Drummondville Station - A Scratchbuilt Clone

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery the old saying says, so imagine my surprise this morning when Jeff Boudreau from the Drummondville Railway Modellers Association (AMFD) wrote to tell me they had almost completed their version of the Drummondville VIA station based on my sets of drawings and 3D printed parts.

Drummondville station almost done (credit: AMFD)

Many years ago, I scratchbuilt that very station for a friend as a personal challenge. Intricate brick work, custom details, very large size, etc. It was a beast to build and when finished, the AMFD members certainly wanted it... or should I say, a copy of it. Back then, I sent them my modelling notes from my blog and 3D printed parts. They have a few very talented builders in their club, but it seems the task was quickly seen as a pretty involved project and was put rightly so on the back burner. They had measured the building just in case, but the time wasn't right to move forward. At that point, I thought their project was DOA but never underestimate modellers who need their signature piece.

Marcel Haché working on his masterpiece (credit: AMFD)

Fast forward few years and Marcel Haché, as I did many years ago, took up the challenge and tackled the beast. Not only did he do a fantastic job, but he also managed to fool me believing for a few seconds it was my own station. The colors, the details, the way it was assembled and even the blinds in the windows! He outdid himself and I'm really glad that the club now has the centerpiece it always wanted. On a side note, I'm pretty sure Marcel modelled the interior because Jeff Boudreau once told me they had surveyed the partition walls in case their would replicate the station in HO.

The station on the layout (credit: AMFD)

That was probably the most fantastic early Christmas gift I could hope for!!

Building Long Overdue Kits

Like any modeller, I have accumulated a dreadful backlog of unbuilt kits over the years. We always think we will find time for these projects, then new shining things appear and they are forgotten until the end of time. Since I can't work on the layout for two weeks due to the drain repairs, I decided to tidy up the collection and work on kits that were in dire need of attention.

Among these kits were a few Proto 2000 8,000 gallons tank cars which were notorious for being a challenge to build. You can always find a few of them pre-owned and unassembled. A few years ago, I got my hand on 3 Champion Oils - Sterling Fuels kits which would fit perfectly a 1950s-1960s consist. Having nothing better to do, I worked on them over 2 evenings at a leisure pace. First, they are much easier to assemble than I remembered and they are so beautiful. Honestly, I suspect that my painful memories of these cars were caused by my poor modelling techniques back in the days. I didn't clean well the parts from the sprue and used CA glue for everything. Not a recipe for good results. That said, I will still have to do some decal work because out of three cars, one is a duplicate. Shouldn't be hard to fix.

The next group of kits were Red Caboose 40ft flat cars in CN paint schemes. They are not that prototypical for CN, but they are still acceptable. It was my first time working with older Red Caboose kits and I must confess I felt some aspects of them are a little bit crude while other are exceptionally good. They are easy to assemble and painting the wood deck makes a big difference. I use an off white base and brush over AK Interactive Wood Wash to create the wooden effect. Mind you, this is only a first step as I intend to weather the decks later as they should be. Be aware that every time I model a wooden deck, I add wood texture using a razor saw blade over the plank. I really go over board with that and it's fine. The job is finished by removing the fuzz with a coarse sandpaper run along the wood grain. As you can see, it looks good for new wood. I will also have to renumber of the flat cars due to duplication.

Wood deck not yet painted

After these cars, I turned my attention to a group of two Tichy 40ft flat cars that were assembled years ago but never painted. I completed some details and painted them. They also got the wood deck treatment and are now ready for decalling work.

Ready for decalling

Another group of cars were a pair of Proto 2000 CN 52'6'' mill gondolas. I always loved these cars since I acquired one back in high school and took the time to assemble them carefully. I upgraded the snap-on coupler pocket covers with screws, which is now my standard practice. Wood decks were painted and the cars finishes in a matter of maybe 2 hours maximum.

Having been more proficient while assembling the kits, I was able to set aside enough spare grabirons and stirrup steps to repair my original CN mill gondola from 25 years ago. Back in the day, I had repaired the broken steps with heavy brass wire. It looked terrible and I thought it was the perfect time to bring that car to life again. Coupler pockets were upgraded, the wooden deck disassembled and painted. Some time was also spent to tidy up the botched brake rigging underneat the car. Some paint touch ups on the new stirrups made everything blend together and it was rewarding to see this car under a much more flattering light after all these years of neglect.

With these cars assembled, I can say that I have cleared up a bunch of CN cars required for Monk. However, I still have a lot of cars to build or paint. I'm not sure if I will go forward right now with these projects, but just to give you an idea, I have about 10 reefers from the 1950s that need some work and also several tank cars to rebuild to complete my British-American Oil fleet. We shall see! But I have also a special project about upgrading Athearn 40ft flat cars to join the expanding Monk fleet.

