Layout Tour: Hidden Lionel Empire

Okay, who says a layout has to be accessed through a boring old door? How about searching for a rectangular portion of carpet, and uncovering a HIDDEN trap door to a magical LIONEL empire!

I witnessed just that, and I was impressed.

Through the trapdoor at the foot of his youngest sons’ bed one of my friends has built an impressive empire, hidden away to all; except the invited. After descending a ladder, you are sitting in the middle of an around-the-walls three-rail O scale mainline operation. At least 4 mainlines and plenty of secondary trackage weave their way around the nicely sized room carved into the hillside below his home.

He prides himself on collecting a vast majority of very rare LIONEL post-war equipment, like the SOO and Monon boxcars that were very realistic in appearance, but poor sellers thanks to their normal boxcar red color. Plenty of flawlessly operating 2-8-4’s, 4-6-4’s and first generation diesels ply the racetrack, the smell of ozone quickly fills the room as 3-5 trains loop around the layout creating the deafening roar of steel wheels on steel rail.

The layout itself was based on a childhood memory of a friend of his. One of the richer kids on his block when growing up had the same fantastic set up, albeit a bit more crude. You entered through the middle of the kitchen floor, into a recently excavated series of tables dug out beneath his friend’s house. The memory stuck after all these years, and now the finished product is quite spectacular.

Plenty of operating accessories and other authentic and original postwar accessories dot the unscenicked layout. When asked about the scenery, he suggested that it’s perhaps more authentic scenery for a LIONEL layout to be on bare plywood than be dressed up with all sorts of scenery. After seeing this layout, I’m definitely inclined to agree, it’s playing with toy trains at its Zenith!

The Beauty of O Scale Brass.

I thought I’d share some astoundly painted, superdetailed and weathered steam locomotives owned by a gentleman located in the south bay area.

I would love to revisit his layout and perhaps cover it in a full article here at some point, can you identify the man behind this layout? (E-mail me with the details, I lost his card accidentally a couple of months back.)

Layout Tour: The O Scale Tall Pine Timber Co.

The Tall Pine Timber Company is a good example of what type of O scale layout you can have in a typical 1950’s tract home garage. (about 1.5 car garage) Despite 2-Rail O scale models’ firm status as the #5 modeling scale, behind HO, N, G, O 3-Rail, and maybe even On3, there are a good amount of available cars and locomotives to help the modeler build the layout that he’s always wanted.

The TPTCo. occupies what seems to be a 20X25 foot space and features a double-track mainline of 2-rail O scale and features an On3 point-to-point operation above the mainline on a ridge. A modest yard is located on either side of the layout with a town between the yards on a ridge, which is served by the On3 branchline. The layout is basically an around-the-walls “doughnut” which maximized the mainline run and also provided for gentler curves for the large Southern Pacific Mt-4 4-8-2’s that he likes to run.

What stands out most in the TPTCo. is the collection of rolling stock. An excellently detailed and weathered collection of 1940-1965 era equipment can be found on the layout, each beautifully weathered an nicely detailed. All the gondolas seemed to have really nice loads, and there was a surprise to be found in each boxcar which had an open door.

It seems like working on rolling stock is this modeler’s favorite activity, as you can find many examples of highly detailed Maintenence of Way equipment, (like this gray drovers’ caboose above) A large collection of MOW flats and gondolas literally covered in people occupies both medium sized yards on either wall.

The people were EVERYWHERE, it was an impressive collection of figures doing all sorts of things. From the requisite Woodland Scenics’ characters to other brands, you could see just about anything. Mules, Hoboes, Businessmen, Workmen, Ladies, Children and more. It was almost to the point of overpopulation, in some areas, which is rare for a layout of any scale.

Alot of detail was poured into every scene and the layout (to me) looks like it’d be located in the foothills of the Sierra Mountain range. Snowsheds, a rarely modeled feature, were present along with the normal “frontier town” scenes and a few other interesting points of interest.

Overall, very competent modeling and exceptionally detailed rolling stock made the layout enjoyable. The trackwork and ballasting were also superb and the modeler’s eye for interesting scenes that only figures could tell really brought much of his layout to life.

