QSSR Mark VII - The Atlas Station

The Atlas station has always been a classic of American railroading since at least the 1960s. While it has become far too ubiquitous at this point, it is still a nice kit with excellent details. When you compare it with the old Revell station and some others cheap kits from the same era, it's holding ground.

It has been said it was based on a NJ prototype, which seems to be true to some extent. But beyond a few similarities, this station should be considered proto-freelanced. Neverthless, the design is kind of cute even if I had serious reservation that the second floor under the roof must be extremely cramped and unpractical. I've yet to understand why you would bother having so many dormers on such a small roof and fit them with minuscule windows!

First pass of coloring

Notwithstanding this critic, I always wanted to repaint mine in a more realistic fashion and see what could be done. Missing a few windows and details, it was also a great opportunity to weather it as an abandoned structure that was left to rot like depots on Tom Johnson's former INRAIL layout or the old CPR station in Richford, VT.

Second pass

My experiments were initially done by painting the station a dark grey, then drybrushing a faded wine red over the entire walls. Using dark brown for trims. The dark grays and browns are there to simulate rotten wood under the paint layers. After that initial coat of paint, I drybrushed several coats of light grey, tan and white, coming back later with red again to modulate the effect. It was not a real technique, but just applying colors following pictures found on Internet.

Third pass with new coats of red and crayon

Sure, I ended up with an exaggerated look, but I was still able to learn to play with paint to create peeling effects without using acrylic mediums or hairspray. Did I succeed, maybe... And after a while, I took color crayons and started to add new layers on the building. Hunther Hughson had done that and I felt it was a great idea to replicate the gritty aspect of failing paint and distressed wood. It certainly improved the appearance.

For additional detailing, I installed a few Tichy oil barrels around the platform as if the area was still used by maintenance of way teams. Wooden ties made from wood matches also added some story to the scene. I must admit I'm generally no oriented toward these cute rendition of railway structures, but it was dumb fun.

Fourth pass with more crayon

If I could critic my work, I would say that the red I used was completely wrong. Using a wine color and fading it with white and tan gave it an unrealistic pinkish look. Also, I should have weathered the concrete platform with more oil washes. Some vegetation and weeds growing along the walls and cracks would also bring everything together.

Results in situ

Will it be the final structure that will grace the layout? I don't know. To be honest, I would rather have a permanent concrete platform on which I could swap scratchbuilt buildings according to my fancy. That said, I'm glad I pushed forward with this idea to exploit the potential of the Atlas station. I still believe it's a fantastic model if you dare to embrace its ubiquities.

QSSR Mark VII - A Classic American Switching Layout

As mentionned in my previous post, I have been absent from model railroading for a few months. Sometimes, inspiration is just not there, and I felt I needed a pause. The last time I posted about layout design, I was making all kind of fascinating but reckless decisions about Monk Subdivision and I’m glad I didn’t pursue them right off the bat. That said, most of my reasons for staying away from the hobby were also caused by doing some home improvement, more precisely, remodelling my entire kitchen and getting rid of a lot of useless stuff accumulated in the house over the years. Pursuing many hobbies is never a good idea, particularly when they involve collecting items. Not that I want to criticize collecting, but they are contexts when this type of hobby is just the most unproductive way to waste time, resources, efforts and money. After a long period of deep thinking, I decided to just stop collecting. That said, it doesn’t affect model railroading and a core passion of mine.

With the kitchen project near completion and some space freed in my office space and basement, I thought it would be nice to move forward with the idea of a small switching layout on a Kallax shelf. I’ve explorer that theme countless time, but never fully finished one (expect maybe Glassine Canada).

The current module isn’t groundbreaking at all, but build upon my exploration of a rural branchline near abandonment. Add to that a discussion with Chris Mears about reusing old Atlas classic structures and assuming boldly their identities as informed by old box art.

 

The big difference this time is the template is as small as possible to be easy to move around during and after building process. I’m learning here from the latest QSSR iteration. The footprint is about 72” x 15”, which is more than enough. The track plan follows an inglenook pattern that serves a generic industry that will probably share a lot with feed mills or small industrial plants (agro or forest products).

A very condensed track plan

As for the Atlas structures, they are the ubiquitous station and the shanty. I’ve had these kits in my hands for almost 3 decades now and it was time to give them a new life… or should I say, model their end of life. The station is now a derelict and abandoned building slowly rotting away.

