot, Fry's, or Micro Center within driving distance, it shouldn't be too hard to lay your hands on a Canon, HP, Epson, or whatever brand photo printer for cheap. Of course, this is all a ploy to get you to buy inkjet printing cartridges, which tend to be fairly expensive. But it sure beats a darkroom or waiting for a lab to print photos that may not even work out, because there is a little trial and error involved in getting the photo backdrop right.

A section of the backdrop,
not yet cut or mounted,

I printed my backdrop in sections, on Canon-brand 8 1/2" x 11" matte photo paper. Rubber cement joined the prints, which I set up to overlap by 1/2" or so.  The rubber cement allows a little bit of adjustment (peel the sheets apart and reset them--don't try to slide them), so once they were aligned to my satisfaction, I used a scissors and an X-Acto knife to carefully trim away any sky or excess, leaving a cut-out of the treeline.  A grey-green watercolor art marker subdued the starkly white edges of the cut photo paper, and also filled in flaws.

Using drafting tape (a somewhat less aggressively gummed masking tape), I hung and adjusted the tree line print on the existing sky-colored backdrop, removing and replacing the layout from its brackets several times in the process.  Once it was in a suitable position, I made some discrete pencil marks to note its position.

Drafting tape holds the treeline in place for adjustment. The joints between prints are hard to see in the tree images.

Then I took the tree line print down and gave the back of it a thorough application of rubber cement.  I also applied rubber cement to the areas of the sky backdrop that would be covered by the treeline for some additional tack.  (Spray cement would work great here, but I had some rubber cement handy and didn't feel like making a run back out to the art store.) I used  the pencil marks to carefully align the treeline, and then smoothed out the treeline print to ensure that adhered evenly to the sky backdrop. In a few spots that didn't want to stick, I gently peeled the graphic back and applied an additional dab of rubber cement.

My two roads still head of into a blue void, so I still need to take some photos to fill those two gaps in the backdrop.  But in the meantime, this treeline will create the illusion that a forest lies beyond the trees I will plant in the layout and the dark, textured hues will subdue any shadows that my trees and vegetation might cast.

Onward to to trees!

The OMG Moment of Making Things in Miniature

I'm making trees using the Scenic Express SuperSage starter kit. Sage trunks (gnarly hunks of mini trees) and some kind of dried Scandinavian miracle weed are the main ingredients, along with various foliage and leaf flocking materials.

Unfinished SuperSage tree. No paint or foliage yet-hut look at that detail!

OMG--these things look incredible before they are even finished!  Build-up is somewhat painstaking--but worth it for a foreground-ready tree

Verdant Green Texture Comes to Dunes Junction

Looking west, we find South Shore GP38-2 2002 contemplating the lush green-ness of it all. That's about half of the earlier mocked-up photo backdrop wedged between the scenery and the back drop.

Layers of stolen baseball dirt and Scenic Express ground foam textures have radically altered the look of Dunes Junction. I was having so much fun--and making such a mess--that I didn't photograph my progress.

I followed Pelle Soeborg's technique of earth colored latex paint, followed by a layer of real dirt (baseball diamond dirt in my case, and then foliage texture. Most of the layout got a green turf blend, but the tree line area next to the backdrop got the forest floor blend with is darker with some coarser texture thrown in for good measure.

I soaked the textures with wet water from a pump sprayer, and the applied three coats or doses of Woodland Scenics Scenic Cement over the course of three days. I tried both a pipette and a pump sprayer to apply the Scenic Cement, and determined that the sprayer put the cement down quickly, as well as evenly and heavily enough to make it my preferred application method.

To get an idea of how the tree line will look, I wedged the old photo backdrop mockups between the scenery and the backdrop. In the coming weeks I will use some Photoshop magic to make a new custom
backdrop that wlll be tailored to he terrain contours.

Next scenery steps will focus on the next layers of vegetation, such as tall weeds and trees.

Looking northeast. The tree line photo backdrop makes a huge difference, and the contrast really shows here.