In addition, he really had a good sense of era, with plenty of vintage vehicles, period clothing and advertisements, and even “way of life” details, like this chicken coop behind a house with a victorian-era screen door used to keep the chickens from escaping.

Despite these great details, the rockwork was rather cartoony, with sheer 100+ foot cliffs making a “box canyon” out of much of the layout. The On3 line seems like an afterthought to me and visually disects the layout (which is a positive thing) I think the layout could have benefitted from nicely painted backdrops instead of the cliffs. Also, alot of the non-cliff rock work was incredibly steep, it created “mini-mesas” which gave a blocky shape to much of the scenery, some gradual slopes would have broken up this nicely and somewhat easily. Some bridges did look overbuilt, but that’s ok, they looked good. The overpopulated layout flooded with people seemed a bit improbable in spots, with railroad workers covering the decks of flatcars and freight depot platforms.

Overall, it’s a pretty impressive layout and it makes a great place to hang out on a warm summer day, that’s for sure! The hospitality of the hosts was second-to-none, I can’t thank them enough for an enjoyable visit.

Should You Buy a Brass Locomotive?

There’s always that one part of any well stocked hobby shop, it’s probably a glass case behind the cashier’s register, or perhaps it’s a commercial fishtank sized glass case with row upon row of gleaming brass locomotives. Some are unpainted with their meserizing golden-brass hue, some with their meticulously researched and accurately applied paintjobs. What they match in their high detail and impeccable craftsmanship is a price tag that will scare off any sane penny-pinching modeler, but should you be scared off by a high pricetag?

In the Defense of Brass Locomotion

Brass models can provide many things that plastic models have yet to achieve in the 60 years they have inhabited the same part of the hobbyshop. Only recently have plastic models begun to provide affordable, well detailed and accurate competition to brass models, but there are just some things the major manufacturer’s won’t ever make in plastic, and that’s where brass has always held an edge.

For instance, the extremely obscure railroad of the Colorado Springs & Cripple Creek District Railway owned a locomotive identical to the one pictured above, it was apparently built in their shops in 1901, or so the builder’s plate reads. It’s a small and light 2-6-2, and I’d bet the pony and trailing trucks aren’t to distribute firebox weight, but to deal with poor trackwork. The sloped tender suggests a local or switcher locomotive, it ran on coal and sports Carbon-Arc or Kerosene lamps fore and aft. The attractive boiler tube pilot is similar to a road locomotive, but it’s modest footboards at the rear suggest otherwise. This tiny locomotive of an equally tiny and obscure road that barely made ends meet in the quarter century of it’s existance certianly was overshadowed by such fabled neighboring roads as the quixotic Colorado Midland and the much revered DRGW. The only reason this model was produced was probably due to the plans for this little loco being run in a 1974 issue of Model Railroader. The CS&CCD Ry’s story having been enshrined in HO scale brass is one of the reasons why brass is an interesting way to build model locomotives, there’s no chance that would ever be made in plastic by any manufacturer with any degree of sanity.

Because brass locomotives don’t have to worry about the high return on investment that plastic models always have to strive for (think of why in the last 50 years there has been over a dozen models of the Union Pacific 4-8-8-4 big boy, yet there remains only a handful of well-detailed plastic 2-6-0’s 2-6-2’s 2-8-0’s 4-4-0’s and other small steam.) more unique models have been produced to fill in niche markets.

Logging prototypes in both narrow gauge and standard gauge have always been popular brass models. Westside shays and heislers, Uintah 2-6-6-2’s, Baldwin logging 2-8-2T’s, 2-8-2, 2-6-2’s and the wide variety of oddities like the Vulcan duplex, Willamette geared steamer, gypsy winch 0-4-0’s, and the Climax A, B & C models are often found on some of the more involved model railroader’s layouts.

Famous prototypes have also been popular. Southern Pacific Cab Forwards, NYC hudsons, and almost every streamlined locomotive has been produced in brass at one time or another. Smaller locomotives of the larger roads have been popular too, like CB&Q pacifics and Wabash moguls.

