Signals fixed!

After spending a couple weekends trying to get my semaphores to show yellow signals, the signals are now working. Thanks to Bill at Team Digital for correctly diagnosing my problem.

For those that care, or who have a similar problem: I was connecting Team Digital's SMC4 servo controller to the SIC24 signal controllers which I program with all the special signal logic. It turns out the servo controller expects to be driven by an open collector output - that is, the output should float up to 5v because of a resistor, but get pulled to ground by a transistor. The SIC24 uses push-pull drivers where transistors tie the output to either 5v or 0 depending on the signal intended. The push-pull output interacts badly with the SMC4 so it never lets a yellow indication get through. Disconnecting all the inputs to the SMC4 and connecting each input to ground would make the signal work correctly. Bill's suggestion was to add a diode on the red signal line. (Time to pull out my college electronics book to understand why that works.)

With that small change, I have three indication semaphore signals working wonderfully!

Now, I just need to clean up the mess of wires covering Auzerais St., and then I can figure out my next project.

California Buildings

Folks always seem a bit surprised that I'd aimed my model railroad for an earlier era so I'd have less reason to do crazy, electronic things. After a weekend spent fighting with a controller for the semaphore signals, it sure isn't surprising for me.

So, my model railroading this week has primarily been a bunch of colorful words I can't repeat here. Maybe it's time instead to repeat a rant that first got me thinking about this blog.

I have a short, shameful confession to make: I really hate seeing buildings on a California-themed layout that don't look like buildings I'd ever see in California. There's no better way to ruin my day than to show me a California-themed model railroad layout with a Main Street lined with brick buildings, or obviously New England style warehouses, or houses borrowed from the Colorado Rockies.

I grew up in the San Francisco bay area, and grew up wandering through the old downtowns of suburban San Francisco communities like San Bruno, South San Francisco, and Millbrae. I visited grandparents in the East Bay, and saw pictures of the old family fruit ranch in Hayward. I learned how to drive in the industrial parks of South San Francisco as well as the roads winding through the Santa Cruz Mountains. I saw all sorts of buildings. Sometimes I'd see traditional houses built before the turn of the century that resembled the buildings seen elsewhere in the US. I saw all the Spanish Revival, Mission Style, and Berkeley brown-shingle buildings from the 'teens. I saw the modern and art deco buildings of the twenties (and the cleaned up, modern San Francisco townhouses of San Francisco's outer Sunset). Scattered through many of the old neighborhoods, I'd see a mix of all of these. 

[Spanish-revival Rio Grande gas station, originally in Santa Barbara, California. Built from plans in a 1970's era Model Railroader magazine.]

Unfortunately, none of these sorts of buildings are found in the typical manufacturer's set of buildings.  There's tons of brick buildings for your midwestern main street, or towering warehouses, tenements, high-peaked roofs, classical pillars, and covered stairwells and mud rooms. 

What do I want to see? Look, for example, at this picture of San Mateo Ave. in San Bruno, a suburb of San Francisco.  The center building is Spanish Revival because of the curved line of the stucco facade; behind, it's brick or (more likely) wood.  The rest of the buildings are all one story, and none appear very architecturally significant except for that great curved-roof grocery store halfway down the block.  Or look at this photo of a parade with a grocery store behind.  Again, modest buildings, stucco false fronts with the rest of the building in clapboard siding, or Bank of America's modest art deco bank building suitable for a smal town?  (I've probably seen the same bank building in a few other towns along the peninsula.)

What makes a building Californian?

• Very little brick. Unreinforced brick buildings fall apart in major earthquakes, so Californians quickly learned that brick buildings were bad. You'll still see older brick buildings in California, but in general brick fell completely out of favor by the time the Long Beach earthquake stopped shaking in 1933.  Unfortunately, it must be easy to make good-looking brick buildings in plastic, and so the manufacturers have lots of buildings to sell us.  Sorry, that's not what my main street looked like! 

If there are brick buildings, they usually predate the 1906 San Francisco earthquake or (at worst) the 1933 Long Beach earthquake.  For extra realism, place some some steel plates just below roof level with nut-bold-washer castings in the center to represent the reinforcing rods that pull the sides together and keep the walls from falling over during an earthquake.   Your HO figures deserve your caution! 


[Wooden packing shed based on buildings in Wrights, California. The original was probably built of redwood milled within a couple miles of the building site. The board and batten skirting protected the posts which propped this building up above a creek bed.]