De-clodifiying Stolen Dirt and More Scenery Progress

Dirt from a baseball diamond, a day or so after its theft
from a local park. Visible are my de-clodifying roller
(a dried-up old bottle of Plastruct Bondene cement) and
manual drying and aeration agitation device (dollar store
rubber spatula, useful for countless scenery chores) 

Scenery building took a short hiatus for the Thanksgiving holiday, but we're getting back on track.

Readers of this blog know I like to mock stuff up and conceptualize. I especially like to do this when my layout looks more like the surface of Tatooine or Arrakis than the Calumet Region of Indiana summertime I am aiming for.

So I painted in Mineral Springs Road and the Dunes Junction parking lot with some cheap acrylic craft paint.  Still looks like a Bantha or a Sandworm might come cruising by, but now with a road and a parking lot.

But seriously, the paint has helped me validate the placement of these key features.

Meanwhile, turns out the one scenery building material I didn't have lying around was dirt. Dave Frary says in his book, and Pelle Soeborg says in his book, to use real dirt as a textural foundation. Dave even suggests that baseball diamond dirt works best.

The painted road and parking lot of Dunes Juction, plus a mocked-up
flagstop shelter for good measure.

So I stole about a half a coffee can's worth of baseball diamond dirt from a local park. It's been drying on top of some newspapers for a day or so.  I used an old round glue bottle to roll out the big clods ('de-clodification' shall be my contribution to the body of scenery building knowledge) and rubber spatula to spread the dirt into an even layer and 'turn' it a couple of times a day to encourage it to dry.  Some folks put there treasured dirt into the oven to dry it out and kill any critters that are in there.  I'll have to figure out a stealthy way to do that when I'm (ahem) alone in the house.

Scenery Base with Colored Sculptamold

Dunes Junction off the brackets and on to the sawhorses. Masking tape protects the weathered and detailed track

This book, by the way,
is a treasure trove of
scenery building information. 

The next stage of Dunes Junction scenery construction: a colored terrain base.  I applied colored Sculptamold over the styrofoam terrain forms after masking off the track and bridge abutments and pier.

I used the Sculptamold coloration technique described in Dave Frary's How to Build Realistic Model Railroad Scenery (3rd Edition).

I mixed one part Benjamin Moore Sedona Brown matte latex paint to three parts water, and then used that to mix with an equal amount of dry Sculptamold, which is a surprisingly fluffy material.

I applied the colored Sculptamold with a rubber spatula--the work went really fast.  It 'set' in a couple of hours and was completely dry within two or three days.  Raw Sculptamold reportedly sets much more quickly and completely dries within a day or so.

A view from the northeast. The variations in color correspond
to the dryness of the Sculptamold.

The latex paint will make future appearances in scenery construction. Frary's technique--repeated often in various Kalmbach scenery how-to books and articles--makes use of earth-colored flat latex as an adhesive and coloration.  One of the features of good scenery is continuity of color and use of a limited palette of colors, and using the same base color across a variety of steps helps to ensure this continuity.

Model Railroad Hobbyist Honcho on Model Railroad Magazines and Future

Joe Fugate, big
honcho of online
magazine Model
Railroad Hobbyist

Over at the publisher's blog at Model Railroad Hobbyist magazine, Joe Fugate, pioneer of internet-based model railroading media, is using fact-based reality--presented via statistics and graphs--to prognosticate about our hobby's future.  The upshot is that old-media paper model railroad magazines are declining in circulation while online venues, like Joe's own MRH, are growing in readership.  Based on this, he sees a much brighter--but different--future than what you might hear about in model railroading communities, both real and virtual:

The decline in the paper magazines begs the question - is the hobby shrinking? We don't think so. We've seen some hobby vendor surveys that suggest the hobby is actually growing slowly ... and Reuters has been reporting that the sales of train sets at Christmas time have been on the rise since 2005.

Spend any time amongst model railroaders--either in 'meat space' (hobby shops, swap meets, clubs, etc.) or in 'cyber space' (yahoo lists, various bulletin boards, podcasts, etc.) and the lamentations about the decline of model railroading will quickly rise to the surface. Lower circulation of Model Railroader and Railroad Model Craftsman, along with the demise of various second-tier magazines like Mainline Modeler and Railmodel Journal, are cited as signs that the hobby is fading.

Go read my comment on Joe's blog.