Boston & Maine Eastern Route Progress

[jbvb]

2-Dec-2013: I'd never brought myself to the point where I'd pay the going rate for a commercial static grass application, but Ron G inspired me: Last month I bought a Harbor Freight hand fly zapper and last night I did a really simple conversion using a sink strainer found in a good hardware store:



The only flock available locally ws Woodland Scenics 2mm - I didn't like their Medium Green in the bottle or as initially applied - too blue, but vacuuming it improves the look a lot:



The tree in the background is a Hemlock Pine I got via Scenic Express - I think JTT is the manufacturer. It's the closest mass market item I've found to an Eastern White Pine.  I also spent a while coloring fake fur for marsh grass - I think I've gotten the tips right, but the base color needs adjustment.

2-Dec-2013: Bill Shanaman commented

"I like to mix the static grass colors for variety. Greener for better moisture areas, more yellow for dryer areas. One technique I'm going to try is using the yellow static grass and paint it with acrylic greens so you get the yellow stem and greener leaves in sun light. Static grass is a great texture difference to ground foam. The type of 'color' lighting also affects the way the color of anything on the layout. I mix mine between cool and warm in the same florescent fixture which balances it out a bit."

3-Dec-2013: Thanks, Bill. If any HUB NEMTE train show vendors have a variety of flocks, I'll look them over next weekend. If not, I can either mail-order or wait 6 weeks for the W. Springfield show and see them first hand via Scenic Express & others. Last night and this morning I worked on my one little bit of exposed rock. The Eastern Route doesn't have much, 6 or 7 cuts in 50 miles, but some was in a
location I'm modeling:



The material is schist with a long geologic history.

[jbvb]

Here's a try at the basic rock shapes, carved into tinted Wood Putty:



Lots remains to be done with paint. And I should probably re-shoot the photos when the sun is fully on the rocks before I start painting.

Orionvp17 commented:

I like what you've done up near the road. I think adding some tan static grasses to the mix you have above the rocks will do it. And I'd add some longer grasses along the fence line.

Grtlakeslogger added:

And maybe a little drybrushing light gray and white onto the sunlit parts of your schist would be effective.

4-Dec-2013:

Pete: Yes, as soon as I can lay hands on the materials.

Stu: This schist is fairly colorful in a good light - orange and black tones from iron, quartz intrusions etc. But I'm going to work from better pictures so I don't get laughed at by a geologist, if one ever visits my layout,

6-Dec-2013: An off-line comment made me realize I hadn't linked this thread with my Operations thread: https://modelersforum.com/index.php?topic=7008.0

Here's a much better track plan than that I posted 3 years ago:



Neither of the peninsulas had been begun, but all other track was complete except the left end of the GE in-plant trackage.

The usable area of the room, with track at 40-43 inches above the floor, is 14 x 39 feet. Mainline minimum radius is 36", though if you plotted what I actually built, it might get down to 34" in places. The Oil Terminal (by West Lynn) and Downtown Newburyport peninsulas will use 30" minimum radius. As you can see from where XTrkCAD colors things pink, I have one tricky switch/curve to build when I start on Downtown Newburyport.

22-Dec-2013: Shortly after my last post, my main PC's motherboard gave up the ghost. No data loss, but due to the season, what I decided to replace it with took a while to arrive. So I put things in place to post pictures from my throwaway Windows box (I use the free photo database/toolkit DigiKam. It runs on Windows, Unix and Mac).

<link to recreated Little River Farm thread here>



My first real resin structure kit is Sylvan's HO-1042 "Barn with Silos". It's intended for Gilbert Rice's farm, between Rt. 1A and Little River. As such, it will be a bit out of date but well maintained.

[jbvb]

The castings had nice detail and no bubbles, which you'll see in the painted pictures. This window started out with mullions for 6 panes, but the flash was thick on this side and I damaged the mullions beyond repair. I've since installed a single styrene mullion to look like a later 2 pane replacement.

As with other resin items I've worked with, dimensions are a bit squishy. Once I got the walls and ends square, I found that the ends only fit the stone foundation one way, and that one of the sides was half a board short. I didn't contact Sylvan, because fixing it myself was less effort than trying to get replacement bits through US Customs. You can see the .188 x .100 styrene brace I used in that corner. I've since installed a filler board made of .040 styrene offcut.

