Boston & Maine Eastern Route Progress

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25-Nov-2011:  2 months since I'd done something photogenic to the layout - life events were some of it, but once you've seen one block panel, you've seen most of them. Here I'd done the hard part of the remaining West Lynn backdrop:



I used 1/8" lauan plywood, because the reverse curve where the Saugus Branch exits staging would have been tough to do in hardboard. Also, I can cut lauan with several passes of a utility knife. Hardboard would have needed many trips up and down the stairs to avoid getting sawdust all over the rest of the layout. Technique as I posted before: Use "scribing" with a compass to make a cardboard template, then more "scribing" to refine the fit of the plywood.

I was having "milestone" feelings;  It was just about four years since I started this thread. In that time, I'd built as much layout as I had when I started, gotten the oval closed and the control system finished and even had time for a few structures. And the first photos I posted here were of the switch that's now under the backdrop opening. The Railroad-Line community helped, offering ideas and feedback and an interested audience.

12-Jan-2012: Most of my modeling time between the holidays went into structures - the Gothic Arch dairy barn scratchbuild and a ModelTech Studios resin tenement.  Neither was finished till February - I went to Germany on vacation, work called me to HQ in New Jersey for the week before the W. Springfield show.



This is B.E.S.T's 'Clam Box' kit, moved on my layout from the north side of Ipswich to north of the center of Rowley. The prototype has grown many additions, I only modeled one.

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16-Feb-2012: A test assembly of the Clam Box and addition.



A test assembly of the Clam Box and addition. I re-ordered the walls so the door would be visible to visitors and the shed would be up against the blank wall.  Ready to airbrush the shed.

21-Feb-12:  I took a break from structures to start the diamond crossing in West Lynn. This is where the Gear Works track crosses the future wye. The diamonds I'd built previously were in Code 100, where the rail bases touch and leave a reasonable HO flangeway. Not in Code 70; I needed brass shim under it all for the guardrails. I hadn't found a picture of one of the low-cost industrial track diamonds I remember from 40 years ago, but on reflection this would have been built in 1942 so heavier construction is warranted.



I experimented with leaving the wye rails continuous and cutting the flangeways later.  A few years after I built this, the NMRA relaxed the Civil AP judging rules so I didn't have to detail with joint bars and bolts.  It's always been more important to me that it operate well.

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29-Feb-2011: I was pretty sure I could make it operate well; less sure I could make it realistic enough to qualify for the NMRA's Civil Engineering AP. But waiting to burn that bridge when I came to it turned out to be the right call...



While I was waiting for glue to dry on my RR-Line Challenge project, I got started on the other rail.

11-Mar-2012: My model work was all on my Challenge project. This is the shed addition I scratchbuilt for my B.E.S.T "Clam Box".



Anyone running a fryer in late August will want the windows open, but even in a rural area the Health Officer will require screens. I used some package wrapping ribbon I kept from a few Xmases ago for the screen. white-glued to the window frames. At twice life-size, it's clear a bumblebee could fly through the mesh, but at normal viewing distances I like it.

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24-Mar-2012:  I took some pictures of the mostly-finished Clam Box, featuring Rt. 1A's new pole line and the detail painting on the railroad's telegraph poles.

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Next, I planned to work on structures between Rt. 1A and the Little River.  But as usual in these years, something else came up. It was only indirectly progress on the layout. But boy, did it make me feel organized

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The binding was done by a librarian friend who specializes in that. It cost more than buying MR's DVD, but I don't have to start a Windows box to use them (and I didn't get burned when MR didn't update the software for newer versions of Windows). The bookcases are just as homebrew as they look..

22-Apr-2012: When I looked over my little people, folks dressed for a tourist trap on a sunny summer day were pretty scarce. I found a couple at now-gone Northeastern Craftsman Supply that looked useful. The fishing guy is Preiser, the girl Merten, the bare-headed guy from Kramer.

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I also cleaned up, painted and detailed a Plastruct (repackaged from some other supplier) swing set for Rowley:



1-May-2012: I heard that Scale Rails would publish my article on my Rowley Modules (appeared June 2012).

