Three Stations

The Campbell station's nearly done, with only a few details left to touch-up. My next step (though it may take a while to get there) is to landscape the area where the station will sit. I'll need to add the ground, weeds, tracks for the interurban, posts to keep cars from parking too close to the building, garbage and debris (people were slobs in the 1930's, too?), and whatever makes the scene realistic.

Still, the station's detailed enough for me to declare it complete, and move on. That's the good and bad side of the hobby; it's easy to say "it's good enough" and find another project, and then five years later maybe pick up the model again to touch up paint, or add some additional details on the exterior (like rain gutters on the back side?). If the model's never really done, can I say I'm making progress?

Just as a reminder of progress, I realized this was the third station I've built to match a Southern Pacific prototype.

I built the first (now Wrights station) back in grad school when my hobby budget was exactly $30/month, and that was being spendthrift. I remember being so careful in the hobby shop to pick just the materials I'd need for that month's projects. I scratchbuilt the station from styrene, basing it on a pencil sketch of the Agnews depot in the "Valley of Santa Clara" list of historical structures around San Jose. I messed up on scale and length there, but luckily all the South Pacific Coast details in that model matched what was available at Wrights. I modeled wainscoting and plaster walls on the inside, and added the decorative roof support details on the exterior, but I never found windows to fit the scratchbuilt openings I framed, so the window openings are still empty. I might have borrowed a Santa Clara Valley prototype, but its first location was on a shelf layout in imaginary central California. I'm glad it's found an appropriate home.

(On the subject of Wrights, check out these great photos of the tunnel at Wrights as seen in February 2009!)

The second SP station was the huge San Jose Market Street station that was the main station until 1935. I built this model for a
shelf layout
I keep in the house.
This was another scratchbuilt model, again out of styrene, and I remember just being amazed at how large the model was compared to anything I've done in the past. It's 24 inches long, and has a ton of doors and windows. I also learned about painting fixtures here; I created a little mask out of strip styrene to spray paint the white sashes on the window castings. This model's mostly complete, but it got to the point of looking decent a few years ago, and has never quite been finished. For a while, the interior was the blocking issue, but I added minimal detail a while back. The shelter at the entrance still needs to be attached. Most importantly, the huge barn that covered all the tracks of the station still needs to be built. I'll get to it one of these days... if building that seems fun.

And the last station is the Campbell station I've already written about. Here's the latest picture with rain gutters and signs installed. It's been a change from the previous model. I kitbashed this model from a laser kit, constructed from wood and paper rather than plastic.
It has more details like the wood screen in the front gable and wooden corbels holding up the roof. I also was able to duplicate the fanciful bracing on the baggage door.

These three models cover fifteen years of modeling, and fifteen years of consciously or unconsciously sticking to a theme of stations in the Santa Clara Valley. All three, also, represent building from photos. Although the Wrights station was only based on one sketch, I've added other details based on photos of the Wrights depot from books. The SP Market Street Station was my first serious effort to do some research on the station from Sanborn maps, then use old photos and postcards to figure out the arrangement of the structure. The Campbell station is probably the first where I've explicitly marked up photos to figure out what exact details to add.

More importantly, none of the stations is quite done, but they're all complete enough for me to be able to say "yes, I've made progress". (Looking at all three together also reminds me I never painted the Wrights station roof green; the original roofs were all stained shake shingles.) All three stations are also reminders of what I've done in the hobby in the past, and of the time in my life when I was building each one.

All the fascia and roof supports are installed on my model of the Campbell (California) depot, and the dock assembly has been glued onto the station. Now I just need to finish details - assorted clutter on and around the station, signs, and other details.

To get some ideas about what to add, I took a photo of the model and compared it to photos of the actual depot in the 1930's. So far (except for some crooked walls and broken windows), it looks pretty good. A closer look at some power lines near the station showed that the back side of the station had the old San Jose and Los Gatos (aka Peninsular Railway) interurban train tracks. This was a streetcar-like railway that ran from San Jose to Los Gatos, Saratoga, and eventually all the way to Cupertino and Palo Alto. The trains used to head west out of San Jose, wind through the Willow Glen neighborhood, and cut through the orchards to Campbell. There's space behind my station for the tracks; now I just need to figure out how to model them (and the trolley wire), and figure out how to make it all removable for operations.

Looks like some heavy planning to do.

