Friday Fun: A Few Words About Wordless Wednesday #306

Way back last June, I wrote about a debate I was having concerning whether to move the siding at the Wethersfield Lumber Co. What I didn't mention at the time was that the debate wasn't just internal, but had been prompted somebody familiar with the area who felt pretty strongly that the siding should more closely follow the prototype and be parallel with the mainline.

Well, I'd concluded last year that the trouble of moving the siding wasn't worth the extra prototype fidelity. But last month, I had a change of heart - not the least prompted by discovering this in the NHRHTA Photo Library:

Yup - you see what you think you're seeing. Right there in our collection all along (or at least since the cardboard tubes containing a bunch of items were donated) is the honest-to-gosh prototype diagram for the Wethersfield Lumber Company siding. We discovered it as we were cataloging the items during one of our volunteer nights.

Talk about a shocker!

So yeah, I finally succumbed to Dave's persuasion - pushed along pretty hard by this discovery as well. The siding is on the move - but don't expect me to include the switchback. Really.

Thankful Thursday & Progress Report

For this week's "Thankful Thursday" I want to thank those who were able to share some kind words and stories about Dave Messer. I've written at length about how the folks you meet in this hobby are its biggest asset and how the friendships you develop through this shared passion are ones that last a lifetime. That's just the nature of this community. Unfortunately, when we lose one of our own, their passing leaves a large hole.

I'll admit that despite a recent "flow" on the layout, the motivational winds have diminished significantly over the past bunch of days. Fortunately, I did make some progress early last week . . .

The terraforming of the previous week being finished, it was time to give everything a base coat of dirt color.

The previous photo and this one show the state of things after all (well, hopefully all) of the base terrain was done - using a combination of cardboard strips, plaster gauze, foamcore board, cardboard, and drywall joint compound.

A base coat of "dirt color" (matched at Home Depot to a sample of actual dirt from my yard) immediately makes things look better.

For the most part, I didn't bother painting the road areas or where I needed to preserve structure footprint markings.

Moving my focus from the Wethersfield scene to Wethersfield structures, I sprayed the interior walls of the lumber co office black.

I also wanted to paint the foundations for the Ballantine's office. I hope to do a more detailed post on this structure soon, but for now I can say that it came from the rooftop of the Walthers Grocery Warehouse kit I used to model the main Ballantine's warehouse. Click here for that build. Having removed it from the roof, it needed a foundation & stairs, which I got from Walthers Modular parts. I just needed to paint it.

Here's a better view of the office(s). The Ballantine's office is actually a pretty cool structure once you add the foundation. I also sprayed the exterior walls of the lumber co office gray. I'll definitely need to weather those walls.

Finally, I continued my "starter craftsman kit" building by trying my hand at heavily weathered wood siding. These parts were sprayed a base of dark gray and then drybrushed with barn red. I think I need to add more red and then maybe "back it back" with weathering. The weathered white windows/doors/trim were done with drybrushed white over the same base gray. Experimentation continues. . .

That's where things were as of mid-week last week. There's been an ebb hobby-wise over the last week between the recent news and celebrating the Missus' 50th birthday (an admittedly much nicer reason to take a break from the layout). I also came down with a cold in there somewhere so have been using my early-morning hobby time to just sleep in a bit.

But I can see a wave on the horizon. . . after this "ebb", it looks like another "flow" may be coming. And in the spirit of "Messer Motivation" I want to catch that wave and ride it as long as possible - hopefully all the way to seeing the Wethersfield scene finally completed, and very soon.

Wordless Wednesday #306 - Messer Affirmation

Dave Messer

It somehow seems fitting that my usual "Monday Motivation" post would be dedicated to one of the biggest motivators behind the Valley Line in recent years, Dave Messer.

Long time readers of this blog will recognize Dave. Along with fellow "Wethersfielder" John Wallace, he's been a huge help to this project, not only through his memories and reminisces of Wethersfield, but through his sharing his amazing modeling skills and talent by contributing so many structures to the Valley Line. In fact, almost all of the structures in the Wethersfield scene are his work - and he even branched out, building structures for East Berlin and Dividend as well. He was most recently working on lineside structures for East Haddam.

We enjoyed ribbing each other about the balance between prototype modeling and freelancing, with one of our recurring "arguments" being whether to change the orientation of the siding for the Wethersfield Lumber Co. I'd concluded last year that I'd keep it where it was, but eventually I realized how right Dave was and have recently been reworking that siding.