Brass is the only way to get some diesels that are too obscure to ever be produced in plastic, like the beautiful Fairbanks-Morse H-20-44’s or the Early EMD TA’s, Baldwin “babyface” cab units, or even small industrial diesels like whitcomb and porter models. SP SD-40T-2’s were popular models in brass for many years until the recent Athearn RTR offering eclipsed the detail of many previous brass offerings. I’m imagining that SD70ACe models are selling quite well as nobody has released one in HO yet.

The quality of the running gear found on the “average” brass locomotive varies wildly so this is where it gets tricky. Some companies were all about the looks and only put a “token” drive inside thinking that the collectors of brass would never run such a highly detailed locomotive as it may hurt the value. These clumsy arrangements often had underpowered open-frame motors flimsily attached with shrink tubing to a poorly built worm-gear assembly like the AT&SF 1950 class locomotive pictured above. This was the most mass-produced brass locomotive ever made, and although the detail is acceptable, it ran terrible. Early Ken Kidder mallets had only the rear set of drivers powered, making them gutless locomotives barely capable of hauling their own weight. Some of the gearing was so poor that it would only be able to attain ridiculously high speeds thanks to a lack of reduction gears. Although not a total loss, they would be worth sending off to an experienced rebuilder of brass like master machinist at DTA Models . (no commercial affilation, but I’m quite impressed with his work.) It seems a great deal of early Japanese brass is like this.

On the other side of the spectrum is the newer Korean brass, like my CS&CCD 2-6-2. It’s built by Ajin precision of Korea and has a fantastic drive train. Featuring a sagami can motor, it has solid driveshafts linked to sturdy machined metal gears with the gear tower solidly attached to the frame. It runs silky smooth. NWSL (NorthWestShortLine) brass has been revered for decades for it’s rock-solid dependable drives and adequate detail. Don’t forget that brass locomotives are heavier and if the drive is solid, they pull much better than a plastic locomotive, especially if the locomotive is small to begin with.

So, should you buy a brass locomotive?

-Yes you should, IF: You’re modeling a really specific prototype or if you absolutely must have an accurate and highly detailed model of a steam or diesel locomotive that would be too difficult to kitbash or scrathbuild. Always comparison shop though, as most brass is expensive, usually more than $300.00 now, with most brass well exceeding this price.

-No you shouldn’t IF: there’s a nice offering in plastic of the same model. It would be a waste of your money. A good example would be a Brass GP7 or SW1500 model, nice detail but unless it was severly modified by the home road (e.g. a unique chopnose like on the WM GP9’s) the Atlas, Proto 2000 or Athearn offering are quite adequate.

Open the Floodgates! Pouring the “Water” for your model scenes.

This is one of the intangible “thresholds” of modeling that modelers have to work up the courage to do, because it’s a one-shot-waste scenario. It’s a tense operation pouring what can be awfully expensive water materials on your nicely painted riverbed.

In the two previous articles, we discussed a new way to research the color of a river, and how to prepare the riverbeds for the coming torrent of “water”. And appropriate landforms to compliment your riverbanks.

Options for Water

For water, Woodland Scenic has been selling a horrendously overpriced product called “Realistic Water”which is actually just Acrylic Glazing Liquid used for painting light layers of paint on a painting. Learn more about Acrylic glazing liquid here. You can get this stuff by the GALLON for half the price of the bottle of WS product at Blick Art Supply.

Acryllic Glazing Liquid
Pros:
-Least Expensive! (Less than $10/Gallon!)
-Easy to Pour
-Non-Toxic, Smelly but not noxious
-Water-Soluble
-Dries CLEAR and looks “wet” and like flowing water (more so than other fake water products)
Cons:
-Smelly for 12 hours after poured.
-Takes 24 hours to dry
-Needs containment if riverbed extends off layout
-If you want to pour it deep, it will take many layers due to the fact that it won’t dry at all fast if you pour it deeper than 1/8″ layers.
-Cannot be colored or dyed (It doesn’t matter if you’re pouring your water shallow)
-It flows through the tiniest gaps in the scenery and like water takes the path of least resistance when poured. Make sure you’ve painted your riverbed properly before pouring.

