Lance Mindheim on art and operations

I just finished reading Lance Mindheim's self-published books on "Model Railroading as Art" and "How to operate a modern era switching layout" and recommend them both highly. It's funny how you can have an instinct that something is right or not, but until someone else says it, you didn't know what you knew. This works both ways, too, when someone makes a comment that changes your mind in a way that you later come to regret.

In recent years, when showing people my layout, I've made the comment that "If I'd known now how fun it was going to be just to operate the Burlington, WA yard, I could have skipped building the whole rest of the basement and just had that be my layout!" (see my previous blog post on this.)While this makes for a fun joke, Lance's work suggests that it is basically true (as many jokes often are!). Lance goes even further, to say that unless you really enjoy yard work, let your layout just be industries to switch, and not too many of them. If it takes two hours just to (realistically) switch 3 or 4 industries, on a layout with only 9 turnouts, why do you need a whole basement full of them?

I did a lot of my early railfanning in the Interbay/Balmer yard area, which led to my starting my modeling efforts by building a yard. The next question was "where are these cars going and coming to/from? This led to the realization that there were two yards in Everett to the north, and a sprawling yard complex south of downtown Seattle, so building them seemed like a priority. After that, I started learning more about some of the interesting local industries and branchlines, which gradually got added. So you could say that I gradually backed into an appreciation of local industry switching. I wonder how my layout would look different today if I had read Lance's operations book when he published it in 2011, instead of this week? Would I have fewer yards and more industries? Perhaps.

One of the challenges of a large layout that hosts operating sessions with a dozen operators at once, is what do you do in between times when you just want to operate it by yourself or with a friend? The OPSIG has published articles about this from time to time, and Lance addresses it nicely in his book. His answer is you pick one or two of your favorite industries and switch them out, using realistic procedures, and let the rest of it be. It will take longer than you think. I've tried a similar approach, which was to put paper clips in certain car cards, and then run a train around the layout working only those cars with paper clips in their car cards. It's a lot of fun and lets me work all around the layout instead of just working a couple of industries. And if I run out of time, it's easy to pick up wherever I left off.

I won't try to summarize Lance's book on art here, but one of its many great ideas is that, because of the physics of miniaturization, everything (except maybe windows) should have a flat finish on it. He uses Dullcote, but other modelers I know have said that Dullcote is still too much of a satin finish, and they use flat sprays from art stores that are designed for taking the sheen off of oil paintings. My big complaint about Dullcote is that it turns white if you put an alcohol-based india ink wash on it. More on this later after I do some experimenting with various flat finishes.

In the meantime, blow for grade crossings, come to a full stop to let the brakeman get off to unlock and flip the switch(s), and never exceed 4 mph when coupling up to a car. :)

overview of 35 years of hobby time

here is a link to a brief video that shows the overall train layout in the basement, after 35 years of work. We had an NMRA open house here last week, so for the first time in a while the aisles are clear and clean and so it's an opportunity for picture-taking. I narrated a more detailed thirty minute video tour as well, but it will take me a few days to edit it. Stay tuned.

new scenery in the "Index Loop"

There's a place near Mt. Index, where the BN mainline passes through the town of Index, WA, on a 180+ degree curve which I call the "Index loop". I didn't have room for the town, but needed a 180 degree turn at that spot on the layout, just before reaching Skykomish, so my son painted Mt. Index on the backdrop there and we called it the Index loop. I roughed in some foam scenery there in about 2004 and never got around to finishing it, until this week. Instead of the town, I put in a section house (that came from JJ Johnson's layout originally) and a stream bed that I suppose should be called the North Fork of the Skykomish river. But I would rather call it "Troublesome Creek", which flows into the North Fork just upriver from there. What you see below is just the first layer of "zip texturing", done by sprinkling dirt, grass and twigs over wet latex earth colored paint, applied directly over carved extruded insulation foam. The service road next to the section house will get paved with gravel, the creek will get a creek bed, and more trees will be planted after the mainline here is ballasted. Here is the new scenery so far:

the MILW Limestone Junction Branch

The MILW had a strange but long-standing job based out of Bellingham, WA, to run up to a limestone mine in the Cascade Mountains and supply limestone to a cement plant in Bellingham, using an SD9 and a string of ore jennies. There was a round concrete loading silo there that was fed by a conveyor that was fed by front end loaders at the mine. I have a weak spot for ore jennies, but they didn't operate all that much in the Seattle area in 1973, that I can find out, other than (1) copper ore coming down from BC to the Asarco plant in Tacoma, (2) radioactive ore or waste (or both?) that came out to or from Bangor and/or Hanford, and (3) limestone from Limestone Jct. to Bellingham. Let me know if you've heard of anything else.

But my layout only goes as far as Bellingham staging, so the Limestone Jct. operation never made sense to try and model. Until last week. We were finishing up scenery in the Index Loop area, which includes a spur for the Grotto gravel pit just west of Skykomish, and suddenly it occurred to me that there was room for an additional switch there that could make it up a 3.5 percent grade to a new shelf on top of the Skykomish staging yard. And, it would connect directly back into the Bellingham staging yard via the existing connection track between Skykomish and Bellingham. And, the mountain backdrop above the staging yard was high enough, and generic enough, that there was room for this new shelf without modifying the backdrop. And, if it was only two tracks wide (enough for a runaround track) it wouldn't hinder the operation of the Skykomish staging yard significantly. And that there was room above the base of the main peninsula to bring the mine out from the wall and really model the operation of the limestone silo. All of these ideas came in one week!

So, here are the results so far. The silo is represented so far by a white stand-in I cut from a used plastic bottle. Haven't had a chance to paint it grey yet, or make a better one.

Partway through construction:

And now after some quick scenery:

Stay tuned for the when the first operation begins...