Monk Subdivision - Raising the Benchwork

Benchwork along the wall must be remove

Due to a major drain failure back in October, a new pipe will have to go down the hobby room. To prepare the space required to install the new drain pipe, parts of the benchwork have to be temporarily dismantled. At first, I was far to be excited by the news, but in hindsight, it's an excellent opportunity to improve things a little bit.

Cutting the painted MDF backdrop in advance

As I mentioned in previous post, the track height was something that bothered me for a long time. I'm generally a fan of layouts were I can feel immersed and watching trains from the trackside. The height was quite good in Armagh, which was at 49.5 inches high. This height corresponds to the unbuilt second level staging. Since this won't be built, I had to make a choice: set the height at 45.5 inches because the current staging is at this height, or raise everything to 49.5". my first choice was to keep things as they were, but when I started to mockup scenery using my photoshoot diorama, it wasn't cutting it for me.

The raised benchwork on brackets

So today, while dismantling parts of the benchwork, I decided to raise a section under the cabinets to see how it would fare. The backdrop height was reduced and the benchwork raised on metal shelf brackets. Sure, the backdrop is now only 11-12 inches high, but the track is at the right height and the floating effect of the layout over the base cabinets is much better than before.

Mocking up a scene

I was always struggling for shelf space to put tools or materials when building this layout and this 8 inches high gap between the layout and counter top is already very useful. Sure the downside is having only 12" of vertical space which isn't ideal for photography, but I'm thinking about painting the cabinets underside in blue to blend it with the back drop.

This is about 12" high for a framed scene.

Since it worked so well, I'll need to raise the other sections. This will also provide the opportunity to replace the cumbersome swing gate with something better. And to be honest, that extra 8 inches means that having a duck under in this area is much more acceptable. I'm currently exploring the idea of building a lightweight movable section and maybe even recycle an old lauan plywood module that was built many, many years ago for the Temiscouata Railway layout.

Good lighting will be required to make it pop!

Modelling Le Tortillard du Saint-Laurent

An iconic part of modern Murray Bay Subdivision are the numerous attempts at kickstarting touristic trains based to link the highly sough after Charlevoix area with Quebec City. Granted the majestic landscape only seen from the railway is a understandable incencitive to provide such a service.

Excursion trains weren't a rarity on the line back in the days and even the famous CN 6060 pulled a passenger train in the 1960s. However, it's only in 1984 that a regular service tourist train was put in service to take advantage of the 450 years anniversary of Jacques Cartier's first voyage to Canada. In Quebec City, an ill-fated event called "Les Grands Voiliers" (The Great Sail Ships) was expected to draw hundred of thousands of people to the old capital and it was thought that a touristic train would be the perfect opportunity to draw crowds to Charlevoix.

A man, Jacques Leblond, with a few associates, dreamed of a train but they had to "build" one from scratch on short notice. Through various contacts, they were able to rent a few GO Transit Bombardier bilevel coaches, refurbish an old baggage car into a generator car and secure CN participation in providing a GP9RM freshly out of the shops to pull the consist. That strange looking train was quite unusual, but struck the imagination of the crows and with an indeniable sense of creativity, provided an enjoyable experience to passengers.

That train was a popular success and was reconducted for an another year, but it hardly made money and was cancelled until the idea was revived in 1995 by another group of investors.

My personal link with this train was that it was my first time riding a train up until the mid-2005. I was two years old and my recollection are barely reliable. But it made an impact and since high school, I wanted to model it in HO. It was a hard thing to do, but when Proto 2000 released short hood GP9 in CN colors and Athearn made the bilevel coaches, it became a possibility. However, It's truly when Rapido made a newer and better version of the GO Transit coaches that it really became a serious possibility. I quickly ordered six coaches and bought a Supercontinental smooth side baggage car to repaint in Tortillard du Saint-Laurent scheme. Finally, last month, when I visited Vermont & Essex Club, I stopped en route to Modèle B.T. in Drummondville and acquired a Rapido GP9RM identical to the one pulling the Tortillard (OK, granted Rapido made locomotive #4028 instead of #4027, but I can live with that).

Tortillard as described in Branchline July-August 1985 issue (Bytown Railway Society)

Jérôme had the pleasure to inaugurate the train on our layout and honestly, it was a fascinating sight and something interesting to run. I can certainly see operation potential around that train.

The next step was to design custom decals for the generator car which was done quickly and now, it just a matter of ordering the decals and painting it up.

Monk Subdivision - Armagh Station Drawings

This title can be misleading if you believe I found architectural drawings of Armagh station. On the contrary, I have nothing on my hand except a few very blurry old pictures from the 1950s and a 3/4 view of the east gable when the station was in derelict state in the 1970s. From these pictures, we can surmise the station was very long, with an extended freight house section and most likely based on standard Grand Trunk Pacific designs, which was common on National Transcontinental Railway. That's where the detective work starts to find a few key information such as general dimensions, internal layout, roof geometry and many more. So here we go! 