Woodland Scenics Realistic Water is IDENTICAL to Acrylic glazing liquid, Except 4 times more expensive. (approaches $16.00/bottle)

Envirotex
Pros:
-Dries Clear
-can be poured deep (thick layers) forming bodies of water
-Can be colored with dyes
-Looks nice, but dries dead flat and needs waves added in additional layers.
Cons
-PRECISE mixing may be difficult
-Excessive care to deal with bubbles is time-consuming and boring
-Produces a lot of heat from chemical reaction
-Expensive
-Yellows with age (big problem)
-Creates “fillets” (concave meniscus) and creeps up pier pilings, water weeds, Stone abutments and anything sticking above the water. Looks weird and hard to fix. (Joe Fugate remedies this problem in his DVD’s.)

“Magic Water”

With thanks to Mr. Williams of “Magic Water,” we’ve expanded our coverage of the pros and cons of his product.

Pros:

-Looks realistic
-Can be poured to ANY depth without a need to “layer” pours
-Doesn’t melt plastic or foam
-Can be tinted and colored
-Has a much gentler meniscus around objects and the shore.
-No bubbles
-No Yellowing
-No Cracking
-No Shrinkage over time
-Comes with instruction booklet that shows how to model everything from mud puddles to high waterfalls.

Cons

-Toxic
-Resin-Based
-12-24 hour drying time (Not as bad as envirotex!)
-Needs additional layer to create realistic waves
-Will seep into porous plaster scenery and needs to be sealed.

E-Z Water

E-Z Water (Bag of yellow/clear plastic granules)
-Looks enticing for beginner modelers…DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES PURCHASE E-Z WATER!!! It’s a terrible, noxious, yucky, sticky product that ruins cookware, your riverbed and your modeling confidence because every pour will end in failure.
Did I mention that it’s never actually clear? It’s always yellow.

Preparing the River

If not contained on both ends of the riverbed or water feature it can leak in all the nooks and crannys, this is the same for all other water products.

Building a Dam:

To hold back the heavier products like Envirotex, Acrylic Glazing liquid, and Magic Water, you need a dam. I made mine out of metal plates you use for workshop pegboard. These galvanized steel plates are less than $0.50 apiece at any well-stocked hardware store. I drove drywall screws through the holes to hold them in place.

THE MOST IMPORTANT PART TO MAKING THE DAM IS THIS:

You have to take Wax paper or Plastic wrap and seal the side in which the water product is going to sit against to prevent the liquid or resin from spilling all over your floor. THIS HAS TO BE NEARLY WATERTIGHT, as all these products seem to find every nook and cranny just like actual water.

Here’s a photo of the dam in place:

Make sure you have at least a 1/4 to 1/2 an inch over the top of your water surface for safety.

Laying a Riverbed, Step by Step

One of the luxuries you’ll probably have as you build your future riverbed is that you won’t have previous scenery attempts lying in the middle of your project. I had to level out an entire canyon before even starting my river.

Here’s what it looked like BEFORE:

I use a lightweight way to build my hillsides, as covered in Woodland Scenic’s “Scenery Manual” which is basically old newspapers, junk mail etc crumpled up into little balls, taped to the board with 2 layers of plaster cloth and a thick layer of sculptamold atop the plaster cloth. They came down without a fight using a small hacksaw to cut through the plaster cloth.

A great tip I learned to recycle sculptamold is to heat up a large pot of water on the stove, then bring it out to the train room an ladle the hot water atop the sculptamold. The sculptamold turns back to the watery mush it was when you first mixed it, and can be recycled over and over. It even absorbs some of your scenery material like the ground foam and dirt, which adds to texture when you use it for scenery next.

The first part when planning a river that will include any rail or road bridge is to build the right-of-way and get it to a point in which it runs reliably, then begin scenery.

Once the track is laid down, shape your banks surrounding the tracks with care to observe how real rivers create banks. Erosion is typically a large part of the character of a riverbank, and trees are the only barrier to preventing the entire banks from being swept away in a flood. Hard stone outcroppings are also elements that add character to a river.

Looking at the above diagram, one can observe some of the neat features you can add to your river scene to add some more detail.

Other riverbed types would include small stones (don’t use ballast for this) and clay riverbeds.

As you can see in the diagram above, I cover the ENTIRE riverbed in an uneven, but somewhat smooth and thin layer of sculptamold. This makes you river look 100% more natural and gives that neat fast-flowing ripple effect that makes your eye think that the water is actually moving.

