Category Archives: Structures and Scenery

Work Progresses on North Corinna Trestle

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A little more work was done on the trestle at the north end of Corinna this evening. The bents that were completed last night were stained and set in place (they’re not secured just yet). I may have to go back and re-glue some of the joints, and also fine-tune some piling lengths. And, the detail castings need to be installed. After my experience with the NBW castings on that Mount Blue Forney cab kit, I’m not exactly looking forward to that! Anyway, enjoy a few snapshots from this evening.

Yet another test-fit for the trestle bents.

Stained, and another "dry fit." Turns out that alcohol stains will soften Titebond glue, even when it's dried over night! I may have to go back and re-glue a few joints. And no, it's not your imagination. The stone walls are much darker in this picture -- they've received their first coat of coloring.

Even though the bridge is nowhere near completed, I couldn't resist running #4 out for a quick beauty shot...

North Corinna Bridge

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I’ve been a little paralyzed, because I couldn’t figure out how to handle the north end of Corinna scenically — beyond knowing that there would be a large creek with a long, low, curved trestle. But, the two storage tracks had ended up being longer than I had anticipated, and the turntable and engine house also wound up being farther north than I had originally wanted.

Note: There are a lot of images in this post, so the images on this page are pretty small. Clicking on them will open them in large-sized viewer.

Late yesterday, it finally came to me — I’d build a partial retaining wall from locally quarried stone. With a selection of both rigid and flexible stone wall on hand, I set to work. The area that’s shown at right will have a bank sloping down from the bottom of wall to the creek.

Of course, at the ends of the trestle, the rock-work will go all the way down to the creek bed level. But, before the abutments could be placed, the roadbed had to be cut away. To do that, I used a hacksaw blade, cutting up from the bottom until I reached the bottom of the ties. Once the roadbed was gone, there was plenty of room to finish the stone-work.

With most of the stone retaining walls and abutments in place, I started on to the trestle itself. To prepare, I removed the plastic pieces between the ties, so that there would be room to slide the rest of the bridge ties into place. One note here. Pictures of many of the trestles on the Maine two-footers show that the bridge ties look to be the same as regular ties, simply placed closer together.

To built the trestle, I started with two curved stringers aligned beneath the rails. To make installation a little easier, I pre-curved them while they were still slightly damp from being stained. I waited until the stain was pretty much dry, and then spread a very thin layer of clear Elmer’s glue along the top edge. The curved pieces were then inserted into notches that had been previously cut into the top of the abutments, moved into position and clamped. While the glue was still wet, the extra ties were slid into place between the molded plastic ties.

I’m now working on the trestle bents which, like the prototype, are of a very simple design — three pilings beneath a single support, with a pair of diagonals to provide some rigidity. There will be nine of these bents on the bridge, spaced approximately every eight scale feet. Once all the bents are in place, there will be additional diagonal braces set between each bent.

The result will be a trestle similar to this one on the Bridgeton & Saco River.

By the way, you may have noticed the “clothespin” clamps in a couple of the pictures. And, you may have thought, “I thought this was an O-scale layout. Either those clothespins are really small, or that’s one helluva big trestle!” Well, you’d be right — they’re half-size clothespins! I’ve been searching for small clamps for several months now, and couldn’t find anything that satisfied me, until now. The coin is a U.S. Quarter, so you get an idea of the size. They’ve got a decent grip, but aren’t so strong as to crush basswood or balsa parts.

The Freight House at Corinna

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The Freight House at Corinna

With the exception of details, the Corinna freight house has been completed. I used the Banta Modelworks “Herbert’s Crossing” kit for this structure, for two reasons: 1) it was on hand and (2) it’s a fairly typical structure that fits the Maine prototypes well.

Description

The Banta kit is what I’d call an “old school” laser kit — a mixture of old and new techniques and materials. Since it’s been a while since I’ve built a kit like this, I spent some time reading through the instructions. And then, I read them again, because, honestly, they are not written very well at all. Since this is a relatively simple kit — one that should be good for beginners — I would have expected that each step would be well detailed. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Entire steps were missing, or were very inaccurate. At least one step and the parts diagram reference tabs and slots that don’t exist in the kit.

The kit instructions ramble on about painting/staining prior to construction. My experience with this has not been good no matter what kind of paints I’ve tried, so I opted to wait and paint each sub-assembly as I completed it.

The Build

I knew that I was going to have to modify the kit so that the loading platform would be at the correct height for my narrow gauge trains. This required figuring out the freight car deck height, and then figuring out how long to make the posts supporting the platform and structure. I moved along according to the instructions, which omit the step of joining the two deck sections together — one piece is laser-etched to represent an offset 12″ board pattern on the exterior portion of the platform, while the other is scribed basswood representing 6″ tongue-and-groove interior flooring. While the two pieces are of the same thickness, they are definitely different types of wood — the exterior portion of the deck is of a much higher quality, harder wood than the interior section.

The last step in the process of building the platform calls for ringing the deck with scale 2x8s. There was not enough material in the kit to finish the edge boards. Fortunately, I had extra stock in my scratch-building supply bin.

Once the glue was dry, I stained the platform using dyes from Hunter Line — an application of light brown, creosote black and then medium brown. Within about an hour, the interior section of the platform had warped upward, managing to pull off the glue joints. I re-glued the joints, parked about 10 pounds of lead shot on the deck and moved on to the next part of the structure.