I needed a break from the structure-building, so I ended up turning back to the signals. I've installed semaphore signals along the upper deck of the railroad (just like the prototype), but getting them work smoothly has been a challenge. At first, I used Tortoise switch machines with a homemade plastic crank to move the control wire that raises and lowers the semaphore arm, but found that getting the arm travel correct was a ton of work. Next, I used some of Circuitron's signal actuators for Tortoises; those work better, but only work for two indication (red/green signals). If I want to get a yellow signal from these (indicating that the train should expect the next signal will be red), I either needed some fancy electronics or I needed to hire some gnomes to sit under the layout and move the signals as needed. The Tortoises are also a bit big; they're great for switches, but when I have two signals located across the track from each other, the actuators under the layout get in the way of each other and make adjustments difficult.

Luckily, I saw that Team Digital was selling a new circuit that will control signals using model airplane servos, and also correctly handles three indication signals. I spent a good part of Saturday in a very hot garage ripping out the old signal machinery and replacing it with the new servos. The servos are amazingly tiny; the picture shows one next to a Tortoise controlling a switch.

So, easy installation for the first two semaphores, and I'm just waiting for the mailman to arrive with a couple more signals so I can get another two signals working. There's still lots to do; the photo of the current setup shows what the layout can look like when I'm still trying to test new electronics.

I ought to build some more kits!

I'm still making progress on the Campbell station. This weekend's project was adding the corbels or roof brackets that support the fascia, and making the lath screen above the operator's bay. See the attached pictures.


Most of the structures I've built over the last few years have been scratchbuilt. I had an idea or picture of the building I wanted, and I used only generic parts - window castings, plastic shaped to look like clapboard siding, stripwood, and wood sheet -- to try to reproduce that building. By scratchbuilding, I get to build exactly the building I want. As I've complained elsewhere, many commercial building kits don't look like they belong in California or the small Santa Clara Valley towns I model. I also get to think about the design of buildings and fitting each to the space I have, giving me a bit more of a challenge and more work to build the model.

Now, most model kits aren't that much of a challenge. There's plastic kits that could be assembled by "shaking the box". There's also wood structure kits that give you a set of rough plans and a box of the same parts you'd use when scratchbuilding, and turn you loose to build the model neatly with none of the fun of designing the building. Kits like that have kept me scratchbuilding (though I'll occasionally use such a kit for raw materials or as a starting point for other work).

Building the triangular roof supports, though, reminded me of what a good kit can provide. I'd gotten e-mail a couple weeks ago about a craftsman house model I have on a shelf layout; the sender wanted to buy the kit, but couldn't find it. (That's not surprising; the manufacturer only built those kits for maybe a year, and disappeared soon after. It's not surprising the kit would be hard to find 15 years later. The kit is the Timberline Scale Models "354 Juniper Street" kit for those who care.) I couldn't help the sender with the kit, but I did find the old instructions and sent off a copy.

Looking at those instructions reminded me how a kit can be useful when it teaches me skills. The kit instructions have you build the roof supports from stripwood using a technique I'd never seen before. First, you cut the diagonal piece from a template. Next, you use a credit card to square off a pair of long pieces of stripwood, and glue the diagonal piece in place between the two. Finally, you cut the glued piece off the longer pieces, and you're done!

It's a neat technique, and I'd forgotten about it til I photocopied the instructions. The brackets came together perfectly, and you can see them applied to the model in the original photo. I learned other techniques from that kit - using white glue and gesso to simulate stucco, using multiple contrasting colors on windows and window frames, adding rafter ends to super-detail a model, etc. It's a good example of why kits are useful, even for folks like me who think they know what they're doing. Supposedly, Fine Scale Miniatures kits were also good places to learn model techniques because of the details about weathering.

I'm also grateful to whichever kit taught me to use double-stick tape to hold down parts. I used that trick to build the lathwork strips hanging above the operator's bay. In that case, I laid out the strips on top of the tape (pressing my finger to the tape to remove some of its stickiness.) I then glued the cross-boards across all the strips, and glued some more on areas that would be cut away after the glue dried to hold everything together. After 20 or so minutes, I pulled the assembly off the tape, cut the whole piece to fit in the roof gable, then painted and installed the lathwork. I always have double-stick tape in my desk drawer for modeling - it's an essential now. It's a much nicer technique than the old-fashioned glue-on-wax paper approach.

Lingering Projects

Model railroading stays as my primary hobby because the hobby morphs to be whatever I need it to be at the time. If I want to be social, I'll do model railroad operations. If I feel like reading about the history of California, I do that. When I have the urge to create, I've got that too. The diversity of the hobby--whether it's the range of construction techniques (wood, plastic, metal; mocking up, building with care, painting), history, planning, or socializing--gives me a fun outlet that matches whatever my current mood is.