When I first started posting photos of the "excavation" a few weeks back and hadn't heard from Dave about it (I was actually looking forward to an "I told you so"), I checked in. Turned out he was in the hospital for an ear infection. Having had many of those when I was younger, I knew how painful they could be and prayed he'd get rid of it quickly. A follow-up email found him in rehab and I thought he was on the road to recovery. Unfortunately, an email from his wife Saturday morning told me the sad and shocking news that he had passed the previous day.

I've written elsewhere about how many folks in our hobby are always looking forward to "someday" when they'll build the dream layout and build all the kits they've collected. Sadly, all too often they leave behind a lot of unfinished business.

But Dave wasn't one of those folks. Not only was he a Master Model Railroader, and writer of award-winning modeling articles, but he was one of those rare guys that actually completed his model railroad. In fact, he often told me - when I was reticent to accept another one of his models - that he loved being able to build more structures for somebody else's layout since his was done. Having accomplished his layout goals, he was happy to help somebody else achieve theirs - especially since he could build so many of the structures he remembered from childhood.

And I was one of the lucky beneficiaries of his enthusiasm and energy. It's not for nothing that I coined the phrase "Messer Motivation" to describe his good-natured encouragement and drive to get to more modeling. And, way more often than I could have dreamed, many of those words of encouragement were accompanied by something for the layout. From the first-ever "Thankful Thursday" when he sent me some freight cars after having first visited the layout, to two different shipments of trucks and other vehicles, to a full scene depicting the Valley Coal Co., complete with a model of the office with a full interior. Dave helped me finally get my model of the Rt. 15 overpass done by fashioning abutments based on prototype photos, and his beautiful model of the Gra-Rock Bottling Co. building anchors the station area scene in Wethersfield. These shipments were usually preceded by an email telling me that "Ray Seery has something in his truck for you" (Ray Seery was the express agent at the Wethersfield station during my era). And every time, after letting him know that the item(s) had arrived safely, he'd inevitably ask - "so what's next on the list to be built?" He was hard to keep up with.

I could go on, but hopefully you get a sense of Dave's tremendous generosity, energy, and willingness to help somebody else along the way. But what I'll miss most is his sense of humor. We bantered back and forth a lot about different layout projects - and had a few fun debates along the way as well. And one of the funny things he started was how he'd describe some of the builds: "Right-On Rayon" (for the Hartford Rayon buildings), "Rock On" (for Gra-Rock), "See-um, Got-em, Haddam" (for the structures he was working on in East Haddam). They were silly - and even he sometimes admitted he stretched things a bit - but I always looked forward to seeing what he'd come up with next.

I'll end with a quick story of how he made one of the biggest highlights of this layout possible. As I mentioned earlier, Dave grew up in Wethersfield, but was a few years behind John Wallace in school, so they never crossed paths. John's memories and photographs of the Valley Line from his teenage years are my largest source of material for this project, and I wanted so badly to have John's house on the layout - right where it was, beside the tracks.

Well, two huge things happened over the past couple of years. First, I had the great joy and privilege to introduce Dave and John through this project and they were able to share a lot of the same memories of growing up in Wethersfield. But secondly, Dave was able to use his great modeling skill to recreate John's house in HO scale. Being able to send Dave a picture of John with his house will always be one of my greatest memories of this project.

That was Dave Messer - a man of great generosity, energy, passion, skill, and humor. I'm a better man for knowing him. I only regret that I didn't get to know him earlier and for a much longer time. His passing is a profound loss not only to his family, but to his many friends. I'm glad that I can count myself as privileged to be one of them.

John Wallace's House

Gra-Rock Bottling Co.

East Berlin Station

Valley Coal - office and oil tanks. Bins & garage in the background.

More bins and buildings

Hartford Rayon warehouse

Hartford Rayon factory

Wordless Wednesday #305 - Connecticut Industry

What used to be . . . and in just part of the state!

Monday Morning Motivation: A Week in Wethersfield

Many model railroaders are familiar with the "ebbs & flows" of working on a layout. Unfortunately, all too often, we find ourselves on the "ebb" side - not too motivated, stuck at an impasse, content just to sit in the armchair or watch TV. But sometimes - if we're lucky - we experience the "flow" and it seems everywhere we look there are things we're exciting to be doing on the layout.

That's where I've been lately. For the last month, ever since finishing the East Berlin scene, I've been motivated to get down into the basement every morning and get a little more done - even if it's only 15-30 minutes worth of work, it's at least something. And riding this wave is paying off. Just check out the photos from the last week . . . 

