Author: Barry Cott

On the PM&TCo, the yard module will contain the only runaround track on the layout and will be connected to staging at its west end and the dock module on its east end. As much as I would have liked to have included the wye, I was forced to move the wye into staging. The yard module will also contain a small spur for car storage.

Here are two photos early in construction. I’m using the same methods as before: 3/8″ plywood grid benchwork on Lee Valley shelving units:

The paper sitting on the benchwork is a full size printout from 3rd PlanIt of the trackwork on the yard module. I used it as a guide to cut the roadbed out.

I also followed Iain Rice’s suggestions on lighting. I tried a three-light halogen setup but found the coverage was poor. I then started looking for compact fluorescents. The local Home Depot equivalent had a nice set of 16″ long fluorescents which could be connected end to end. The cost was a little expensive: $35 Cdn per pair (about $20 US; the exchange rate is just killing us these days). I bought a total of four fixtures and set them up in a V formation about 2″ back from the front edge of the upper fascia.

The results were very impressive; nice even light and everything was well illuminated.

Here’s a photo of module with the lights on:

And one more of the dock area:

I decided on using sheet styrene for the fascia since I had a fair bit left over from the backdrop. I started with the lower fascia. It was a simple matter of installing the fascia cut roughly to the right shape, installing it on the module, marking the final profile of the fascia, de-installing, making the final cuts and reinstalling. OK it was a bit of a fiddle, but worked out just fine in the end. I used #5 brass screws from Lee Valley with #6 cup washers to hold the fascia on. The cup washers are highly recommended; they spread the force of the screw over a wider area and help keep the styrene from tearing. I also created 3″ wide wings at both ends of the module as per Iain Rice’s suggestions. They help frame the module.

Here’s a photo before the paint went on:

After installing the lower fascia, I turned to the top fascia. I first cut a 3/8″ piece of plywood to the same footprint as the module. This piece sits on standards above the module proper. I then cut a 4″ wide piece of styrene for the top fascia. Again, these were installed with screws and cup washers.

The fascias then got several coats of dark brown semi-gloss latex paint. The brown colour was based on my flat earth colour but darkened considerably by the addition of black to the tint:

There are two main structures on the dock module:

1. the dock itself along with the combined passenger/freight “station” for traffic between the PM&TCo. and the steamship “Kawigamog”
2. the water tower for refilling PM&TCo. engines

The dock was the most important to be designed at this point because of its interaction with the scenery. So I started by designing mockups of the dock and station. I used cardboard for most of it and placed scale figures, rolling stock, etc. into the scene to get a feeling of scale. I left things for several weeks until I was happy with the design.

The dock went together pretty quickly. I had some stripwood lying around, so the dock is all stripwood. After laying out the dock, I filled in some more scenery details around the dock, in particular, the rock walls coming up from the water.

At the time, I had no photographs of what the Key Valley station at Lost Channel looked like, so the design of the dock station was based on photographs of the station at North Portage on the Huntsville and Lake of Bays Railway circa 1930. Essentially it was a one and a half storey building with a hip roof. I built the dock station was built using sheet and strip styrene. I used several Grandt Line windows and doors; the six pane windows are cut down from a Grandt Line 12 pane window. I followed Boone Morrison’s suggestion for laying out hip roofs using a compass. It worked very well.

Below is a photograph of the station under construction along with a photograph of the H&LoB Rwy station. I took a few liberties (siding rather than tarpaper; changes in windows) but I feel I’ve captured the look and feel of the prototype. The side roof is pretty funky but prototypical. The colour in real-life is not as garish as the digital photo would have you believe. The roof still needs to be tarpapered and the windows, doors and trim painted white.

I was struggling a little with how I was going to scenic the banks beside the water, when my field trip to the Lost Channel area paid off in spades. It was clear that the Key Valley Railway had to build their roadbed in the dock area with loose rock and talus. So I purchased Woodland Scenics brown talus and proceeded to build up the banks that way. I mixed some ground foam in with the talus to show some weeds poking through.

I put the talus down before poring the water bottom so that the water would appear to be flowing around the talus at the water line.

As per Dave Frary’s scenery book, I poured a flat bottom lake with Polyfilla and then used paints and acrylic gloss medium to make the small inlet of water beside the dock. It worked OK; I didn’t make the Polyfilla thin enough nor did I soak the existing plaster in the water area enough, so the Polyfilla did not flow very well. I had to sand it several times and repour it once to get a relatively smooth surface.

I also managed to get bubbles in the upper coats of the gloss medium by rushing things. Another couple of carefully applied coats fixed this.

There is still a lot of detailed scenery to go, but I wanted to make sure that the structures on the module were designed and installed before going too far. Here’s a picture with the basic scenery in place:

With the backdrop painted, I started in on the foreground scenery. I started by building up the hills. I followed Paul Scoles’ method of using scraps of foam and masking tape to lay out the hills:

I then covered these supports with Woodland Scenics plastic cloth. Nice stuff to work with. After laying out all the hardshell, I then went back and gave everything a coat of the earth colour latex paint and a sprinkling of Woodland Scenics earth and green tone ground cover foam.

This is where I discovered my biggest mistake so far on the module. Compared to the colours of the ground foam, the trees on the backdrop were far too blue in colour and everything just looked wrong.

I quickly learned a good rule passed on by Rob Spangler that you should always match the colours on the backdrop and the foreground scenery. For most of us who do not want to dye our own ground foam, this means selecting a colour palette for the backdrop based on the foam colours. I took samples of the ground foam with me and returned to the craft store. There I was able to find several different greens that better matched the foam colours. These new greens were much more olive and yellow in colour. I then added a new layer of trees onto the backdrop (made a lot more difficult since the hills were now in place. The scene came together much better with these new olive-coloured trees.