The drawback of all this is that it's really easy to pile up half-finished projects. There's usually a few projects sitting around that either got half-done and placed on the layout, or partially-built kits sitting on my workbench, or materials and kits sitting in the closet waiting for me to start them. That's not unique to model railroading; my wife knits and weaves (among a bunch of other craft hobbies), and t-shirts with the slogan "she who dies with the most yarn wins" suggests that fiber arts hobbyists are just as bad as piling up potential and half-finished projects as anyone else.

I hadn't done any model building recently, so I decided to go after some lingering projects on Saturday morning. I started with a freight car model that's been half-built, but I found the assembly frustrating, so I ended up turning to a model I've been building for at least a year - the Campbell S.P. station. As I picked up the kit again, I reflected a bit on why I'd given up on building it previous times.

Campbell's a major scene on my layout; it was a small farming town with multiple canneries, a bank, and a movie theater. There were times it must have been a busy place, but all the pictures I've seen of the railroad station shows it quiet and sleepy. Being the railroad agent must have been a slow job.

The station itself has some memorable features. It was originally built in the 1880's by the South Pacific Coast narrow gauge railroad that went over the hills to Santa Cruz. Like many railroad stations of the time, it was built in the Eastlake or Stick style, with lots of wood and machine-produced trim. Because it wasn't built by its later owner, the Southern Pacific railroad, it isn't an exact match for any of SP's "standard" depots, and has a bunch of interesting features - elaborate wood bracing on the baggage doors, gables above the station agent's office, and elaborate wood trim in a few locations.

When I started the Campbell station, I wasn't sure how to approach the model. I could build the entire station from scratch, but I was looking for shortcuts. American Model Builders does make a really nice kit for SP's "type 23 depot". The AMB kit is about the same size as the Campbell station, and had a lot of detail that I wasn't sure I could scratchbuild well. I'd also been interested in trying one of their kits. When I saw one of the kits at the hobby shop, I bought it as a starting point.

The Campbell station's hit a few roadblocks during its construction. First, I had to figure out how to "kitbash" the AMB kit to a floorplan closer to the Campbell station. I remember photocopying the laser-cut pieces for the AMB kit, and trying to figure out how to re-shuffle them to have the same configuration as the Campbell depot. I also found the Campbell depot had eight more windows than the kit, so I had to go poking around for window castings that would look appropriate on the model. It took a bit of courage to start cutting and rearranging the walls, but I managed to do it. There was another hitch when I realized the walls weren't turning out to match the station, and so I ripped some of the work apart, got the walls rejuggled, and... put the kit back on the shelf.

Then, last year, I finally assembled the walls together, and started looking at the roof. The roof's a mix of angles, with gables going off in all four directions. The roof was intended to be glued on (sealing the interior), so I spent some time putting clear glass in the windows, painting the interior walls black so they weren't noticeable, and cutting wood to form the roof.

Then I sat on the project. Assembling the roof was going to involve some tedious cutting and fitting, and I wasn't completely happy with how everything was coming together. I eventually got frustrated, put the half-built kit on the layout to keep it out of harm's way, and moved on to other projects.

Til this weekend.

I don't know what got my back onto this kit - perhaps guilt at having it sitting around so long. I'm also at the point where I could start adding dirt and scenery at Campbell, so having the complete station ready to drop into the scene would encourage me to start putting in terrain and dirt. Or maybe I just needed a way to fill a few hours. In any case, while waiting for my wife's plane to arrive, I finished the glazing, took a deep breath, and started gluing the roof on. It came out ok - though there's some not-quite-level lines that I'm not happy with, but I'll live with. The progress on the roof kept me fired up, and I spent part of Sunday gluing on the simulated shingles, then painting the roof green as it would have been in real life.

The picture shows the station as it is tonight. I still need to put fascia along the edge of the roof, clean up the painting, and start adding details, but this weekend's work made a huge difference; even if it was only a few hours of work, it still got me excited about finishing the model once and for all. I'm now poring over the old pictures to capture little details--a ladder hung on an end wall, a shaded lamp above a doorway, and chimneys on the roof.

We'll see if this weekend's progress gets me excited to finish the station completely. Although some of my projects get put away because I got frustrated or stuck, others just get forgotten about; I don't remember what's half-built, or what particular snag caused me to stop. For this kit, I made a point tonight of writing my "to-do" list of the work still to be done. I've also kept big lists of ongoing projects so that I can quickly figure out something to do when I've got time. My current lists are a bit out of date, so maybe it's time to make a new "what to do when I'm bored" list.

