illinois Central Chicago District - Monee Rebuild

[cuse]

Looks great all around Vince. I love the elevated tower, particularly for a background scene, very dramatic! In my opinion, the farther away from the front the structures are, the more exaggerated the effects should be. Doug's displays are so good at utilizing steep roads and multiple levels. My own opinion is that nobody (that I care about) is going to interrogate me about the prototype engineering issues, I like drama! (only in my hobby )


Nice Work!


John

[vinceg]

Hi guys -- been a while. After a lot of thinking and all the great input from the folks here and some opinions from my wife (never to be taken lightly!), I have decided and realized that I really need to break up the Bandit's Roost building collection. The real clincher was the Harrison Building. I really like the unique design and interesting lines and don't want it to be pushed back in a corner where I won't be able to enjoy it as much. So, my plan became:

1) Find a different way to fill the corner
2) build some other small kits to help populate the area

For (2), I decided to build my first Bar Mills Kit - the Homer Paint/Old Dominion duo. Details on that build to follow. For the different way to fill the corner, I decided I would use another Bar Mills Kit - their recent Christmas super kit release - Queen City Coal. I like that kit because it seems to be designed in a way that is compatible with a corner. Here's the ad for that kit:



More in a minute...

[vinceg]

So, now I'm thinking the new layout looks something like this:



The black raised platform will hold the Queen City diorama. The paper "road" is Illinois State Highway 50 that parallels the IC for most of the route I am modeling. I like the idea of running it under a bridge (the Rix model you see) to help conceal the interface with the backdrop. That same bridge is the road that represents the only access to QC Coal. The Callahan Machining building (from Bandit) is a nice, two-story structure that I am hoping will help me justify the disappearance of the road to the right of the bridge into the backdrop. I am sort of phoning it in, I guess, with retaining walls around QC coal so that I can put in a few more short structures along Hwy 50 that do not obscure the view of the upper diorama. To the left you can see Homer Paint. That's just sitting there for the moment -- treatment on that left/north side of the QC dio not yet worked out.

The white cutouts you see on the dio base are 1:1 footprints of the actual buildings from QC coal. I wanted to make sure I could orient them in a way that would allow for some foliage in front of the backdrop and also not be blocked by any foreground buildings.

Here's a view from a slightly higher angle:



I have pics from builds of Homer and Old Dominion. Will follow up with those shortly.

[vinceg]

HOMER PAINT

OK. I wanted to share some details on the build of the two Bar Mills Homer Kit buildings. First, I have to apologize that this won't be a great build thread. Both of these buildings have been finished for a while. I took some pics along the way so that I could go back later (which is now) and share some of the experience. But, doing it after the fact will miss a lot of the detail, so, sorry about that. Hopefully there are still a couple of things of interest here.

First off, here are the boxes:



Two boxes. Roughly speaking, one box contains the parts for the Homer Building and water tower, the other contains the parts for Old Dominion. Not completely true, though. There are things mixed together. Not hard to sort out, though.

Open the boxes and you see:



Lots of goodies, here. Bar Mills includes some Woodland Scenics figures here, some insta-fence, both plastic and wood windows, pre-cut glazing, metal and resin details, and the usual assortment of milled siding, stripwood, and chipboard for roofing. In the right box, you can see the three strips of stone foundation that is used for Homer. It is task board that has stonework laser-etched in. We'll talk more about that later.

The manual for both buildings comes in one document that you see at the bottom.

More shortly...

[vinceg]

So, here's a fun fact. My instruction booklet was an error. It appears to be an early version that was used to mark up errors. There is yellow highlighter on most pages. Here's a sample:



There is even a coffee stain on the bottom of a couple of the pages. I envisioned that Art was redlining this document some Sunday in his favorite easy chair while watching football. Who knows, maybe this special copy is worth something on eBay 

The errors weren't really a problem except for the fact that the manual did not include the sign page. No sweat -- I called Art and he emailed me a PDF within a couple of hours. Big contrast in support from my experience with FOS.

As a side note, I have started looking at the manuals for Queen City Coal. Those are *not* filled with highlighter markings but still contains zillions of errors. Among Bar Mills' many talents, copy editing is not one. I am tempted to call Art up and offer to do some free cleanup of his documentation on new kits....he probably wouldn't be interested, anyway.