This is probably the best picture of Armagh Station (source: Facebook)

One of the first thing that we know is that GTP had several standard designs classified by letters: Type A, type B, type C, etc. With that knowledge, I wanted to see how far I could go online, within a day, to find everything I needed to replicate a decent version of Armagh Station.

The first step was to Google simple terms such as "Grand Trunk Pacific" "Station Drawings" "Type E". Luckily enough, there was a short PDF file produced by the Province of Manitoba which collated informations taken from Charles Bohi’s book "Canadian National’s Western Depots". In the PDF, there was a set of station plans identified as GTP Type D and Type E, with Type E looking identical to Armagh if not for the shorter freight house. Upon further investigation, it appeared the authors had inverted the caption and it should have been Type D.

Drawings recovered from a PDF (credit: Province of Manitoba)

I tried to find it Library and Archives Canada had some drawings online, but I didn't find a lot to help me. So I imported that drawing into SketchUp, a 3D modelling sotfware, and scaled it to HO. I didn't take long to have an entire set of drawings, however, no a single one was fitting with the other one, particularly in the roof. I was puzzled until I manage to discover that these drawings had been pieced together and badly stretched, making them only reliable in the X axis. Unfortunately, the drawings were so blurry it was impossible to read what was written, including the dimensions. I could fiddle a bit, but I needed more help.

Scaling the drawings became quite tricky

That help came from Charles Bohi's book which I searched for a copy online with the intention of probably buying it. It wasn't hard to find and some only shop displayed a few pages to show the content. Once again, luck was on my side because of there very few pages, two were about station Type D, listing interior and exterior dimensions that I could use to scale the drawings from the PDF. Better, Bohi was giving an excellent description of the hipped roof shaped, in particular the presence of a flat spot on top of the station main building. That was the key to understand why I couldn't make sense of the roof. It was just a matter of time before I had a set of perfectly scaled drawings that could be used to built a station.

However, the extended freight house layout didn't seem to be a standard practice on GTP and since I only had very poor pictures of Armagh, I was hard to guess the overall dimensions and location of doors and windows. It then struck me that since Armagh was a sizable town on the line and the midpoint between two division points, it was probably why the station was so large. You only require such a warehouse if you have a lot of goods for larger customers. It was a common pattern on the old Monk Subdivision: many station had GTP layouts but with extended freight house. If such a thing was common on Monk, it would also be shared by stations on other NTR subdivision.  At that point, I asked myself which towns in the Abitibi area could have such a larger stations. I selected Amos because it wasn't a division point, but still a very large settlement.

Amos station in 1945 (source: BAnQ)

I tried finding information on Quebec National Archives (BAnQ) and found many pictures of the town in the 1910s up to the 1940s. Not only the station was almost identical to Armagh, but I even had aerial pictures of it. In general, Amos station photographs were of much higher quality, with helped to figure out key details and dimensions. The only noticeable difference was the location of the second freight house door.

Extract of Amos insurance plan by Underwriter's Laboratories (source: BAnQ)

But while these pictures were of a great help, I still needed to figure out exact dimensions of the extended freight house. At that moment, it crossed my mind that such a large town as Amos was bound to have been surveyed by insurance company mappers. A quick BAnQ search shown it was the case and that the station had been documented. This was the final piece of the puzzle and what I discovered was a very large station that really as a lot of presence.

Locating the freight house openings in Illustrator

The last big challenge was locating with some precision the openings that existed in the freight house. Most pictures of Amos and Armagh stations are shot in such angles that you can't see everything. However, we can assume there was, from left to right, two large sliding doors, two windows, a door and, most likely, another window right by the telegraphist bay.

Crude 3D rendering of the station

At that point, I was content with my work and the 3D model fitted almost perfectly the photographs of Armagh Station... until Chris Mears pointed out that CP Tracks website had PFD files of old GTP drawings! They had the 100-154 drawings available in much better quality, even though it was based on a photocopy and some deformations were clearly visible. The interesting part is these plans were different from the one shown in Bohi's book. They are quite similar, sharing the exact same dimensions and window placement, but I could see that interior partition walls in the office was different and there was much more details on chimneys. Also, there was a basement right under the office, something I wasn't aware.

Using that new data, I compared my first draft and started to correct it. The section drawing were of higher resolution, so I was able to figure out the way they built the curved roof eaves. That was the linch pin to finally get the dormers right.

Improved drawings

All in all, it was a fascinating and quick project while I can barely do nothing on the layout. I had some issue with the sanitary drain and a contractor will replace it by Christmas. It means a new trench must be dug in the concrete floor of my hobby room to install the new pipe. I will give me an opportunity to improve the benchwork and backdrop later on.

Meanwhile, I will check if it's worth 3D printing or scratchbuilding the station. Maybe it will be a mix of both mediums. I feel like 3D printing is cheating though!