23-Dec-2013: A picture of the Sylvan barn with the roof on and entrance ramp assembled:



The barn's roof overhang is bigger than usual for New England, but not a real outlier. Scalecoat "Graphite & Oil" and ancient Floquil Boxcar Red from a can stuck to the resin pretty well, but I did make a few chips cleaning up visible ACC blobs, so take care.

The silo is finished per the instructions using Floquil Concrete.




I've never owned or worked in a silo, but I'm pretty sure that Harvestore and other mechanical top unloaders didn't exist when this style was current.  I asked how they did it, and what I should add to the model and got several answers:

grlakeslogger said:

I live in dairy farm country in Wisconsin. They used a long auger to load the silage up to the top of the silo. The auger was only wheeled into place when silage was being made. The silage then fell downwards inside the silo. The silo was open to the inside lowermost level of the barn, where the cows were kept and fed. Incidentally, the entire silo below the formed metal dome top was concrete on one of these. That includes that far left portion you have painted red. That vertical shaft housed iron ladder rungs so the farmer could climb up the outside tunnel-like shaft to get above the silage.

24-Dec-2013:Thanks, Stu. I think Sylvan's prototype had a wood vertical ladderway; it's molded in 3 parts with horizontal boards and vertical trim. I followed the instructions when I painted it like the barn's wood. They included two side walls and a flat roof for a shed to connect the silo to the barn, which they said to paint as concrete if it was used. It has a notch in the roof for the ladderway, which they call a 'chute'. I'll have to adjust the ground level for it. Knowing about the auger is helpful: it gives me a lot more flexibility in placing the silo - I had thought I had to make sure Mr. Rice could park a silage chopper/blower under the chute.

Does this barn look like the cows were kept in the cellar, and the main floor was for hay? The cellar has a lot more windows and doors than old barns in my part of NH. My grandfather's barn had a wood silo whose base was well below the main floor of the barn where the cows were kept. The open side of the foundation faced away from the barn. Hay went in the loft, which was only about 6' above the main floor. Manure went down hatches into the cellar, where a spreader could be brought in and loaded. I've only the silo foundation to go by since my mother passed, but I guess he unloaded the last few tons of silage, or maybe all of it, into a wheelbarrow or sled and brought it around and in. He only had six milkers.

bxcarmike said:

On barns here in upstate New York, the lower level is for livestock, if it's a dairy, there's usually a small room off to one side or end where the milk is stored, either canned or bulk. On the barn I used for my livestock, the covered ladder side was next to the barn with a small shed-like addition connecting to the barn. I'd climb into the silo(wooden) and shovel down silage , usually corn. As the silage lowered, I'd remove a ladder section until it was ground level. The lower level would have stalls, either larger pen like or individual stanchions, where cows would be kept in, used primarily for milking. Some barns also had gutters in the lower floor for manure removal, some gutters had conveyors to remove to an outside place where the manure spreader parked. Upper levels are for baled hay mostly, and occasionally a hay wagon, pick up truck or even a smaller tractor.

grlakeslogger:

James, what bxcarmike describes was common around here too. Here, the majority of barns had concrete around the ladder ways, but there were a few wooden ones too, like your model.
I do not recall when blowers became common. What I described earlier was based on memories from my elementary school years. Many of my childhood buddies were farm kids, and I thought farms were great places to play then. The small shed you described definitely had concrete walls, because it had to be strong enough to withstand the force of the whole column of silage in the silo when full. The lower level here usually had stanchions. Cows wore numbered ear tags, and, somehow, each cow got into its own stanchion at feeding time. They were fed and milked twice a day. Long ago, that all happened in their stanchions. Sometimes, to maximize milk production, nutrients or medicines had to be added to a particular animal's feed. That's in part why the stanchions and ear tags. Later, milking happened in a "milking parlor" a separate, sanitary addition to the barn. Otherwise, both hay and straw went up in the wooden portion of the barn.

In addition, a visible detail you might add are about four lightning rods along the peak of the barn's roof. Those were common here too.
Oh, almost forgot ... when weather permitted, cows were given free access to the barnyard outside. In good weather, they were pastured much of the day. They were not always in the barn.

