Top-five, all-time favorite Model Railroader issues? Well, there's December 1979...

I'm thinking in terms of top-five lists today. Something about reading High Fidelity does that to me. Either that, or it was the fever from the flu. One or the other.

Top five favorite model railroads I've seen in my life:

5) JoJo Hansen's Lake Tahoe Railway and Navigation Company. I saw it as a teenager on one of the 1981 NMRA National convention in San Mateo. He had the first double-deck layout I'd ever seen, and it all fit in the garage of a row house in Daly City. He reminded me I didn't need to wait for the perfect space before I could build a great model railroad.

4) Gene Martin's Lodi layout in Los Gatos. Wow - an entire layout modeling a single town, with huge amounts of switching! I want to do that some day. (Check out Jim Lancaster's Historic Packing Houses website for several pages carefully documenting
Lodi's industries. I'd love to see it again, and be even happier to switch some industries on that layout.

3) The narrow gauge layout at the East Bay Model Railroad Society. I remember visiting there as a kid, and stared at it for hours wondering where the train would appear out of the maze of tunnels.

2) Ed Merrin's Northwestern Pacific Railroad. I saw this at the National convention in 2001. His double-deck layout was torn up after a move, but I loved the size of the layout, and how he had lots of switching and lots of scenery in a modest space.

1) Jack Burgess's Yosemite Valley. No question, it's magic. It convinced me that modeling a real prototype in detail was the way to go, and Jack's modeling inspires me to do better on everything I build.

That took me a fair amount of thought; I guess I don't normally think in top of my "top five" or "top ten", unlike the character in the book (or John Cusack in the movie.)

But my favorite model railroads is not what got me thinking about lists. As part of my usual California-centric structure bias, I was thinking about model railroad buildings that I wish someone would produce in kits. And in the most recent Narrow Gauge and Short Line Gazette, my number 1 kit appeared.

So what's my top five California-theme model railroad structures I wish someone would produce as kits? It's a hard list to put together, but here's my guess:

5) Large wooden warehouses or sheds with clerestory windows at the peak (like Walther's Mountain Lumber Company). It seems like most large shed-style warehouses from the 20's have windows at the roof level to let more light into the building, and I have at least two sheds like that I need for my layout. I could buy the Walther's kits, but they're pricey and I'd hate to throw away all the other bits of the kits just so I could keep the central building. Looks like I'll be scratchbuilding these.


4) Stucco storefront building with bay windows. I've built my own for downtown Campbell, but I wish some of the folks doing brick main street structures would do a couple buildings with bay windows. There's no way to reproduce your typical California main street without 'em.

3) More Southern Pacific specific buildings. There have been some great SP-style speeder sheds and section houses produced lately, but I'm waiting for kits of an SP-style interlocking tower.

2) Airplane bungalows. It seems like half of the houses in older parts of Oakland or San Jose are airplane bungalows. These are small wooden houses that have some details from craftsman houses, but tend to have very low roof pitches hipped towards the front. I could imagine scratchbuilding one or two, but I'd love to be able to build a whole row of them.

Wait, no let me change #5. I don't want sheds, I want sawtooth roofs. I can make shed roofs all I want, but making something with a sawtooth roof is much more painful. Let's move "sawtooth roofed warehouses" to #3.

And maybe replace the stucco storefront with more spanish style buildings. Maybe. I'll need to think about that one.

And what's my #1, most wanted structure? A 1930's public market-style strip mall. Years ago, I was at Moe's Books in Berkeley and found an architecture book on strip malls and supermarkets. (The Drive-In, the Supermarket, and the Transformation of Commercial Space in Los Angeles, 1914-1941 by Richard Longstreth, MIT Press.) My friend thought I was nuts to pay $30 for a used book on strip malls, but it's been a great resource for me both for 1920's pictures and for inspiration for commercial businesses.

It turns out the first strip malls were outgrowths of filling stations: the service station added storefronts around the court, and the bays got filled with with a set of businesses just like the large public markets downtown. There was always a butcher, a grocery store, a vegetable seller, and a sundries store, each a separate business. By the end of the 1920's, developers even had a formula for building these: choose a busy street between the residential neighborhoods and the city center, make sure to be on a corner for visibility, but on a light street so it was easy for customers to drive in. Check out this one still standing alone San Fernando Road in Glendale.

I've always thought one of those strip malls would make a nice model building, and I was really pleased to see Rail Scale Miniatures is building one: their Horwood Brothers Service Station. It's not quite right; they've modeled a more cluttered scene to make it look busier, and they've intended it as a service station only, but all he key aspects are there: small stucco buildings, the corner lot, multiple storefronts, and some really nice mission-style details. Now if only I had a place for it on my layout.