More shortly...

[vinceg]

So, starting on the Homer building. First up is the foundation. This is new for me. This is the first kit I have run into that provides wood foundations. The South River kits have lots of hydrocal bases, but I haven't seen wood yet. Here are the pieces just placed together to check fit for the main structure:



Now to glue them and make sure they're square:



And finally, the foundation for the shed in back. The shed is situated slightly below the rest of the structure. Those foundation pieces are just a skosh shorter.



More shortly....

[vinceg]

Time for the walls. Who doesn't love bracing the walls. Instructions were straightforward, here. Enough wood to do the job. The instructions actually say that the bracing wood is 5/32" rather than 1/8" ... a little bigger. I actually didn't bother checking but I assume it's true. Bigger is better, right? Here are the raw walls braced:



Something that seemed very odd to me - check out the floor for the main building. There is laser-etched planking for only half the floor. Even odder, the half that is not planked is the half that is exposable to the loading dock. Yes, I checked the instructions a few hundred times -- I didn't get it backward. What I did matches the pictures. Maybe that's another artifact of the early-version manual...dunno. I thought about reversing the orientation but decided not to. I wasn't 100% sure that it was truly symmetrical. Doesn't really matter. In the end, you will see that I left the loading dock door only partially open and there's nothing noticeable here. I just don't understand why you wouldn't etch the whole floor.

More shortly.....

[vinceg]

Here are the walls after priming. I primed these using a watery wash of Apple Barrel Pewter Grey. I wanted wood that looked very gray after applying the inkahol mix later. Given that I don't have any more Floquil Driftwood like apparently everyone else on the forum, this will have to do. This idea comes from the many great ideas Jason Jensen provides in his YouTube videos. Thanks, Jason, for all of your unselfish work in this area.



More shortly....

[vinceg]

And finally, the walls are painted. In this pic, you only see some dry brushing with white paint. You will later see what they look like when I hit the walls with the inkahol to darken them up a bit. I used Signal Green for the windows and corner trim. You can see here that the windows for Homer are plastic. Later, you will see that the Old Dominion windows are wood assemblies.

One other neat thing here -- Bar Mills has this thing called "rafter combs." You can see one of them just above the shed foundation in the picture (the part is numbered 18). I have never seen this before. What a great idea. You'll see what they look like when they are installed in a bit. Bar Mills also uses this same "comb" architecture to do loading docks, wood landings, and other wooden platforms. Nice time saver.



OK....it's past midnight. Gonna call it quits for now and will try to at least finish up the Homer building piece of the thread tomorrow night.

Cheers.

[vinceg]

OK, I lied. One more step. Here are the finished walls. Inkahol wash added along with signs. A few other things going on here. First, you see a couple of freight doors that you didn't see before. Those are wood assemblies. You can also see the loading dock on the left. It is planked. There is also the foundation for the ramp that is not yet planked. I did the windows here with glue, not the pre-cut acetate. For Dominion I did use the acetate. I do really love the look of the clear plastic sheets but I do so hate the work. Pre-cut does help some.

BTW, I did notice that there is not enough planking supplied with the kit. The number of 2x8s used for the flooring matches what the bag says should come with it. But, there is no way to get the job done without two additional strips. FortunatelyIa now keep some supplies in stock so it didn't hold me up. I sent Art an email telling him about the problem. No idea if anything will change (or even if the kit is still in production).



We'll put 'em together tomorrow and see how it looks.

[Mark Dalrymple]

Looking really good, Vince.

I'm enjoying following along and appreciate your thought process as things develop.  I think too many of us are scare to show how our ideas 'grow', but it is such an important part of the journey.

Might I suggest that you go to the trouble of making some quick mock-ups of the Queens City Coal structures to put in position, and also mock up the land-form (with scraps of polystyrene or even scrunched up paper) before the retaining walls and raised flat site were put there.  I think it will be important to show some of this gradual elevation change, and it will help you visualize what the land looked like before man decided to build there.

Cheers, Mark.

[Janbouli]

Off to a great start Vince.

[Oldguy]

Looking good.

[postalkarl]

Hey Vince:

Looks great so far.

Karl

[PRR Modeler]

Excellent looking build Vince.