Thanks, Stu and Mike, knowing how Sylvan's prototype worked will help a lot in getting this scene right. Sylvan does suggest lightning rods, and my own barn still has the system my grandfather had installed.

I'm modeling a new gothic arch freestall dairy barn on the other side of Rowley, MA - Sylvan's newer-style silo with the domed top is going there. But Mr. Rice is not the sort to haul feed to cows when they can walk to decent pasture. And the mandate to have a bulk tank and a concrete-floored milkroom is still in my layout's future.

[jbvb]

01-Jan-2014: I've gotten a good deal done over the holidays, but my main PC's power supply failed and the new machine I ordered is still somewhere on CSX. Finally, I found time to get the old one repaired, so once again my pictures are organized:



This is Gilbert Rice's Little River Farm with ground goop leveling the yard and making the ramp up to the barn. I used plastic wrap to protect the foundations. All in all, I'm reasonably pleased with the suspended masonite building supports, though it's definitely more work than placing buildings on a flat foam or plywood substrate.



This is my attempt at blasted schist: base of wood putty tinted with black dry color, damp-brushed (kind of like dry brushing but wastes less paint) with white, raw umber & burnt umber artist's acrylics. Once I get good sunlit photos of the prototype, I may try to re-do the quartz intrusion (white streak near the right end).

2-Jan-2014: Basic ground cover is complete and I've got the foundations looking decent, except for two door stones I'll look for when Jane walks her dogs at the beach.



The genesis of the scene in March, 2011 is shown on Page 3 of this thread.

Next is more wire mesh cow fence than I had time for this evening - the next day start with dealing with a snowstorm.

Just over the horizon, I try making an apple orchard out of blueberry twigs.

[jbvb]

08-Jan-2014: The Little River Farm house now has two doorstones, the barn has all the scribed wood floor you can see through the door, there are flowers by the front door and the highbush blueberry patch is planted:



I hadn't expected to be cutting stone for the model RR, but I'd gathered stones at a beach in Kennebunk and the one that fit the side entrance best was too long. So I made grooves with a cutoff disk and whacked it to break the ends off.

12-Jan-2014: I made a bunch of barbwire fence for the farm, using 1/16 x 3/32 tie stock and single strands of copper from a dead power cord. Today I did the mesh fence for the other side of the tracks.



Not pretty yet, but it's getting closer.

13-Jan-2014: Yesterday evening I used up all the WS 'foliage' netting I had on hand making trees (visible behind the barn). Highbush blueberry twigs work fairly well, particularly the bark color/texture, but they wouldn't be durable enough for the front of the layout. My treemaking also needed practice & possibly better materials & techniques



This shot got better with orchard in the gap between the barn and the house, plus something for a backdrop between the orchard and the edge of Rowley. But it wasn't warm enough to pour Little River and finish the marsh. The marsh grass color is way too light at this
angle, which was improved when I trimmed the fake fur to a more realistic height.

[jbvb]

21-Jan-2014: I started building the Rt. 1A overpass about 2004; I thought it would make a good subject for an article, so I took progress pictures. The bridge itself was finished in 2005 and moved to its current location in 2009. However, I expect my target publication would want shots of it on my layout, and I hadn't really finished the scene around it until a week earlier.



After returning from Wenham & some landlord work last night, I got out the tripod and lights. These are outtakes, and there are some others I need to re-shoot due to spider webs and lighting issues, but I hoped to get the article submitted that week.



I'm glad I coved the backdrop corner, but I wish I'd brought it all the way around to the window frame.

23-Jan-2014: Part of the day was probate things, but a lot of the rest was photography, prototype and model. But after I'd shot everything I could think of, and played games with lighting I'd never tried before, it was "Once more unto the breach, dear friends..." for the show in West Springfield. I've been taking Rowley to Hub Division modular setups for just about 25 years now, Rowley River for almost 20. Fate permitted them to be back in the layout Monday.



This shows the aluminum angle bracket that supports the end of the module. I've thought about a free-standing pillar to support the middle joint, but that needs a socket in the floor - an idea I still haven't really bought into.