This is what the dry riverbed looks like with the layer of sculptamold down and the silty riverbed of decomposed granite in place. Any dirt you apply atop the sculptmold MUST be applied over a layer of FULL-strength white glue to prevent us from having problems when we paint the riverbed next. (It will also create a nice layer between the sculptamold and the acrylic glaze.)

Here’s a closeup of the bridge abutment in place, with low wooden retaining walls on either side to prevent eroding the mainline behind the stone pier.

Using techniques in the PREVIOUS ARTICLE on how to correctly paint your riverbed, we take our paints and paint DIRECTLY on top of the dried dirt. (make sure to use a medium sized 1/2 inch wide disposable paint brush)

In the next article, we’ll cover how to pour the river, it’s easier (and in some ways harder) than you might think.

How to Model a River

Rivers are perhaps the most often modeled item on a railroad next to Depots and Trackside industries. Unfortunately, very few people actually model a river realistically enough to really convince your eye that it actually looks like water. Sure, the glossy surface helps, but it’s also what’s below the waterline that counts most.

Joe Fugate has certianly captured the look of a seasonal creek, with great success. You can follow his progress in his 5 DVD set about his Southern Pacific Siskiyou Lines. I would highly reccomend these sets of DVD’s for anyone wanting to make realistic scenery. (Volumes 4+5 deal with scenery)

For this article, I’ve modified Joe’s methods to produce a wide, shallow river. This type of river can be found anywhere. It typically doesn’t get more than 15 feet deep and has lots of sandbars and silt.

If one looks at the wide variety of rivers across the country, they all have on thing in common: a dominant riverbed color. This varies wildly from the rich oxide reds of Upper Michigan to the Green Swampy mess of the South, from the Clear mountain streams in the mountains to my river, slow, shallow and containing decomposed granite and a bit of clay.

Color Theory.

Color is a make-or-break thing about painting a river. Model railroader has pushed black and sand as the dominant colors for riverbeds, and I disagree with their color assesment for ALL rivers, although the Milwaukee river does in fact have that color grouping.

The Mississippi is predictibly silty with a sandy brown being the dominant color.

The mighty Missouri River is raging in the winter, you can see the difference between the fast-moving winter Mo’ and the levied puddle that once was part of the river.

The somewhat fast moving Susquehana meets up with what seems to be the Juanita creek/river, just north of Harrisburg, PA in a hamlet called Benvenue (no “i” ?)

The Kankakee River is green..

The American River is deeper and faster…

My favorite as far as color is concerned is this one outside Edisto Island in South Carolina.

…Finally we have the River I intend to model mine after, the Salinas River, located in California.

This really gives the modeler ideas to branch out beyond the ultramarine blues and blacks and see what a REAL river looks like.

Next, we’ll discuss how to build a leak-proof riverbed for our water product and discuss how to correctly blend colors together to create the riverbed, then finally, We’ll pour the river and add the bankside vegetation.

I used Windows Live Local’s “Bird’s Eye View” to capture all of those Aerial shots.

Interacting with Miniature Railroading has a NEW look!

I’m pleased to announce the new colorscheme for Interacting with Miniature Railroading! (No, it’s not based on a railroad’s color scheme for those curious minds)

Check out the new banner, a time-lapse photo I look on my model railroad, and you’ll find a few other improvements.

I’m beginning to re-write some of my articles that were a good idea in theory..but weren’t as helpful as you might have wished. The first article that has been throughroly re-vamped is “Micro Layouts are a Blast!”

Next will probably be updated tutorials on how to do stuff, and you’ll see them in the next few weeks among the other new material.

I have made many promises in the past for articles that I never got around to writing, the list is below, and will be a guide to what you’ll be reading on this site in the next few weeks as I tie up these loose ends.

 

If YOU have any suggestions, please leave a comment.

List of future articles:

-Building a Photo Diorama for you model Trains (re-write, new photos)

-Modeling 4 lane concrete roadways (re-write, new photos)

-We build a Pizza-Style Micro Layout (New)

-How to weather: Tank Cars. Livestock cars, Hoppers, Gondolas, Steel boxcars, trussrod boxcars, old passenger cars, streamlined passenger cars, flatcars, Covered hoppers (both grain and cement), cabeese, diesels, and electric locomotives.