Vasona Junction train register booth

Work's getting in the way of model building, so I'm just throwing out a picture of a project from last year: the Vasona Junction train register booth.

When running trains by telegraph messages, it was pretty common for a train to get the message "Don't pass this place unless train X has already passed there." That's easy if you're on the same track, for you'll see that train go by. What happens if the tracks branch so you wouldn't see it go past?

To answer such questions, railroads kept train register books at stations where trains started and stopped, and at all junctions. Trains passing these places would see a mark on their timetable indicating a train register book, so the train would stop and the conductor would mark down his train, the time he was passing, and his direction. He could also check the register to make sure any trains that had priority over his on the next stretch of track had already gone by.

Usually these train registers were in real stations, but Vasona Junction was stuck out in the middle of the prune orchards, and got so little traffic that the railroad didn't even bother to build a station here. Instead, they built a small booth that sat next to the tracks and contained the train register.

If you look at old timetables, you'll see that all the passenger trains stopped at Vasona Junction. They didn't do this because it was a popular location; I suspect they scheduled a stop only because they knew the trains would be stopping to sign the train register book.

My model will eventually be placed at Vasona Junction on my layout. I also keep a piece of paper handy as the "train register" and encourage the train crews to sign it as they go by.

It was a quick evening project to build. I try to keep a few of these small projects in mind when I'm stuck on what to do next. The body is styrene board-and-batten siding, with a wooden door and boarded up window. I suspect I didn't bother to cut out the door or window opening. The shingles are Campbell paper shingles. The entire booth is painted in the traditional yellow and green that SP painted most of the buildings that the public might see.

See this picture from "Railroads of Los Gatos" for a picture of the actual shack when it was standing along Winchester Blvd. just south of the Highway 85 bridge. Looking at those photos, I just realized I messed up the model; I only added one boarded up window when such windows existed on all three sides. Guess it's time to make another one!

[The Erie Lackawanna train register image came from another web site which I can't remember. I borrowed it when I gave a talk to some computer science friends on train order operation. Thanks to whoever I filched it from.]

Oooh, BIG laser cut kit!

Check out my latest kit - a Makerbot 3D printer. I'm not sure how useful it'll be for model-making; although it can make things by building up layers of plastic one HO inch high, the output's still a bit rough. Still, it ought to be interesting.

The pieces are great - 1/4" plywood eighteen inches across, and cut just as neatly as any of the laser-cut building or car kits I've made.

More later.

How Much Difference Could a Few Years Make? Part 2

For the model railroaders who try to model a specific real moment and place (and there's more of us every year), we focus on "the real world" for a bunch of reasons. Maybe we end up with a model railroad that just seems more realistic. Maybe we enjoy the historical research to find out what buildings existed at a specific point in time. Maybe it gives us more details and facts for "dressing" the scene.

One problem, of course, is that we probably can't find an exact moment. Jack Burgess models the Yosemite Valley Railroad in August 1939, but even his huge collections of photos and documents can't tell him every detail about downtown Hopeton, California in that year. Without the right documents (or all the time in the world to search for every bit of historical data), we need to search, interpret, and extrapolate to figure out what should have been at that location at that point in time.

One problem is that the world changes all too quickly. I'm sitting here in modern California, and there's times where even I complain about all the changes that have taken place in our neighborhood in the last five years, let alone twenty. Earlier this year, I wrote about how ten years of railroad timetables showed how drastically the railroad's technology, work practices, and freight traffic must have varied in that time. At the same time, the villages changed to town, motor cars went from curiosities to bumper-to-bumper traffic, music changed, fashion changed… everything changed. It's fine for us to try to interpret how the world changed from a small number of photos, but we need to remember that a few years, let alone ten, is a huge time - a fraction of someone's life - and that the world we see in pictures from 1926 may be completely gone by 1936.

For example, here's one of the photos that inspired me to build my Market Street Station shelf layout. This shows Western Granite and Marble's shed at 396 North First Street in San Jose. A similar photo in Signor's "Southern Pacific's Coast Line" book got me interested in this stretch of track just east of the old San Jose railroad station. The shed later became Borchers Brothers' Building Supply, a San Jose institution which lasted into the 1990's.

When I needed to fill in that spot in the layout, I used the Western Granite and Marble photo as my guide, and added an interesting industry to my 1930's layout. For some reason, I thought that a shed like that needed a little office, so I put a small clapboard building inside for the office structure, and put some stairs up to a storage area on the roof.

That'll make things look like the 1930's, right? Nope.