Structures are used to frame the train entrance (and hide it)

Those familiar with old section houses crumbling along the ex-MMA/CMQ lines and the old depot at Richford, VT, will understand what I’m after. This is a theme explored by Tom Johnson on his previous INRAIL layout and I want to give it a try. The station is in the foreground and acts as a view block for trains entering the stage. It’s also a fascinating place to stand and look at the action. While the building no longer serves a purpose, its grounds are used by railway crews and maintenance of the way, so there is still life there.

 

Atlas structures framing the layout entrance

Another thing I wish to experiment with is a raised foreground sloping down toward the tracks. This is something I really want to try because everywhere I did it on Murray Bay Subdivision, I loved the look of it. It’s a neat wait to frame a scene and smooth the transition at the end of the module. Consider it as an inversion of Stanstead, which had its hills in the background.

 

A raised foreground is a good way to frame tracks

As you can see, this is a very simple layout once again, more interested in colors, textures and framing the scene. It’s an artistic take on ubiquitous railway elements and for that reason, it follows no prototype in particular. It will be a home for my 1970s-2010s small collection of American and Southern Quebec rolling stock and motive power to suit the mood of the moment. For its name, I originally thought it could be Rockville to pay tribute to the classic Atlas station, but maybe I’ll be lazy and it will just become another QSSR iteration, probably Mark VII at this point! Some ideas refuse to die!

Mocking up the feed mill from recycled structures

At the moment of writing the article, most of the layout is now quite advanced: the recycled module has been disassembled and rebuilt in a lightweight version. Cork and tracks are installed and fully wired, including switch machines and frogs. Landscape is taking shape, with the raised foreground already in place. I don’t plan to work on the layout until the end of July as I will take the road on Friday to give a clinic, a week later, at St. Louis RPM convention. It will be a great occasion to visit more of Appalachia and discover the Midwest while meeting people I only know online.

A Return to Model Railroading...

It's been a few months since I've published anything significant on this blog. Not due to a lack of inspiration about what to write, but more to do with a general apathy regarding my hobbies lately and putting my effort into completing long overdue home improvement projects that were victims of procrastination. That pause was probably required to sort out my ideas and let cool my head from conflicting concepts.

That said, the last few months were also an occasion to explore a few ideas, many of them involving all kind of exotic themes which are usually not on my radar. The lack of hobby time also put forward the need for a small display or layout to fill the gap. There is nothing worst than stopping completely an activity with the ill-advised thought that there will be a "right" time to do it. However, learning from previous failed or successful attempts, I decided to take the best ideas and try to do something that would fill the gap on my office shelf.

A glimpse a what could be...

I've put forward a few general parameters to reach my goal:

1. It must be built on a lightweight module that can be easily moved around in the house and outside.
2. It must be dual power (DC and DCC)
3. Size matters and anything over 6 feet is too long for a module. You probably recall my theory where I explained that a scene about 6 feet long is large enough to fill your field of vision and create perfect immersion.
4. Trackage must be simple for ease of maintenance and trouble shooting
5. Generic locale with swappable structures that can be replaced over time to try new challenges
6. Be nicely finished and scenicked to be a good-looking addition to my office
7. Serves to experiment with scenery
8. Versatile enough to accommodate my large fleet of locomotives and cars

Certainly, there is nothing really new with these parameters, but they do reflect a desire to get better at what I'm doing and expanding upon previous iterations. With the St. Louis RPM and summer vacations close to my door, I won't be able to do that much on that layout until the end of July, but recycling an old module made it possible to start working on it efficiently. More to come about it!

Unspoken Truths - A Cohesive Design - Part 3 (final)

Since making mistakes and correcting them take less time than waiting to find the truth on paper, I’ve decided to fundamentally revise and streamline the Monk project. It doesn’t mean I’m abandoning it, but rather that I’ll try something that can be reverted back to the initial planning if required or that can grow out as I develop the design and find new ways to run trains.

First, I’m completely ditching replicating an exact prototype location. That’s not a mystery to those knowing about my intention with Monk. It had always been the initial goal: find what’s mundane, typical, and relatable. Everything will be generic though prototypically informed. Getting it right is more important than slaving over a prototype that may change according to my fancy. A passing track is a passing track, a grade crossing is a grade crossing and correctly locating a water tank doesn’t really change from a railway to another. Structures are fun to build and can be replaced to create another railway, be it a CNR station or a CNoR one.