Painting Backdrops

One of the tricks to a great model scene is having a decent backdrop so the model world doesn't end just behind the model. I've tried two approaches for backdrops - painting them by hand and using photographs, and I've been happy with both approaches.

My backdrops are 1/8" styrene from a local plastics supplier (Tap Plastics). I get the sheet cut into 1 foot by eight foot strips, then glue it onto supports at the back of each scene. After priming and some sky blue paint (fading as it drops to the horizon), I've got an acceptable scene.

Here's a photo from behind an orchard near Campbell. In this case, I only used a dark blue-grey paint to look like the silhouette of the hills we'll often see in the Santa Clara Valley on summer afternoons. Checking the color wasn't hard; I just went outside and squinted at the far hills. Painting this just requires some quick brushwork to make a mountainous shape on the backdrop.

In the Santa Cruz Mountains, I needed more realistic scenery for the nearby mountains. These pictures from Glenwood and Wrights show a couple other attempts (in some cases not covered enough by trees at the back of the scene.) I learned these techniques from an old Narrow Gauge and Short Line Gazette article from the 1980's, though the techniques are similar to other model railroad articles. I painted the furthest hills in a dark bluish, then painted each nearer line of hills in a brighter and greener set of colors. As I got closer, I detailed in trees with a flat brush held vertically and touching only on the tips. It's not the greatest landscape painting, but it'll do for me.
The big message here, of course, is that the backdrop doesn't have to be very good. These photos are close-ups and aren't great when examined in detail, but when the whole scene's looked at, they're not the center of attention. They just register as sky colors and hill colors, and that's enough to convince the viewer that the scene is real. Backdrops are also really forgiving; if the painting doesn't work out (as the Glenwood scene didn't at first), just paint a new set of hills on top of your not-quite-good version.

These final two photos show the scene near Wrights in Los Gatos Canyon. I'd tried painting California dry hills, but hadn't been happy with the results. I finally gave up and decided to try some photo images. Rather than go out to the hills and photograph decent scenes, I turned to Google Earth.

Google Earth's normally viewed top-down, but it also has contour maps so it knows the height of features. If you tilt a Google Earth scene (check the on-line Help to see how) , you can look at an edge-on view of nearby hills. In my case, I found spots along the west side of Los Gatos Canyon, and looked towards the east side of the canyon with the view tilted almost horizontally. I then did screen captures of the scenes, printed them on photographic paper in my cheap ink-jet printer. I then sprayed the images with Testor's Dullcoat to cut glare on the image, cut out the sky portion of each image, and glued them to the backdrop. The first picture shows one of the more realistic parts of the backdrop. The second (over the water tank) worked less well, but is still quite presentable. The only problem with the images is that they're captured from aerial photos, so trees and hills often look a bit stretched and flattened when I tilted the image to look at it sideways.

That last picture also gives away the source of the photo. If you look at the larger version of the image, you'll see a small, bright green line at the top of the ridge. That's Google Earth's way of displaying roads, and I'd forgotten to turn off road displays when capturing the image.

I Survived BayRails!

Last weekend, I opened my layout for BayRails, a model railroad operating session gathering in the Bay Area. BayRails happens every two years. Eighty to a hundred people from around the country come to San Francisco and spend three days running trains on model railroads in the area. Some are quite famous layouts published in the model railroad press, some are huge and run prototypically long trains. Others (like my layout) are much more modest, but hopefully still fun for operations. I hosted two days of operations, and had folks from Arizona and St. Louis switching boxcars for half a day. The photos give a glimpse of what an operating session is like.

Getting the layout ready for operations is usually tiring, but prepping for two back-to-back sessions (on Thursday and Saturday) turned out to be quite a challenge. Model railroad operations is a bit of a game, with rules, pieces, and other players, but most games don't require the host to clean and repair pieces in between sessions. I spent most of Friday night cleaning the track, repairing balky locomotives, fixing minor electrical problems, and resetting all the boxcars to their correct locations.
One of my surprises at operating sessions is that no one plays the game the same way. I'm familiar with my layout, so when I do switch boxcars, I've got my habits. I've got favorite ways of getting the job done, I know how many cars can fit on a specific siding, and I know what order to do the work to make my life as easy as possible.