• Lots of wood. Wood-frame and sheathed buildings were cheap and easy to build in California; there were huge forests along the coast range and in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. San Francisco recovered quickly from the 1906 earthquake because lumber from the Mendocino coast and from the Santa Cruz mountains quickly arrived for rebuilding. It's not at all unusual to find older industrial buildings built completely from wood.
• Single story, low and big buildings.  Land was cheap in small-town California, so low buildings that spread out were common.  Stairs, after all, are a lot of trouble; if you can buy a big lot and put a spreading building on it, why not?  With the mild winters, there also was less worry about heating the building.  The buildings also stay low to the ground.  Because the ground doesn't freeze in California, there's no need to dig the foundations below the frost line.  Placing buildings directly on slab is safe and cheap.
• Less enclosed storage, more outdoor work space. Because of the mild climate, it's not surprising to see equipment stored outside, or for a building to be open on one end. Houses won't have mudrooms, and will often have large porches to catch breezes during the summer.  Large, overhanging eaves keep the heat out in the summer.  (Watch out, though, for the steeper roof lines and big eaves from Colorado or New England; those roof slopes aren't needed when you're not trying to encourage the snow to slide off.)
• Less substantial industrial buildings. Most California towns had industries that were seasonal like agricultural, or were new businesses that built light buildings. There were few of the huge industries that might build large, permanent buildings, nor was land expensive enough to force owners to build up. As a result, it's not surprising to find wood-framed or corrugated iron buildings instead of large brick warehouses and factories. 
• Lemon trees. Every house in California needs to have a lemon tree planted somewhere on the property. It's a zoning requirement that's strictly enforced.

What kits do I like?  The old Suydam kits (now made by Alpine Division Scale Models) have some of the best California lines.  Their lumber yard shows how mild weather kept most of the lumber exposed and the office small. Suydam also made two of the only Craftsman-style houses in HO with their Dr. Whyte's house and Brown's Bungalow.  Both would be at home in any suburban town in Northern California.  The cardboard kits require a bit of care, but turn into nice models.  Timberline Scale Models also produced a beautiful laser-cut Craftsman bungalow kit back in 1998,  and my model sits proudly front-and-center on my Market Street layout.   Campbell's wooden kits also capture the California look-and-feel with lots of low wooden and corrugated iron buildings.  Some look a bit too rustic, but that's nit-picking.  All Campbell's buildings also have wide eaves and lighter construction which makes them look more Californian than many of the wood kit manufacturers.  Compare Campbell's kits to Bar Mills's kits, for example. 

There's also few kits for the art deco and streamlined moderne styles that were common in the 1930's.  Walther's bus terminal or City Classic's market would both fit the Bay Area well.  IHC's San Francisco townhouses provide material for kitbashing any of the stick-style townhouses seen in Northern California urban cities.  Although the townhouses might have been two or three stories in San Francisco, these can also be cut down to a single story.  Finally, I love Showcase Miniature's barn, which looks exactly like a typical barn you'll see in rural California even today.  Those Iowa-style barns with mansard-ish roofs just don't appear out here.

I model the 1930's, but if I modeled the 1950's or later, I'd also need to put in mobile home parks.  Mobile home parks in California were often built on the undesirable land that was easily graded, so it's common to see clusters of mobile homes in odd shaped lands along creeks or in other places where flooding appears frighteningly possible. Usually, the railroad went by the same spot.

I'd love to see more California-style buildings.  Spanish revival style buildings are really common on the San Francisco peninsula, yet I can't think of more than a couple kits with tile roofs.  I'd love to see some embellished false fronts with stucco and red roof tiles hiding a worn wooden building behind.  I've built one by routing the facade from plexiglas and building bay windows from styrene.  Model Tech Studio's kit for the San Francisco's 4th and Mission switch tower is beautiful (and I wish I'd get around to building mine.)  I'd also like to see more art deco building kits; I've always been interested in Funaro and Camerlengo's art deco building, but have never gotten around to buying or building one.


[Spanish-revival storefront with bay windows, modeled from building in Campbell, California. Front wall is plexiglas milled to shape; rest of body is styrene sheet.]

Now, my other pet peeve are buildings that are asymmetric, badly balanced, or look too crazy to have ever existed, but I'll save that rant for another day.

Here's details on a few of the structures I've built for my layout that look like California buildings: 
• Borcher Brothers building materials, North First Street, San Jose
• Abinante and Nola packing house, West San Carlos St., San Jose
• Smith Manufacturing Co., Stockton Ave., San Jose

I need *how many* boxcars?

They might say model railroad operations is like a really fun game, but they don't say what it takes to get enough pieces to play. [Photo from the Sparks railroad yard, January 2006]

Different people have different ways to get the "pieces" for operating a model railroad - the freight cars. Some folks buy a bunch of Athearn plastic cars, and find things are "good enough" for operation. Jack Burgess, on the other hand, starts by looking at photos of the Yosemite Valley in the late 1930's, and tries to recreate exact cars that had actually been seen on the real railroad.

When I started building the Vasona Branch layout, deciding on freight cars wasn't hard. I went to the box, and grabbed my collection of HO freight cars. Some were plastic "shake the box" kits from my teenage years. I had a couple scratchbuilt kits from grad school days. I even had whatever western-prototype kits I'd managed to build when we lived in New York, from some Red Caboose refrigerator cars to a pair of Denver and Rio Grande Western iron ore cars I'd gotten one weekend from the hobby shop in Ridgefield, Connecticutt. (Iron ore? In Colorado? It was all they had.) All fifteen or twenty of the cars went on the layout that first weekend as I got basic benchwork, a reverse loop, staging tracks, and the beginnings of the West San Jose scene built. I put the cars in a train, ran them here, ran them there, and switched a couple at the sites of industries. Cool! I've got a big layout!