 

Tentative track plan

Second, the theme stays the same: a busy mainline in the middle of nowhere in the mountains. That’s good enough for me. This, combined with the first statement, means that I will no longer give real place names to spots on the layout but rather give them a generic descriptor. The goal is to emphasize what happens there and not to falsely pretend to be somewhere that I can’t model as closely to reality as I would wish. It’s a succession of cameos, vignettes and vistas where one can stand and get immersed by what happens from the trackside. It’s all about railfanning the trains. In this case, places will then be known with short yet evocative names:

• The Meet: where you can see trains stop at the signals and meeting each other through a clearing in the forest. This is the isolated railfanning spot that provides only a glimpse of trains fighting the grade. It will be located at the Abénakis Bridge which will be replaced by a big fill.

• The Fill: a very large embankment built in a shallow but large valley with a big concrete culvert. In this regard, this scene is unchanged from the previous layout design. You watch the train as it enters a scenic curve.

• The Station: a place of civilization where you find fields, a small rural station, a section crew and a team track. Nothing fancy… except for the train order signal and the fact that here, the railway connects with human life.

• 
  The Causeway: a long narrow embankment built over a lake/marshes on the outskirts of the Station where our train disappear beyond a point we can’t reach after travelling through a highly scenic S-curve.

As mentioned in a previous post, the layout will be modified to be a folded dog bone. The passing track is now implied since there are no visible turnouts and we imagine they are out of sight from the modelled world we can see, as happens often in real life.

Defining the views

Also, some modifications are made to the staging area. Basically, I’ll modify the lower staging to fit the new scenario. I’ve yet to decide exactly what I want to do, but the good news is the longest train will be 50-cars long, which is quite impressive if it even works. Another idea would be to only have the lower level loop used as a staging (between 4 to 6 tracks) and keep the upper level staging much simpler with only one long passing track.

Passing turnouts won't be visible on the layout

My idea is that, if I’m inclined to do so, it would be possible to scenic the upper level and consider it as another layout. Among many ideas, I’m extremely tempted to do it in an American Southwest style reminiscent of Santa Fe and other such classic roads. I won’t hide the fact that ATSF is quite an evocative force in my mind and it would be cool to have a very simple track plan that can support two difference “layouts”.

Proposed scenicked upper staging

Unspoken Truths - Putting Things Together - Part 2

Last weekend was one of these moments when you question everything about model railroading. Kind of like when I wrote the “Thinking out loud” series of articles many years ago where I vented my frustration. Call it midlife crisis if you wish, but I’m reaching a point where I want to get off that train and do something else more meaningful, more streamlined and in harmony with my current pace of life.

 

I’ve been riding the prototype modelling train for years now, probably close to two decades and it has never brought any sense of achievement, i.e., interacting with my trains in a close and personal way. With prototype modelling, there is always a new barrier we set for ourselves after jumping the last hurdle. It’s certainly a good school to learn a lot about the trade, but at the same time, it can lead to hobby burnout and unsatisfaction. As I said to Chris Mears, I don’t care about operating trains in a highly and well-thought environment… I don’t care! I tried it countless times and it never meshes into my regular schedule for more than a few days. It’s boring to me and I can do nothing about it.

 

A month ago, I was asked by Lonnie, a well-known member of the St. Louis RPM to write a bio about myself for the website promotional material. As could be expected, the instruction were both very clear and oriented toward a goal: to share your “identity” by assigning a specific prototype, locale and era to your modelling efforts. It felt awkward to write it… it felt weird, as if I was an impostor. I don’t model a single prototype in a specific era and locale and don’t believe it’s a fundamental aspect of my relation to this hobby. In hindsight, I should have written the truth: “Matthieu Lachance isn’t a prototype modeller, but he enjoys modelling based on prototype pictures to achieve realistic results.” My approach is to inform my modelling based on reality… not to replicate a very specific slice of reality and consider it my entire creative world.

 

Lance Mindheim’s wise words still resonate with me: “he doesn’t give a rat’s rear about operation…” I could say that about many things related to that hobby. Regular readers will know that I like to replicate specific trains in their environment… but not how a specific subdivision works. Over the last few days, I’ve been in introspection mode and had to recognize that what drives my participation in this hobby is recreating trains (locomotives + cars). Stations, signals, turnouts, bridges are there for context, they create a frame, a setup, a mise en scène, but they aren’t the end goal. When I look at Charlevoix Railway in Louis-Marie’s basement, I’m extremely grateful to have been able to build such a thing with friends… only if trains could run their course without reaching the end too soon.