When I have others over, that all goes out the window. They're new to the layout, and are having to pick it all up as they go along. Each set of visitors is different. One crew early in the layout took what I thought to be a complex switching problem and finished it off in moments. Another crew noticed a useless bit of track in the Del Monte Cannery trackage that I'd copied straight from an old Sanborn fire insurance map, and realized it was a great place to hide the caboose when switching so they didn't block the main line. I suspect their use of the track might have actually been a use for the track on the prototype!
This weekend was no different; I saw crews switching nearby industries "backwards" from my usual way but with fine results, using hand signs to communicate when switching, and thinking hard about the difference between how they'd switched on other layouts and how they thought the real railroads would have worked.
Overall, it was a great weekend for me; it was great to get feedback (both good and bad on the layout), and I enjoyed seeing the visiting crews behaving like the real crews and getting real work done. I've got work to do before the next operating session. A couple of my locomotives could use some maintenance work after several hours of constant work. Several minor track problems became much more obvious when visitors are watching, and one switch got spiked shut on Saturday morning when I realized it was misbehaving enough to frustrate operations. But I'll be looking forward to operating again soon!
Thanks to all my visiting operators, and I hope you had a great time!

Choosing an Era

I'm often asked why I model the 1930's. After all, I'm only 40, I'm in high-tech, and I'm a bit lazy about reliability issues. Why wouldn't I be modeling the 1970's, or modern day? I could run nice, reliable diesel locomotives instead of balky steam locomotives. I could spend hours computerizing the layout so I had automatic signals and dispatcher control instead of avoiding the computers and electronics problems I normally like.

It's a complex question to answer.

First, modern-day railroading just wasn't that interesting for me. One obvious reason is that modern trains are big. The locomotives are big, the freight cars are big, and the industries that have rail service are big. Fitting those kinds of scenes into the space I have - either a shelf layout or a single garage layout - just isn't easy. Older trains are smaller, so I can model more.

Even if I had the space for long trains and big engines, I'm not a railfan. Spending a day going out to the tracks and watching trains run by isn't that interesting. Even worse, I grew up on the San Francisco peninsula in the 1970's. I grew up watching dirty, unmaintained Southern Pacific diesels going by, and watching all the industries disappear. The steel mills and warehouses in South San Francisco either got torn down or stopped getting rail service. The canneries and food processing plants of the South Bay closed. San Francisco's Bayshore yard turned into a ghost town as all the warehouses in San Francisco turned into office space, dance clubs, and outlet stores. There's just no romance for me in that era, so trying to model the SP in the 1970's just doesn't sound fun.

My strongest reason, though, is to learn more about and recreate my grandparent's world. I've seen photos from the 1920's and 1930's, and I like the reminders of California's agricultural past, and of a time when railroads were the new and modern thing. I can see the pictures of my grandmother and her brothers and sisters in Santa Cruz for the day; they've just driven down from Hayward, they're dressed up, and they look like they're having a wonderful time. What was the drive on Highway 17 like for them? What sightseeing did they do?

My mom's family was from Hayward. My great-grandfather came over from the Azore Islands in the 1870's, earned money as a shepherd for the Miller and Lux, and bought ten acres above Hayward in the 1890s which he planted in apricots. He lost two wives, then met my great-grandmother and raised four children with her. The family dried the apricots on the property; every year for the harvest, my great-grandmother would prepare food for the family and the workers they hired to pick, cut, and dry the apricot. This photo of my great-grandfather shows him proudly looking over a drying tray of apricots sometime in the 1930's. Those apricots would get sold to one of the dried fruit packers down at the railroad tracks; the packing houses in Hayward probably looked a lot like the ones I model in San Jose and Campbell. My grandmother even worked as a bookkeeper for one of the packers for a while. My great-grandparents' fruit ranch probably looked like every farm in the Santa Clara Valley. When I'm researching and building my models, I'm also learning more about the world my family came from.


I also see the pictures of what the Bay Area was like. In this case, my grandmother took a photo of one of her friends sitting on top of a "gravity car" on the Mount Tamalpais Railway. My father took me and my sister hiking on Mt. Tam pretty often when we were growing up; I hadn't realized then that my grandparents had gone hiking on the mountain too, or that they'd stopped and taken photos at places like the Double Bowknot where I'd walked by 50 years later. My grandmother would have ridden the Northwestern Pacific to visit relatives in Sonoma County, or taken commute trains on the Peninsula when they lived in Redwood City. A couple decades later, my dad remembers working in the Hunts and Del Monte canneries in the summer, and knows that he got paid well for unloading cans from boxcars and checking the fruit cutting machines.

It's all memories. It's learning about family and the world they lived in. It's learning about how the Bay Area's changed from agricultural to high-tech, and from empty spaces to wall-to-wall suburbia. It's knowing what kind of orchards occupied the space where our house is, and knowing the importance of Sunnyvale's historic apricot orchard. It's about understanding the San Francisco Bay Area during one of the other booms the area's gone through, from the wheat fields to orchards to industry to electronics to the Internet.