[jbvb]

30-Jan-2014: The W. Springfield show was almost all good - I saw lots of friends and acquaintances, saw some nice modeling and new offerings from vendors and bought some books, freight cars and one loco. But there was bad news about an old friend, railroader and modeler, which changes my priorities for this spring: I'd been thinking about the NRHS convention in Springdale AR, but if he may not be there, I need to make an earlier trip.

Before I put the modules back in the layout, I tried an angle which is normally impossible for the tripod:



This is an outtake because it reveals a gap in the scenery that's otherwise only visible from under the layout. It also pointed out that I'd get a lot of much better photos out of a few days' work on the backdrop.

I was seeing light at the end of the tunnel on my estate wrap-up, so there was more time for modeling the next week.

03-Feb-2014: I'd been working on my passenger cars over in the Car Shops <link BCW ex-RDC klt build>  but it stalled for painting weather (I open my window for the vent). So I took up Mike D's house (see page 6). Mike told me what he remembered about the little kitchen addition, and I built it as a demonstration at the Wenham Museum in January.



I also laid out and partly cut the bay for the front. I decided to score/fold rather than cut and re-glue, which worked out well. Then I assembled the shell.



The corner braces will support the 2nd/attic floor/interior walls assembly, which got built next.

[jbvb]

07-Feb-2014: I was planning on 13 bridges over or under the RR, one of which is going to be a really big job. But I had several other things to finish before deciding which I should work on next. My priorities were equipment, operation and scenery/structures in Newburyport.



Here's Mike's house sitting on its hardboard foundation. This photo emphasizes how steep my compression is going to make Winter St. There will be angles where photos will look good, and others where the natives might not recognize what I'm modeling.

I didn't add brick foundation walls till I gave thought to the next house downhill. I planned to shim the ground at the penciled property line to level fore-and-aft, but I  built a mock-up before mixing more ground goop.

10-Feb-2014:  I had visitors on the Eastern Route yesterday; Ron G. brought two Ambroid open platform coaches rebuilt as work cars, and Victor C. brought some NYC locos he wanted to run. I was Towerman, so I didn't get to take any pictures, but was pleased that my idea of adjustable clearances worked, and Victor's 50' TOFC flats were able to run. A number of videos were shot in Rowley, but I don't think they ever made it onto the internet.

I put some time in on Mike's house:



After figuring out why the bay's roof is so deep (the 8 foot long 2x12 header spanning the opening), I built it using 3 pieces of .020 sheet and .080 square. Life is too short to calculate the roof angles; I just penciled lines outside each piece to make the next.



Then I assembled it with solvent cement.

I started on the main roof and realized it would have been simpler to do the soffit if I'd made the ends higher than the sides. Oh, well..



I was considering whether to cut the window openings lower to leave room for the trim between the tops of the windows and the soffit. Viewers who kneel can able to see this from LP-eye-level, otherwise not worth the trouble.

[jbvb]

18-Feb-2014: I got the eaves done - .015 x .125 styrene strip removable with the roof.



Mike couldn't remember the trim and interior colors, but his sister had some pictures. It needs a portico roof over the entrance door.

After that I experimented with Phragmites reed trees and MRC DCC decoders. But with warmer weather this week, I did some airbrushing. Once the interior and trim are painted, I applied asbestos shingles and finished it (much later).

24-Feb-2014: The editor said they'd publish the Rt. 1A overpass story but they need a few more photos. After dinner I got out the lights but I made myself a sandbag while daylight remained.



No spider webs in this outtake, but I think I can light it better.

27-Feb-2014: I was feeling ambitious, so I called Minuteman Press in Newburyport to see what they could do for the long-delayed fibreglass windows for the Hytron warehouse. After a couple of emails, I picked up 8 copies of this printed so the vertical dimension was exactly five inches:



The non-opening sections turned out to be narrower than the others, so I took more care when I started printing them myself.

[jbvb]

Minuteman printed them two-up, so I only used 2 of the 8 sheets to get this:



I used 3M 777 spray adhesive, but it made a bit of a mess and I was rolling it off my fingers for a while. I should have figured out how to dilute one of the contact cements I have and applied it with a brush. I made the corner verticals from Evergreen .060 angle.
It needed more ground goop, vegetation and fences, which it got years later.

28-Feb-2014: I hadn't seen the proof, but I was told "the April issue". Now since many of us already had the April MR, I wasn't really keeping any secrets. However, for all I knew it was still subject to change, so I tried not to jinx anything.