I did some later research, and found out that shed probably disappeared around 1910, replaced with a more elaborate storefront, and then, in the 1920's got replaced again with a Mission-style store and office in the trendy style of the time.


Dave Caldwell, grandson of the founders, dropped me a note about six months ago, and was kind enough to give me some more photos showing all the changes in the building. He also kindly noted that the little office inside the shed was not in the original. Here's what the building looked like in 1910:


Here's the new building under construction around 1926.


And here's the new building completed. Note that the original shed still appears to extend behind the new storefront.

And finally the late 1930's or maybe even the 1940's. Someone who knows cars can probably tell me the exact date.

So in what seems like a small time -- what's twenty years, after all? -- that building I wanted to model went from a very utilitarian shed to an elaborate and curvy false front, and then to a Mission style front. Who knows how it differed in the 1940's and 1950's, though at least I know (because the building's facade still exists) that the building stayed mostly the same in the intervening years. Dave mentioned that Borchers Brothers sold the building (and a separate yard between 2nd and 3rd streets on the south side of the railroad tracks) in 1982, and moved their yard to Sunol St. near Del Monte Plant #3. It's now a false front for a condo development on the old property, but at least that cool Spanish Revival / Mission storefront is still there.

Am I very frustrated that I built the wrong building? Not completely. The shed fits the scene well, and on a recent visit to San Francisco, we walked by one of the old piers near the Ferry Building. The main door was open, and when we looked into the cavernous space, we saw a little raised office built on poles inside the main building - kind of like my model. I might not have captured Borchers Brothers correctly, but I did record a very California-like scene.

When in Doubt, Build a Kit

It's been a slow few weeks. Between work, a bit of frustration with the Cricut, and family issues, I haven't done much model building, and didn't have time to do any of the big scenery projects on the layout. I'm mostly blocked on more finish scenery until I build more trees, but that's a messy job that deserves a nice, sunny weekend day.

For a change, I pulled out an old Fine Scale Miniatures kit. FSM is a famous name in the model railroad hobby. They started designing elaborate, highly detailed kits starting in the late 1960's, and were one of the first kit manufacturers to have the idea of limited run kits. They make a fixed number of kits, sell them at one time, and then never sell them again. Modelers buy the kits and hoard them for later, others trade them as collectibles, and some even get built. For building, FSM kits are well known because they included detailed instructions on how to build and weather the kits, because they aimed at board-by-board construction to get a highly-detailed (and usually a bit run-down) look, and because the kits always come with a big handful of tiny castings for every detail item from windows and architectural gingerbread to brooms and cats. Painting all these takes forever, but their kits look beautiful when done. Cynics would accuse FSM of doing caricatures of 1920's buildings - slightly odd buildings with strange additions, immense amounts of weathering and wear, and huge amounts of colorful detail. Sometimes, the built-up kits look a bit more like a Disney or movie-set version of 1930's buildings than is truly real. The caricature charge is probably true; these models are intended to be eye-catching, and they succeeded. As for amounts of wear, I've heard that set dressers on movies can go nuts trying to add all the detail needed to make a scene look correct, and maybe FSM realizes that more than most modelers.

I've never built an FSM kit. I've done a bunch of wooden craftsman kits, some laser cut kits, and done scratchbuilding, but I'd never gotten the full FSM experience. Luckily, Dear Wife was with me at the hobby shop one November, and asked if there was anything around that would make a nice Christmas gift. "How about that kit?" I pointed at a smaller 1970's FSM kit on the shelf; the price was a bit more than an impulse buy, but wasn't that crazy. She got it; it made a good Christmas gift, as it was something nice, and not something I would have bought on my own.


It's been an experience and a time-warp, as it brings back memories of all those 1970's style kit building tricks. They suggest using tiny dots of glue to secure wood to the templates, model airplane-style. They didn't have double-stick tape in the grocery store then. Paints are all solvent-based, and they recommend Floquil brand, back when that was one of the only choices for model railroaders. (Although I followed their suggestions of stains made from black paint, I got similar effects to using Weather-It (vinegar and steel wool wash), as well as using my favorite light grey fabric marker.) The walls were all machine or die-cut, not laser-cut, though they have the cute trick of having the outside clapboards and inside sheathing scribed on both sides of the same sheetwood. I'm also having to figure out how to paint the metal window castings to look like wood, rather than using nice laser-cut windows. They even include a roll of Campbell shingles, originally made from the same material as gummed brown packing tape, and Campbell's aluminum foil-made corrugated roofing. (I might substitute Paper Creek's beautifully rusted printed paper corrugated roofing.) They also suggest detailing the walls by embossing the end of the clapboards and using a pin to simulate nail holes. I'm not sure if all that work makes a difference, but I'll try it once.