4-Jun-2012:  A rainy weekend produced this progress on the farm on the north (RR east) side of Rt. 1A:




The Post-1850 New England Farmhouse from Mt. Blue Model Co. was well along. The Sylvan resin barn kit was just taped together.

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17-Jun-2012:  Being Father's Day, I more or less took the day off (except for two loads of wash and some bookkeeping this morning). But no modeling, because I discovered I'd given myself an accidental present: My Canon MP990 all-in-one has a slide scanner!!!
(It still scans slides for me today. I gave up on it as a printer in a couple of years. Inkjet ink is a racket, laser print is much more durable)



I'd forgotten this had ever existed till I looked at my 1979 slide. It's a mechanically-interlocked warning gate on the approach to the Merrimack River bridge in Salisbury, slightly in the rear of the 3-head searchlight WB home signal. It had been out of service 14 years, and was entirely demolished a decade or so later. I'm still not sure of room for one at each end of my planned model bridge, but it would be easy to animate.

Dave Emery asked how it works:  The pipe at the lower right comes from somewhere out on the bridge, either the locks that hold the swing span, or the levers that raise the approach rails above the swing span rails (I recall them as being the lifting rails - the ends were mitered). The lever mounted on the tie end reverses the motion. There's a rack on the end of the pipe engaged with a 2' or so gear wheel. The larger vertical pipe mounted to the gear's hub rotates, swinging the gate. All that's left of the gate is the two pipe tees it was attached to. I think it was a horizontal pipe with a diagonal brace coming down from the upper fitting.

5-Jul-2012:  I'd spent the last couple of weeks scanning slides. But with a rainy morning on the 4th, I got up to the attic and made
some progress:



First I got out my makeshift foam cutting setup. In the 1950s Lionel made products of a quality we may never see again. The Nichrome wire came from a surplus site.

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I don't use a lot of foam, but there are three places on the layout where it lets me do a simple lift-out:



This is behind Bexley Engine Terminal, and might need to come out for easy access to a couple of switches, but also made creating the scene much easier. The raised area is a site for a City Classics Gulf gas station then under construction.



This is a similar situation in West Lynn.

I also noted my first day working in Seashore Trolley Museum's Restoration Shop.

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12-Aug-2012: It had been a month with little layout progress, but the weekend's weather was too unsettled for relaxed sailing, I needed buckets from the guys whose wheat I harvested before I could clean it, etc. So I worked on scenery:



This removable section behind Bexley Engine House needed screen and goop to make transitions between levels and fill gaps behind the retaining wall along the tracks.

I usually put off making and applying my Wood Putty ground goop until I have a few hours to work (because I can't store it more than a few hours). So I did four locations that day:



This overpass crosses the east throat of the Bexley yard. No tint for the stonework, black for the road, brown latex paint & sawdust for the embankment.

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12-Sep-2012: The previous week I got going on scenery in the Bexley (yard/engine terminal on the west side of the attic) area. It wasa all in-
progress, so not pretty for pictures. But I did indulge in an impulse, and the results pleased me enough that it might be interesting to others.
I had built some removable streets in Bexley's downtown out of hardboard, and I'd put the rough side up to bond some kind of road surface to it. However, concerns about getting at the screwheads later and how the paving would respond to flexing kept me stalled. While was waiting for scenery to dry, I noticed a can of "Cape Cod Gray" stain I'd picked up on sale , and decided to see what it looked like:



It has enough "cobblestone nature" when viewed from a distance that I painted the rest of the "rough-side-up" hardboard with it next. Which inspired me to expand the part of the city I'm working on (this started out as finishing the "gothic arch barn" farm area). Many urban streets in New England initially got asphalt only in the travel lanes, leaving the gutters or parking spaces cobbles. I was able to reproduce this by going over the middle of the street with black latex paint and sanded grout, putting less strain on the incomplete "cobblestone nature" of the hardboard.