-How to weather steam locomotives (a mulit-part series)

-How to model an orange grove using new techniques

-How to detail and scratchbuild a citrus packing house from photographs of the real thing

-More building and structure plans

- N scale structure articles

-A review of the new Bachmann HO GE-45 tonner (with siderods!)

-and more!

The Fun of Lionel

After many years of being a “serious” prototype modeler, I was very pleasantly surprised when I had a chance to play with a classic Lionel layout today. I had shunned Lionel stuff for being unrealistic and bulky, and cringed every time I saw that third rail, but today NONE of that mattered. 

Tugging the throttle of a mighty ZW transformer is an experience I’ll never forget: The sheer POWER. Watching that New Haven Alco FA hum to life and see the streak of faded orange zoom around and around followed by brightly colored cars hitting the 027 curves at 250 scale miles per hour was just sheer joy!

Half the fun of Lionel is the SOUND. Now I’m not talking TMCC sound and all that modern “prototypical” sounding stuff, I mean:

-The powerful hum of a ZW transformer

-The growl of the locomotive as you crank up the throttle

-The cacophony of steel-on-steel that a good consist of cars makes at speed

-The rapturous clunking of a 10 car train clomping across a 90 degree crossing

-The electric “GNEEEEEEE” of operating a remote switch

-The  noisy tinplate trackwork flexing and moving against the plywood base 

-The various ancillary metal sounds that blend into the background providing a fully enveloping world of pure audio magic.

Owning KATO diesels and running on nicely laid HO track, the rush of activity, the thrill of being trackside with my models has faded over the years due to the sound systems not being able to capture the heavy track sounds, just the high-pitched steam and diesel sounds. Lionel managed to capture that, and with the playful and bright colors recapturing the gleeful feeling of  being 6 again with my friends’ CNJ 2-4-2 pulling a variety of rolling stock around what seemed to be a huge sheet of 4X8 plywood.

What a rush, a feast for the eyes and ears. I recommend rediscovering LIONEL again if for nothing else than the sheer fun!

It reminded me what the purest fun of model railroading is like and renewed my enthusasiam for trains and model railroading in general.

What Is the Best Scale for a Christmas Train Set?

Top 5 Christmas Layout Scales (1 being the most ideal)

5. LGB- Garden Scale Fun! At 1:29 scale, G scale will cetianly provide a lot of fun on a large scale. You could even put most gifts on the flatcars and gondolas that come with the starter LGB sets! These trains are extremely durable and even capable of being submerged and continue to run flawlessly.

4. O27 Lionel – You can’t have a classic Christmas without a loop of LIONEL encircling the tree. Although unrealistic in every way from the standpoint of a real model railroader, the kids won’t mind as they take the hefty throttle and crank up the speed on powerful diecast 4-6-4 hudsons or streamlined F3 diesels. The wide range of “action cars” that perform some element of animation only helps to increase the fun exponentially. Their legendary durability also help too.

3. On30 is the perfect comprimise of Playable size, prototype accuracy and colorful family fun. Basically,these O scale narrow gauge trains run on HO gauge track! This adds flexibility and fun, as you can operate both scale on the same loop. Bachmann makes some really impressive and affordable equipment that lasts forever and can be used on more serious layouts in the future. They are also about the same scale (1:48) as those ceramic holiday homes that are so popular. This is the fastest growing portion of the hobby and hundreds of brand-new products are coming out in On30 each year since it was formally introduced in 1997.    

2. Lego Trains- Infinite Creativity in a scale that works out to roughly 1:32, which is close to #1 scale. The rebuidable trains add a lot of holiday fun and I really enjoy playing with these reliable, colorful and fun trains.  

1. HO scale- I may be biased, but this is still the perfect comprimise of Scale, durability, and unlike every other scale listed here, inifinite expandibility. 60 years of product development has made HO the scale richest in variety with literally hundreds of thousands of different products to build and play with. Your youngsters will be able to, should they become interested, actually be able to build a fun and realistic looin model railroad that takes up less space then all the previously mentioned scales without being fragile, like N or Z scale.

Gallery of the Scales