Building up the windows and doors follows modern practice — making and sandwich of 1/64″ peal-and-stick plywood. It’s best to pre-paint these parts, which I did using craft store acrylic paint. While the paint was drying there, I moved on to assembling the walls, which were made from some rather porous, soft scribed material.

Magnetic Gluing Jig

In this case, the wood was pre-warped. Since it’s important to be sure that the walls are square, I used a magnetic clamp base to hold everything in place while the glue set, and I went back to assembling the windows.

With the walls built up, and the windows ready for installation, I moved on to painting the walls. For the exterior, I used a band of dark green on the bottom six “boards” and a light green the rest of the way up. On the interior, I used a neutral gray color. Usually, when both surfaces of a wood are painted with the same or similar paint, they won’t warp.

Warped end wall

I don’t know if the “pre-warped” condition was the cause or not, but in this case, the walls warped considerably, and in multiple directions! By the time I got the camera out, the walls had straightened out and then warped in different directions! The extreme warpage, along with a generally flimsy feeling to the walls prompted me to add structural supports to the interior, using spare materials I had on hand.

Added interior bracing

The resulting box was solid, rigid and square. Note in the photo that the new framing continues across both door openings. This was done to hold the thin section between the doors in line while the paint dried thoroughly.

The roof is made up of two slabs of soft, flat wood with scribed lines intended to be used as guides for the tarpaper roof. Unfortunately, there was no tarpaper material in the kit. Instead, there was a quantity of too-small paper shingles. Additionally, the roof panels are the same size, and there is no provision for the roof halves to overlap, nor is there a provided cap strip — and, there is no mention of how to handle the roof peak in the instructions. I opted to bevel the edges where the roof halves join together, and proceeded to build the roof structure basically according to the instructions.

For the roofing material, I decided to use a product I’m developing for market: printed shingle stock. To affix the heavy paper shingles to the roof structure, I use double-sided carpet tape. This approach avoids warping the structure and wrinkling or bubbling the paper, as occurs when using various glues to hold the paper on. The carpet tape also has a little “give,” so when changes in humidity cause the paper or wood to expand or contract, there’s no warping or bubbling. I hit the outside edges with a brown Sharpie to simulate the edges of the shingles, and stained the underside of the roof with light brown stain. Then, I applied the 2×6 trim strips at the ends as in the instructions, and added strips along the bottom edges as well to match the construction of the passenger station.

Roof underside.

While all this was drying, I installed the doors. After some hemming and hawing, I decided to install the doors in an open position, which meant removing the braces across the doorways. I was pleasantly surprised when the wall didn’t spring into some odd position. Using tape as temporary “hinges,” I glued the doors in place.

Conclusion

With the three major pieces of the kit completed, I can say that the results were worth the effort. However, I would also say that this kit could use some improvement. I am reminded of a kit I built over 15 years ago — one of the first laser kits — whenI was still modeling in HO. The unclear, incorrect and incomplete instructions made the kit more difficult to build than it needed to be. And better quality materials would have reduced the number of additional steps I had to complete. Finally, if I had not had extra material in my shop, I would not have been able to complete the kit as designed. At U$46 for this relatively basic kit, I had expected a better experience, and in the future, I will certainly plan to inspect kits from this manufacturer prior to purchase.

Structures for On30

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I just received a contact from Harris Blowmeyer, commenting that certain O-scale structures are too large for use with On30. In his case, he’s wondering about O scale water tanks.

Bridgeton Junction on the Bridgeton & Saco River showing narrow gauge and standard gauge trains

The trick here is to remember that, while On30 trains are in fact O scale, they’re models of much smaller trains than O scale standard gauge trains, and structures like water tanks, coaling facilities, etc., will be proportionally smaller.

The obvious solution is that one should use models of narrow gauge prototypes for water tanks, sand towers, coal towers and the like. A less obvious solution is that some S-scale structures are sized quite nicely to stand in on an On30 layout — especially for Maine two-foot prototypes.

More Roadwork; Building a Turntable

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Yesterday was another busy and productive day working on the layout.

After looking at that dirt roadway for a few days, and comparing it to photographs of dirt roads in Maine, I decided the color just wasn’t right — too bright and too even. So, I set about to make the road look a bit more used.

The first thing I did was to use some light gray weathering stain to streak the roadway where tire tracks would be. I also dry-brushed the stain over the entire road surface. After that I used light brown weathering stain to darken the color of the entire roadway. I also use both stains to help blend the road into the surrounding scenery.

I really like the toned-down look of the road, so I’ll probably go back to my old yard modules, and apply the same effect to the roads there.

I also headed down to Kevin’s with the “north” end of Corinna, and we did all the prep work for the turntable.

Most of the Maine-two-foot turntable pits I have pictures of seem to be relatively shallow, and there’s no consistency to how the pit walls are lined. This pit is only 3-scale-feet deep and, since there are quarries near Corinna (in my world), I’ll be using a cut stone pit wall.

Finally, I published the wrong picture of the final stain color for the passenger platform. As I mentioned, the platform didn’t look brown enough to me, so I added a wash of barn red weathering stain to bring the browns forward a little. The correct picture is shown at left.