New Construction -- and a New Blog Name

No, I'm not building a new house - and ours is definitely not "new construction" having been built in 1892!  But I'm off to a good start with the new layout sections.  The 18" x 96" Monson village section has been framed out using the same construction techniques that were used on the existing layout sections, but it won't be installed until the upper valance and backdrop are in place and painted.  Those pieces are cut and primed, and the backdrop might get a base coat this week.

The photo below shows how the new sections will be supported. The upper valence/shelf will be extended around the room to support the upper fascia and provide additional storage, but this time instead of using shelving tracks I'm suspending a 20" shelf (i.e. 2" deeper than the benchwork to allow for good foreground lighting) from the ceiling joists using the threaded rods seen here.  As I did previously, the backdrop will be free floating and will be sandwiched between the benchwork and upper shelf and the wall. The rectangle made of furring strips is to prevent the backdrop from bowing out into the window well.

Meanwhile I've decided to keep updating this blog rather than starting a new one, and have renamed it "HOn30 to the Quarries" in homage to Robert Jones and his book on the Monson RR, "Two Foot to the Quarries."  Eventually I might get a new URL and have this one redirect, but I'll stick with the old URL for now.

A New Adventure

With my interest in prototype modeling growing over the past two or three years, this freelanced layout has not been getting a lot of attention. While I like all of the Maine two footers, my two favorites lie at the extremes: the 112-mile SR&RL, modernized with safety appliances in the teens under Maine Central ownership, and the 6-mile Monson RR, which was the remotest of the two footers and never moved on from stub switches and link-and-pin couplers.  

So with the recent and impending release of some of the most iconic Monson equipment and buildings in HO scale, including the Vulcan forneys from Toma Model Works and the combine and Monson Junction station from Otter Creek Construction Co., I've decided to turn my Monson-inspired freelanced layout into an actual portrayal of the Monson Railroad, including the town of Monson with the depot, Maine Slate Co headquarters, and engine house; the slate quarries just outside of town; and the junction with the Bangor & Aroostook 6 miles away.  

Here's the current iteration of new track plan, with the junction replacing the town of Thomaston on the current layout and the railroad wrapping around the walls to end at one of the quarries, with three other quarries represented by sidings - two operational, one not:

The layout would reuse the existing benchwork and even part of the roadbed in the current location of Thomaston, so for the time being Thomaston and the curved trestle will remain in place and connect to new layout sections representing Monson village and the quarries.  The staging yard has already been removed and the adjacent track and fascia sections pulled out in preparation for installing new benchwork:

I might continue this story here or I might start a new blog to document the new layout.  Stay tuned...

Snow plow

I've been taking a major diversion into 3D printing recently, so while nothing much has been done on the layout, I have been keeping busy.  Here's an HOn30 model of the Monson RR snow plow that I designed and printed on my new Anycubic Mono 4k printer, based on plans by Wes Ewell (link).  The model is assembled from several separate prints, including the chassis, cabin, plow blade, flanger blade, and trucks. I couldn't get the roof to print without warping so it's made from styrene, but I did design a 3D printed jig to ensure that the roof panel installs with the correct overhangs all the way around.

The plow was a challenge to design with all of those boards on the face of the plow.  The ones in the middle actually twisted as they ran across the face, so it took a while to figure out how to design them.  The rest of the design was straightforward although as usual it took a lot of trial and error to get everything to print correctly.

The prototype had a link and pin coupler but I mounted a knuckle coupler in case I ever want to push it around the layout. 

Installing LED layout lighting

After considering several options for layout lighting I decided to go with LED tape lighting.  LEDs have several advantages over the traditional fluorescent tubes, including more flexible installation and the ability to adjust the color, depending on which type you use.  While LED tape is available for under $20 for a 16 foot length, these cheaper ones are much too dim to light a layout.  Adequate lighting requires at least 300 lumens per foot, which typically costs closer to $3 per foot.

To mimic daylight, it's important to have a high color temperature (around 5000K) and CRI (color rendering index) above 90.  After shopping around for a while I found a 600 LED, 16 ft "daylight white" LED tape that met these criteria.  Coincidentally, right after I found it, I also found a YouTube video showing the same LED tape lights used on a larger layout, so I figured I was on the right track.

I also bought a remote-controlled color-changing 16ft RGB tape from the same manufacturer to install in parallel. The color-changing strip is too weak to light anything on its own but will be useful for color-balancing the white LEDs, and I can also use it for evening/night effects.  In retrospect I wish the RGB LEDs were stronger but they will be adequate for my purposes. 

I could have simply stuck the LEDs to the underside of the shelf above the layout, but I wanted them to be closer to the layout to give a slightly lower angle for foreground lighting.  Since I had two 10' L-girders that were salvaged from a previous layout, I cut them to fit the front edge of the shelving and screwed them to the shelves with the 1x2 flange of the L-girder pointing toward the backdrop.  The high-intensity white LED tape was then attached to the lower edge of the L-girder, while the lower-intensity RGB tape was stuck to the underside of the 1x2 flange. In the first photo below the tape that's hanging down is the end of the RGB tape, which hasn't yet been stuck in place.

A masonite valence was then attached to the L-girder to mask the lighting. 

I applied metal insulation tape to the back of both the L-girder and the edge of the valence to reflect light back onto the layout, both to increase the amount of light and to fill in the foreground.  The shelves overhang the layout by 1.5", which also helps ensure that the front edge of the layout is well lit.