I wanted to know when the warehouse passed from Hytron to Owens-Illinois, and the web rewarded me: It was built the Korean War as Hytron expanded from a single facility in Salem MA to 4 plants employing more than 6,000 people. CBS was playing conglomerate and bought them in 1951. Newburyport had a very advanced picture tube plant 1/2 mile from the depot, but CBS closed it in 1959, throwing 1,000 people out of work. CBS-Hytron was also in the semiconductor business, but apparently punted it in the early 1960s (as conglomerates tend to).

Since my modeling ranges from the early 1950s to the mid-1960s, I decided to make removable signs for the warehouse. Owens-Illinois' is still up there, all I need is a telephoto and a tripod. But for CBS-Hytron, I wound up extrapolating from a photo of a radio tube box. This required my deepest exploration of the free 'GIMP' image processor to date. I fixed up color and printing register issues, shifted the relationship of two logos and set a reasonable size. Then I printed it on matte finish paper.



I built a styrene sign to suit, painted it primer red and applied the image with white glue. The inkjet-printed sign survived that, but didn't like being weathered with A&I.  The picture shows I need to be careful about where I set the sign; I don't think it's actually out of square.



I fixed up the landforms and installed a foundation for the Newburyport section house. Vegetation may happen tomorrow. But I
got distracted by writing a "how I used GIMP" tutorial making some farm signs I'd needed for a long time.

[jbvb]

11-Mar-2014:  A good deal of progress in the past week, but nothing finished enough to be photogenic. I'd just reached a milestone closing out my mother's estate, and went to work on the RR: I installed windows and detail-painted this modified RailroadKits EF-13B, the cinderblock 'Used Car Dealer'. It's to stand in for the real R.E. Walters Buick/Olds. I applied some diluted white glue to the lot and sprinkled on SpectraLok sanded grout: Raven for the paving outside, Natural for the cement floor inside.



Then I caught #205 departing Newburyport with two new coaches right behind the engine. They were so new they lacked window shades, but that's another thread.

Memo to self: dial the exposure compensation up when a white structure is in the foreground.

12-Mar-2014: I had a "Crafton Ave. Service Station" sitting partly built for several years. I started to paint it the other day, but stalled because the back will be visible. I don't have prototypes around anymore, City Classics' site showed only the front and I couldn't find anybody building it on the web. Is the back supposed to be brick or block? If the latter, I suppose it would have been painted white?

[edit]: At Dave's Emery's suggestion, I emailed City Classics: the molded back wall is block, and the prototype might have been painted or left plain concrete color.  I chose concrete for the contrast with the white front and sides.



My first try at a word-processor-generated sign. I think the DejaVu Sans Mono extended about 4 points works OK for a '50s enameled metal sign, but I'd like to reduce the inter-line spacing. In the final, Buick will be red, Olds blue. [Even before the inkjet ink faded, the red and blue were very difficult for visitors to see].



The unfinished forest behind the BL-2 is Phragmites tops spray-painted two shades of green. I'm trying to model young-ish White Pines, but looking at it from this angle shows I should go back and get more of the heads with more fuzz on them. And I need to borrow a blender to make the ground cover.

[jbvb]

23-Mar-2014: I wasn't expecting the April issue of RMC for at least a couple of weeks, given when I got March's.  Recent progress hadn't been awfully photogenic, but I'd been doing both little and big things:



The photographer set up by Rowley River (bridge 30.94, recently labeled) but #22 was a little late and even with the aperature wide open his film was too slow for 3717 making up time on the straightaway.



The sun was brighter when the local from Portsmouth came along, so he shot it even though it had one of those dratted roadswitchers.

I corrected the handrail while weathering it...

13-Apr-2014: I'd mostly been setting up for operations, but rather than leave this thread adrift any longer, I posted:



An operator's eye view of the intersection of High and Winter streets in Newburyport, with a westbound local accelerating out of the station.

[Janbouli]

Love the farm scene James , reminds me of days long gone by when I lived in Canada

[jbvb]

Thanks, Jan, and good to see you in this forum.