 

I’ve shared many times my idea to create generic layouts which provide a parade route to display trains in a compelling way. Each time I’ve created a layout, it was all about setting up nice little railfanning spots: a bridge, an overpass, a grade crossing, a hill, a broad curve… And this is what I’ve done when I succeeded in this hobby. The home layout isn’t different. The project has been in planning for years and the current iteration dates to 2020. If you have followed the Monk Subdivision project, you know that I’ve worked hard to streamline it to the bare minimum, to get the essence of a railway with as little elements as possible. The focus was on framing nice views. On the other hand, the operating scheme has been a nightmare even if very simple. Running up to 8 trains with two staging and a bunch of control panels isn’t my cup of tea. I have also to ask myself: will I have the time to set these operating sessions. Will I have the patience to program them, to debug these things when all I want is to run trains because I can operate them elsewhere (Stanstead and Murray Bay Subdivision). Why not start with a simpler layout that can be expanded when and if required?

 

As I’ve found out over the last few years in other realms of my life, it’s a time of streamlining to go right to what matters and enjoy it. It’s not about taking shortcuts, but about finding what is essential. In that regard, the Monk Subdivision isn’t different and its goals, while still the same, must be attained in a timely and meaningful way. Let’s look at what it means by a series of three sketches.

 

Monk Subdivision is just a big excuse to look at long trains running on the mainline (option 1). Nothing less, nothing more. The two stagings are funnels that feed trains to that stretch of mainline. There are two approaches to that: you model the real way trains meet, of you find a way to simply mimic that impression of bidirectional traffic. The first way is the most typical one and based on prototype. You have a single track mainline with a passing track and trains meet there. Since you live in a model world, you lack space and compress things. Long turnouts end up crammed into curves and you fight with geometry. On the other hand, you have nice view of trains entering the passing track and cool signals. OK, alright with me… oh! But you have to control the train constantly, so railfanning is taking the back seat because you need to have that cab in your hand and make sure traffic is moving safely… Loss of immersion. And don’t talk about the level of wiring involved just to get started.

 

The other option (2A), shunned by serious hobbyists oriented toward “real” operation, is to simply create the illusion of a passing track. It works on the premise that if you are looking at a very long siding (Armagh had a 140 car passing track capacity), there are very little chances that would will see both end of it except if you are standing by a turnout. In that case, the line will look like a double track mainline with bidirectional (albeit slow) traffic. That raises a couple of questions… Armagh siding was about a little bit over a mile long, which is about 64 feet in HO scale. The entire visible mainline on the layout is at best 42 feet long… So you won’t see both ends at all, which is an interesting observation. One could decide to model only one visible turnout, the other one being implied as being somewhere in the outside world. You still must manage traffic, but only at one end of the passing track, making your life easier and, focussing the experience in one unique place that becomes special.

 But there is more to that idea… What if both ends couldn’t be seen, i.e. not modelled on the layout? Can we accept that? Is it a “lie”? The layout would be a flatten continuous run, a.k.a, a dog bone (option 2B). The double track would represent the mainline and the siding even if it’s the same exact track. In the staging room, there would be no need for reversing loops as traffic would run always run in the same direction on each track, creating an illusion of bidirectional running. The Edmundston and Joffre stagings would then be greatly simplified and it would be possible to run DC or DCC without having a headache dealing with reversed polarity. Would it be sad to lose the signals? Though there may be a neat solution…

 

Less is more...

One solution would be to partially represent them. You have the two signals on the passing and mainline that are a few hundred feet from the turnout. The turnout itself and the approach signal being invisible, in the outside world. While looking at prototypical distances of signals to the throwbar in Quebec, it’s about 360 feet! Which is roughly 4 feet in HO. Something rarely modelled correctly due to compression… But that’s the nice thing about Monk, compression doesn’t apply because it’s a series of railfanning vignettes. As for operation, the traffic and signals would be handled exactly like a double track mainline with Automatic Block Signalling (ABS), which is the most basic way to implement them.

 

Real signals are quite far appart from a turnout.

At the end of the day, there is nothing new in what I’m presenting. It’s simply an acknowledgement that prototype operations aren’t the core role for Monk which, at the end of the day, it closer to an exhibition layout or a diorama with action. More on that on the next installment!