It didn't take long til I realized just how many industry tracks I had on the new layout, and how I didn't have anywhere near enough freight cars to keep even some of the industries busy. I did some quick figures, guessing at the number of cars that the layout could hold and the number of trains, and figured out I was going to need to build a lot more cars.

Worse, I realized that I really wanted to capture that 1930's look of short freight cars, dominated by a sea of plain brown boxcars. Few of the shake-the-box kits really captured that 1930's look I wanted (though Accurail's outside braced 40' boxcar is really decent.) My other big sources of traffic also needed freight cars-tank cars for oil products, gondolas for gravel, flat cars for lumber.

So one of my big hobby projects over the last five years has been building more freight cars. Each time I think I've got enough, I start trying to run additional trains during an operating session, or get annoyed at seeing the same box car run on the layout twice in an operating session, and decide that I could use a few more.

To capture that look of the 1930's, I turned to resin cast kits. These kits are made in small runs by garage manufacturers, and have a scary reputation for being lots of work to build. They come just as flat castings straight out of the mold, and need to be built up into a box, then need details like grab irons and brake systems to be added, and finally need to be painted. I've probably got 15 or so on the current layout.

My best way for building the resin kits turned out to involve burning out at work. After a couple crazy projects, I desperately needed to get away, so my wife and I rented a vacation house up at Sea Ranch on the Sonoma Coast. Sea Ranch is an isolated collection of vacation houses in the middle of nowhere; apart from walking along the ocean, visiting little Gualala, or sleeping, there's not a huge amount to do. We both brought several craft projects, and I managed to finish four resin freight cars over five or six days, generally finishing one a day. That worked so well that I made sure to wear myself down the next year so we'd have to take another break, and managed to get another four resin kits done that trip.

The attached photo shows some of the projects done on the second trip. These are a mix of Westerfield, Funaro and Camerlengo, and Sunshine kits. I use superglue to assemble these, following the trick of a needle in a pin vise to apply the glue and an upside-down shot glass to hold the glue so I don't stick my elbow in it.

I also built a bunch of the Red Caboose refrigerator cars for the layout at other times. When we moved out to New York, one of my favorite parts of our new neighborhood was Valley Model Trains, located out in the old mill complex in Wappinger's Falls. I built six of the kits while in New York, and when I needed more refrigerator cars for the new layout, I decided to stick with these kit. I mail-ordered another six from Red Caboose (because I could never find them in the local hobby stores).

When I mass-produced the additional six kits, I tried to fix some of the problems I'd had with the older models. I found the plastic grab irons and steps were too fragile, so this time I made my own wire grab irons and used flexible plastic steps. I also bought undecorated kits so I could match the black roofs of the late 1920's and get unique numbers for each of the kits. To make decalling all the kits easier, I marked up a clear plastic template that was the size of one side of a car, and showed center lines and heights for each of the decals. With the template, it was easy to make sure all the various text appeared in the same place on each car.

Last year, I started running a gravel train during my operating session. The train's story was that it would run from Santa Cruz to the new mainline construction in San Jose, drop off full cars, and pick up empty cars already dumped. This train was intended to be a combination of a troublemaker (getting in the way of other trains) as well as being a low-pressure job for late in the session. It had been running with an odd mix of gondolas. There were a couple Details Associates steel gondolas that had a problem staying on the track because of their light weight, some of Red Caboose's steel SP gondolas, and a mix of scratchbuilt and borrowed gondolas of different flavors. The Red Caboose and Details Associates gons are based on 1950's prototypes; they were reasonable things to get when I wasn't sure what era I was modeling.

However, none of these were prototypical; a normal work train in the 1930's would have been filled with very distinctive drop-bottom gondolas. The only problem was that the only sources for the cars were imported brass cars (pricey!) or some 1960's Ulrich kits no longer in production.

I thought about different options for a while, but all the old photos I saw from my era showed those hard-to-find cars. I thought about trying to kitbash something appropriate out of new kits, or maybe casting my own kits. Luckily, I checked Ebay and found that the Ulrich kits, though collectible, were very common. I started bidding on kits as they appeared on Ebay; my price limit was $15-20, I went after assembled and original kits, and I got non-SP cars usually in garish colors (because the SP cars commanded a big premium.) I finally had seven cars sitting in the closet, and so I started assembling or repairing them. I painted them all boxcar red, and bought a fistful of decals from Champ to give them appropriate lettering. These cars are nice and heavy, so they roll up and down the layout quite nicely with none of the derailing of the plastic kits. I remember being so worried that I'd spend too much on Ebay, but in the end I spent less than if they'd been available as new kits.

The layout's pretty much stuffed with cars now; I've gone from an average of 7-8 car trains to 12, and the staging tracks don't always fit a full train during operating sessions. (The photo shows all the cars from the layout moved out of the way for cleaning before an operating session.) But that sea of brown freight cars - almost all 40 foot cars, with the occasional 36 foot shorty boxcar or longer 50 foot automobile or furniture car - definitely captures the feeling of the 1930's I'm trying to maintain. Mass-production of car kits isn't always my favorite way of spending my hobby time, but I've been happy with the progress.

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.