20-Apr-2014: Needing more DCC motive power for my next op session, I got out MEC 622. It's a factory-painted Genesis USRA Light Mikado. I renumbered it from 626, added the handrail atop the tender and weathered it. I'd done this about 2001, but after an epic struggle to take it apart and put it back together, an intermittent appeared which made it useless for DCC. It stayed in the box 12 years.

I found and fixed the problem, temporarily at least: it was designed DCC-ready via a cable into the front of the tender with with a 9-pin socket and a dummy plug. But there was no strain-relief on the engine, and the shortest wire went to one of the motor brushes. Now it's a little shorter but soldered to the eye again. I'm trying to figure out a way to supply strain relief, lest this turn into another "only the owner picks it up" engine.

The next question is "sound or not"? No doubt Athearn used the cable/slot scheme so the tender could be uncoupled without taking it apart. But I've only found one sound decoder with a 9-pin connector: QSI. And I'd need to slide it through the slot and put a plug on the speaker to retain Athearn's scheme. More "only the owner picks it up" issues. That might have worked if it stayed home, but I chose a non-sound decoder and it's still that way.



Here it arrives in Bexley to take the Portsmouth Local east while K-8 2713 (Sunset, purchased painted) heads for the house for a minor repair.



After a quick trip up Rt. 1A, the photographer caught it in Rowley.

3-May-2014: Prep for my next op session continues. The photogenic parts are:



I needed a switcher appropriate for the Portsmouth Local, so I got an NCE decoder for a P2K SW-900 I'd bought years ago. I milled the slot in the weight to 3/16" to make room for a 3mm LED without filing the flange off. The MicroMark connector for the rear headlight wound up requiring several cycles of "remove plastic at the front of the cab, see if it fits" after I took the picture.

[jbvb]

03-May-2014: My PC was completely upgraded and everything worked again. Here's 1231 shot from Bridge Rd. in Newburyport, with the NCE SW9SR decoder running both the front LED I installed and the factory incandescent bulb on the rear.



The B&M's last round of switcher purchases, between 1952 and 1954, were to eliminate steam from various branchline and local freights. It's been said that's why they were delivered in maroon/gold, where older switchers were black. Alas, they all had handrails alongside the hood.  Plus 1231 is one of two B&M SW-9s with factory MU and drop step on the cab end.  And it had large numberboards on top of the hood.  Someday, I need to either add handrails, drop step and numberboards, or just handrails and renumber it.

7-May-2014: All I did this week has been timetables and waybills. So here's an outtake from my April RMC article on building the Rt. 1A overpass. I like sunrise/sunset light, but the editors chose others.



16-May-2014: BL-2s certainly had a unique look, but I've heard it was tough to work on their prime mover and electricals. I saw them in service on the Bangor & Aroostook, but the B&M's barely lasted 10 years. Some of that was lack of MU, some of it was a great surplus of more modern roadswitchers due to McGinnis' odd attraction to Budd RDCs and EMD's easy credit terms.

Not much modeling yet this week. But I got a truckload of firewood into the barn getting my lawn ready to mow, and my girlfriend's container is all packed, so the weekend included layout time. Necessary, since I'd agreed to be on Tour de Chooch after Thanksgiving.

18-May-2014: B&M 1550 is a P2K unit re-detailed: steam generator, a lot of WM items removed including MU, with the solid 3-stanchion handrail of a post-1950 B&M unit, Athearn Blomberg sideframes and DA bearing housings. My paint, Accu-Cal decals.

20-May-2014: Layout progress: My second op session suffered from congestion in the Bexley engine terminal when the Oil Job, the Portsmouth Freight and the Bexley Goat were all in the yard. So I started the first enginehouse track:



I bought the Peco track pit castings years ago, but got stalled over track layout: enginehouse doors were usually barely large enough for the biggest loco that would fit on the turntable. Some kit doors are way oversize, which would cost me too much of my tight space.

When need arose, I realized I could build the leftmost track without committing to a geometry. I cut out the Homasote per the directions, and waited for the solvent cement to dry. Then putty, paint and weathering *before* I install and wire it. The pit doesn't look exactly like
the prototype I'm following, but I doubt I'll get called on it.

Next settle the rest by mocking up doors and walls. And leave my mockups in place for an op session to see if they annoy the Bexley yardmaster or get damaged.