The "daylight white" LEDs appeared a little too harsh to my eye, so I set one of the customizable settings on the RGB strip to a yellowish white to provide a slightly warmer look, as shown below. Other custom settings will be used for dawn, evening, and night effects.

The combination of the high-intensity white LEDs and the RGB LED strip works well and the fascia and valence give a nice "shadow box" effect.  The high-intensity LEDs are definitely strong enough to light this 14"-wide shelf layout on their own, but if the layout were any deeper I would want a second strip about halfway back to light the full depth evenly.  

Putting it all together

Here's a photo that includes several updates all at once. First, some initial scenery is now in place, including dirt, grass, and ballast in the transfer yard area. Second, in the distance is the freight station, which is now finished and installed. It will be shown more clearly in a future post. Third, I starting making some granite loads that could have been plausibly carried on two-foot flat cars. And fourth, I've been experimenting with LED strip lights for layout lighting, which will also be the subject of a future post.

While Maine granite was popular for buildings, columns, and monuments, other common products included paving blocks and curbstones. These latter products seem more suited to a two-foot gauge railroad and will be the primary cargo on my layout. 

The curbstones shown above were made from basswood and scale out at roughly 9" x 16" x 5'.  Nine inches is too thick for curbstones so in the future I will use thinner stripwood.  I rounded the edges with sandpaper and then dunked the pieces in diluted white primer followed by a dark gray stain to give them the final coloring, and then assembled them into stacks with scale 3X3 blocking underneath.  

The loads shown here would have weighed between 8 and 10 tons by my calculations, which is right around the capacity of a two-foot flatcar. The standard gauge flatcar on the adjacent track is a 50-ton car so several narrow-gauge loads could be transferred to a single standard gauge car.

I plan to make paving blocks the same way.  An HO scale paver would be around 1/16" x 1/16" x 1/8", so for flatcar loads it may be easier to carve a larger basswood block to represent layers of pavers, instead of making each load from dozens of individual stones.  I'll still need a lot of individual pavers though, since I want to have piles of them lying here and there.  

Finishing the backdrop, part two: the town scene

I wanted to include some town buildings on the backdrop behind the Thomaston station, freight house, and transfer tracks, so I chose a backdrop from LARC Products called "Steeple" that had several wood-framed houses and a church in the mid-distance, with a meadow in the foreground.  There were two complications to deal with on this section.  First, the tall foreground trees meant for a lot of finicky knife work to remove the sky portion. It took nearly seven hours just for this 9' section, spread out over several evenings.

Second, the sky in the "Steeple" image is very pale, almost white in fact. Even though I'm removing the sky portion, the hints of sky visible through the tree branches were too much of a contrast with the blue that was used to paint the sky, so I decided to repaint the sky to be much paler toward the horizon.

This time I used three colors: the same Benjamin Moore "aqua marina" and "jet stream" plus a 1:1 mix of "jet stream" and white for the lowest band. The bands were brushed on and then blended while still wet.  Here's how the bands looked before and after blending; the colors look different because the "before" photo was taken at night under room lighting while the "after" photo was taken with daylight coming in the windows.

After the new sky dried the background image was applied. LARC offers three choices of material: a 4 mil vinyl, a 7 mil polyester they call "Fab-Tex", and a more rigid 10.5 mil "anti-curl" material. The first two are self-sticking.  I chose the 7 mil polyester and was glad to find that it was very forgiving. It practically smooths itself during application, and it's even re-positionable so that you can take it up and reapply it if you do it wrong the first time (which I certainly did!). Here's the result:

Most of the buildings look appropriate for the late-twenties to my eye, with the exception of a couple of houses behind the station that have a more modern swing set and pool that will need to be hidden by foliage. Also, the beige building between the transfer crane and freight house is reasonably period-appropriate but somewhat distracting, so I will use small trees to partially hide it.

I'm really pleased with how the backdrop turned out. While I would hesitate to use the sky-removal technique on a larger layout, for a small shelf layout like this one it was manageable.  

Finishing the backdrop

Before starting the scenery I wanted to add some landscape features to the backdrop. I like the look of photo backdrops, so I bought two backdrops from LARC Products: one for the town and another for the more rural scene with the trestle and crossing. I had LARC re-size their stock images based on some digital mock-ups, and also asked them to flip the rural backdrop because it looked better that way.  They were great to deal with and turned around revised proofs very quickly. I would definitely use them again in the future, particularly since they have such an extensive collection of stock images.

The two backdrops had very different sky colors, so I cut off the sky from each of them and pasted the landscape onto the existing painted sky backdrop. The LARC material is self-adhesive so installation was very easy. Removing the sky from the rural section went relatively quickly, but the town scene was more complicated - that will be the subject of another post.  I had the best luck using curved cuticle scissors to cut along the sky line and then a brand-new #11 blade to do the detail work, especially around the large tree on the left. 

The standard gauge track running into the backdrop will be at least partially masked by trees and tall grasses.  For the area behind the trestle, I plan to add a photo of a stream, using foliage to mask the edges of the photo. The next photo shows a mock-up of that scene using a black-and-white copy of the creek photo. I wasn't thrilled with how the original backdrop looked in this area so I'm also testing an unused scrap of backdrop to see if it would look better, which I think it does.