After adding some foam core as a base for the Gra-Rock building and surrounding area (needed to bring it up to the same height as the track), I decided to fill in just south of the area to flatten that out a bit as well.

While I typically use a cardboard lattice to support my plaster gauze, the area wasn't deep are large enough for that, so I just used some wadded up newspaper held in place with masking tape.

Instead of dipping the plaster strips in water and draping as I usually do, this time I tried just laying the dry strips down, spraying them with water, then blending them in with a brush dipped in water.

I did the same thing at the north end of the Wethersfield bulk track, making a flat area for the coal hopper offloading, and blending it in with plaster gauze.

Here's an overview of the Gra-Rock/bulk track area done and drying.

Next, I turned my attention to the north end of Wethersfield, adding a base layer of ground foam from the previously done area down to Jordan Lane. Matching the blend of colors wasn't easy. In fact, this was my second attempt - not so much due to the colors, but to the fact that during my first attempt, I'd "streamed" rather than "dripped" the glue on and created swirly dark lines where the glue had washed away the foam. Based on feedback from Facebook followers, I just went over it again with this 2nd layer, and it came out great.

At the end of last week's Monday Motivation progress report, I showed how I started to modify the lumber co. siding. Here's the shed being pressed down into some wet joint compound to make an impression of the footprint. The shed itself is protected by a layer of plastic wrap. This technique allows the building to "sit down into" the scenery rather than on top of it. It also allows you to just place the building in the impression without having to fix it in place. Makes it a lot easier to remove!

  

This area south of Church Street has bothered me for a long time. Unlike what I ended up with here, the prototype area is pretty flat. Unfortunately, the fascia is a bit too low here to make leveling it very easy. 

And you can see from the, um, level how unlevel the area is.

If I were to do this again, I'd try filling in with pieces of foam, carved to shape (despite the mess). I don't know why it didn't occur to me to just add another layer of cardboard lattice to support the plaster gauze, but you can see I ended up using masking tape as a support. Part way through, I realized that I shouldn't drape the tape over the fascia (would make it impossible to hide later and the plaster gauze would stick to it rather than the scenery. If the tape failed, so would the gauze). So I hot glued some N scale roadbed just inside the fascia for something to stick the tape to and added my gauze over that.

Here's the completed masking tape support. Still not flat, but at least back toward Church Street is much better.

Looking south from Church Street.

Speaking of Church Street - don't just drape your plaster gauze over foamcore roadways - it won't stick. I'll be installing a styrene sheet street here but first needed to remove the "bouncy" plaster gauze.

And speaking of plaster gauze, here it is draped over the masking tape support. Since I wanted to be sure it would drape nicely, I did dunk it first and then went over it with a wet brush.

I also added two layers of gauze since it's near the front of the layout and I wanted stronger support. I'm afraid adding two layers of wet gauze at the same time might have been too heavy and weighed down the tape a bit. Next time, I'll let the first layer dry & harden before adding a second layer.

Terraforming continued with more joint compound - and I turned my attention to the Fernwood Street area, deciding to raise the yards/houses above the street using cardboard.

The street is pretty obvious, but note also the cutouts for the driveway entrances from the street. I just cut out some of the cardboard and blended it with more joint compound. And speaking of joint compound - look how much I used to fill in between the cardboard and the scenery base!! That's gonna take a while to dry & harden!!

So that's where things stand as of now. Not bad progress for a week of mornings-before-work. Once I'm satisfied that the bulk of the terraforming-with-topping is done, I'll be going over everything and blending it all in with my ground goop mix. Since that's already brown and has some glue in it, I'll be applying ground foam to it right after I apply it. This one 2-part step ought to make for a huge visual impact.

Of course, I have at least one building to finish and a photo backdrop to do as well. But I'm very glad to finally be working in Wethersfield and getting it toward some level of finish.

Prototype Junction Interview

I've written before how much I enjoy model railroad podcasts, but it's especially cool when I hear a buddy being interviewed on one of my favorites.

So imagine my surprise this morning when I saw A Modeler's Life podcast had just posted a rare Sunday 'cast interviewing my friend Randy of Prototype Junction. I introduced you guys to Prototype Junction earlier this week, but this is a chance to hear more about this cool new approach to producing freight cars - and directly from Randy himself.

There's a March 9 deadline to get involved in this project, so click here to hear the interview and learn more about it!