Three hours, a little crawling under the layout, a lot of leaning over it, a batch of wood putty and a fresh bottle of diluted white glue was enough for that night:



My Pentax Kr has a flip-up flash which doesn't do well against my white, sloping attic roof. I tried the shot above upside-down and like the result.

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The East Bexley dairy farm is what I started out to work on. The road overpass uses some Atlas girders I had around. I suppose the work at the other end was me avoiding an evening of building fences here.

At that point I was mostly using photofloods for photographing my own layout. Now, the effort I've put into into decent room lighting almost always lets me just place the camera and take a shot.



Testing arrangements of flats to go with a new one I built from DPM parts, and one shot of them came out ok. Ambient light, 1/8 sec. f/40 is strained at this depth of field. I've fiddled with image-combining programs but haven't actually laid out money for a commercial program. This would benefit from a bit of fill from behind the camera so you can see the caboose platforms and weathering the GP-9's trucks so they show up better.

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18-Sep-2012:



I decided to build what the B&M called an "H-Arm". These were used at transitions from open wire to cable, and at some interlockings. I used Rix parts, but didn't try to fill in the insulators in the middle, where the pole normally goes. It's 2 feet from the closest viewers. So far I've been able to put up with the crooked bracing.

Model photography is more important to me than many in the hobby, so depth of field is often on my mind. I was first introduced to the idea by Ben King's late '60s articles in MR, where among other things he built a pinhole camera from scratch. The zoom that came with my Pentax Kr DSLR will stop down to f/40 at some settings, but I also use an old Pentax 100mm macro in full-manual mode. It only goes to f/32, but it will focus much closer. Usually (as above) I shoot with room light, but I also use inexpensive tripod and clip-on photofloods when I need more/better illumination.

22-Oct-2012: Recent progress wasn't photogenic, but I'd just gotten in about 5 hours with my airbrush - I had to refill the nitrogen tank before I did any more, but here's what happened to my "equipment waiting for weathering" queue:

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08-Nov-2012: I'd stalled on finishing the West Lynn yard lead deciding if I was going to do River Works' in-plant track with ties, or just rail on the Homasote, paved over. Finally, I decided I would do the receiving tracks from the B&M to Bldg. 41 as open. This leaves it open to do the remainder, past Bldg. 30, as paved-in. The previous evening I started on ties:



I'd been reminded that my spurs didn't have anything to keep cars from rolling off the end. Most got wheel stops, but there are a few that need a full bumper. CMA (Tichy) makes nice injection-molded styrene, which took some effort to assemble but they proved fragile.
Walthers has a similar plastic bumper which proved much tougher.  I have a couple of metal bumpers but have never installed them because the required gaps are that much more trouble.

21-Nov-2012: The Seacoast Division organized an operating day in October, which I'd enjoyed a lot. When I got home, I got back to the unfinished track in West Lynn; I really only needed the yard, the interchange tracks with River Works' in-plant railroad and the Gear Works track to make the Lynn Goat an interesting 2-trick job.



I decided this area should be open track; I'll save the street track for the GE-switched part of the plant (lower left). There's been a lot of rail laid in the yard (upper right), but that wasn't photogenic for a while.

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23-Nov-2012:  One side of the the non-urban end of the room has about 14 feet of line with only a single turnout. But GE's River Works and the B&M plant that supported it were heavy industry by everybody but a steel mill modeler's standards.



This larger view took more time fixing up than it would have to get out the lights.



After Thanksgiving dinner, I finished the final track in the yard, actually a team track (Public Delivery on the B&M). The cardboard mock-up was replaced by an Acme freight forwarding facility - the prototype was on the Western Div. in Malden, MA but they generated interesting priority traffic. The Walthers plastic Hayes bumpers are temporarily installed pending painting. Track in the area needs only a few more spikes. Wiring in this quadrant of the room was complete until I start laying the GE receiving area.

This also advanced me on the Model RR Engineer - Electrical AP: "One yard with a minimum of three tracks and a switching lead independent of the main line." - Bexley's yard doesn't have an independent lead unless you count one of the two mains at East Bexley.

Also, I submitted the Author AP paperwork earlier this month.