It's also been a long time since I've had kit instructions printed on large blueprint-sized paper sheets. With laser-printers and Kinkos available everywhere, most kit manufacturers these days just print on plain paper, and sometimes include color pictures too.

The pictures show my progress - some castings painted, the platform done and looking great, and the building walls looking a bit... dark. I broke away from the instructions to try to make it look as if the building had been painted black originally. (Southern Pacific's engineering diagrams say that non-public facing buildings were painted black with red trim, so I wanted to try doing that instead of the nicer yellow-and-brown seen on stations and buildings along the tracks.)

Still Not Getting the Results I Want From the Cricut

When I bought the Cricut and Sure Cuts a Lot, I was hoping that I'd be able to do work similar to what I'd seen in laser-cut model railroad building kits. My best hope was that I'd be able to cut out a full structure kit out of thin basswood and cardboard. My narrower hopes were to be able to make some of the detailed bits that cut really well in laser-cutting - really fine HO scale windows (with each sash cut out of thin 0.020 cardboard) and strips of cardboard notched to resemble shingles with double-stick tape on the back for adhesion.

The Art Deco building for Campbell showed I could cut a full building, but most of the success there was in cutting the big wall pieces. These aren't particularly hard by hand; it can require a lot of tedious measuring, but cutting out large pieces is pretty easy. I did make the large storefront window from multiple Cricut-cut pieces, and so does count as a success for the cutter. However, I used commercial plastic window castings for the more traditional door and window.

I've tried to make double-hung windows as nice as the laser-cut kits, but the Cricut can't cut them nicely even after I've massaged the SVG line drawings to cut better. I can get paper to cut cleanly with 0.050 inches between cuts, but the 0.020 inch boundaries at sash lines usually tear even with good Strathmore board cardboard. I also still have problems keeping the openings both square and fully cut through. Cutting the entire window opening in a single cut means that the waste piece usually falls out easily, but the corners aren't always square. If I cut the window openings with multiple straight line cuts (cut in both directions), the Cricut still has problems fully cutting through.

Today, I decided to try making shingles. If you haven't seen laser-cut shingles, the shingles are 1/10" wide strips with thin notches cut along one end. To apply these, you glue them to a roof surface, overlapping each row, and with the notches exposed. It makes a neat, realistic roof.

I'd been able to cut small batches of 5" long strips of shingles, but this time I tried to cut a full 6x12 inch sheet of brown construction paper into shingles. I found the cutter does really bad if I'm constantly cutting along the 11" direction because moving the whole carrier sheet back and forth eventually causes the carrier sheet/cutting mat to skew, throw off the cuts, and jam the cutter. I tried reordering the cuts so I did a row of narrow slits across the paper, then moved the paper a bit and cut the next row, and finally cut all the shingles off in one step. I found that even with small movements of the carrier sheet, I still ended up with a 1/16" error from one end of the sheet to the other. Maybe there's some ways to arrange the cuts to avoid the error.

There might be manual workarounds; while cutting all the individual notches for shingles would drive me crazy, cutting the long strips would be a few minutes work with a straightedge. Maybe I could do the slits with the Cricut, and then cut each row of shingles off by hand with a straightedge, or try to cut smaller batches so that there was less chance of accumulating error between cutting the slits and cutting the strips of shingles out. I wouldn't want to do that if I was making shingles to sell, but it'll be easier for the small amounts I need for personal use.

Ugh. I see promise with the Cricut. Watching it cut the slits for the shingles was a nice reminder of the fun of automation - the Circut was cutting several hundred little slits pretty precisely, and doing it all over twenty minutes while I could sit outside and enjoy some nice weather. Unfortunately, I don't feel like I can actually make anything at the level of accuracy for the models. It could do great at curved shapes,so if I wanted to model Gaudi's Casa Badillo in Barcelona (picture borrowed from here, I'd be doing great.

Sigh. Maybe I do just need to bite the bullet and start spending time up at TechShop borrowing time on their laser cutter.

The Scrapbooking Building

Here's the scrapbooking building; it's not completely done, but it's close enough. The glass block window was cut from clear styrene on the Cricut. The first shot shows it temporarily in its correct spot on Campbell Ave. next to a dime store (plastic model, I forget which brand) and a mocked up Campbell Theater (to be kitbashed from a Walther's Bank.)

Some quick checks of the Sanborn Fire Insurance maps show the lot holding the building was empty in 1925, but occupied in the late 1930's. It really is a Streamline Moderne building!