Here’s a picture of the module after the change in backdrop colours and after finishing the shoulders of ballast:

This time I followed the advice of Boone Morrison and Linda Sand and used rubbing alcohol to wet the ballast before gluing it down with matte medium. This method works extremely well and I will use it from now on for ballast.

As you can see in the photograph, I’ve just started to go back and add the texture layer to the scenery.

With a design in mind, I started by painting the backdrop. I did this before putting in the basic foreground scenery structure because the foreground would make it difficult to paint the distant hills.

I followed the approach outlined in Dave Frary’s “Realistic Model Railroad Scenery” book. First I painted the sky; then I added a line of distant trees. I used cheap flat acrylic paints picked up at the local Michael’s arts and craft store and used a simple foam brush for both:

Here’s a picture of the module with these two areas painted in:

The cardboard mockups are standing in for the station/warehouse building at the dock and the water tank. I then added a second line of distant trees on top of the first line. This second line of trees was a slightly more intense green that the first. I also used a little spray of flat white enamel at this point to increase the illusion of distance.

Finally, I switched to a bristle brush and followed the Hales’ method of painting trees as described in recent issues of Railroad Model Craftsman: you just get a little bit of paint on the end of the bristle brush and just daub it onto the backdrop. This works very well for recreating Ontario forests. I squeezed out several shades of green onto my palette (a margarine tub lid) and then mixed different shades for blotting. I finally went back with a fine brush and some grey / white / black paint and painted on some tree trucks. There are a fair number of white birch trees in this area and I wanted to capture them on the backdrop.

I’m pretty pleased about how the backdrop turned out. It looks great without a lot of work. Here’s the east end of the module:

Unfortunately, I did not match the colours of the backdrop to the ground foam I was using and later on had to go back and repaint the trees. I strongly recommend purchasing your ground foam early and matching the backdrop colours to it.

Before I started slinging paint and plaster around, I wanted to cover the basic open grid benchwork with a layer of foam. After looking around, I decided to break open the piggybank and buy some of Woodland Scenics 1/4″ and 1/2″ foam sheets. These things are expensive but I felt it was necessary to use such thin sheets to help keep the roadbed looking like it was put on top of the ground. I used 1/2″ foam on the north side of the track and 1/4″ on the south side to create the feeling that the ground slopes from the north to south.

At this point, it became very clear that I really didn’t have a clue on what to do next. Like many other things, designing scenery from a photograph is much easier to get right than trying to make things up in your head. So I started searching around for photographs that I could use as a basis for the scenery design for the dock module. I don’t have any pictures of the Key Valley Railway around its dock, so I turned to another railway in the area that has a lot more photographic documentation: the Huntsville and Lake of Bays Railway. I found a picture of the H&LoBRwy. docks at North Portage in the 1920’s which showed a panoramic view of the area that matched the vantage point of my dock module. Working from the photograph made it much easier to design the basic scenery structure, in particular, setting the horizon and determining how much of distant hills should be visible.

Editor’s Note: In 2005, I exchanged some emails with Dave Robinson who provided the following photograph which if I had in 2001 would have substantially changed the design of the Dock Module:

After reading a lot of differing opinions on backdrop materials, I decided to try 0.060″ sheet styrene. The best reference on sheet styrene backdrops is Marty McGuirk’s Back to Basics column in the April 2000 Model Railroader.

I had some difficulty locating a company that would cut a 4’x8′ sheet of styrene into 3 16″x8′ sheets. I finally found Commercial Plastics here in Calgary who did the cuts for no additional charge.

I decided on 12″ radius corners at each of the three corners of the module. In order to line things up easily, I marked the wooden module structure at key places. I then calculated the linear distance of backdrop need to match up with this point (using the rule that the circumference of a circle = 2*pi*radius; therefore the length of a 90 degree curve is pi*radius/2). Then I just put the styrene in place, matching up the marks as I went.

I used latex contact cement to glue the styrene to the wooden module structure which worked very well. Because a single 8′ section was not long enough to fit the module, I spliced two sheets together with an 8″ splice plate between them. I used styrene putty to fill the small gaps at the splice. Here’s a photo of the backdrop while the cement was drying:

At the left side exit of the module, I built a little flap of styrene to cover a very unattractive view of the benchwork which can be seen here:

One thing I would do different on the next module is to give the styrene a light sanding with a fine grit sandpaper before installing in the module. It is relatively easy to chip the paint on the unroughed sheet styrene. Touch wood; I have not scratched anything yet but the potential is there. Roughing up the surface would give the paint something to adhere to.

I’ll be using DCC on the PM&TCo. so the wiring is pretty straightforward. I ran two feeder bus wire roughly parallel to the mainline track from one end of the module to the other. On the recommendation of the Digitrax group, these bus wires are solid 12 gauge copper. Such a large wire is necessary to keep voltage losses down.

Each piece of rail has a 18 gauge solid copper feeder wire. It may be overkill but at 5 minutes per feeder, it didn’t take me long to install them all for the module. I tried Tony Koester’s approach of attaching the feeder like a spike to the side of the rail as described in the August 1998 issue of Model Railroader. It works quite well and after I painted the shiny parts black to match the rails, they all pretty much disappeared. The advantage of ‘feeder-as-a-spike’ approach is that you can add the feeders after the track was been laid.

Connecting the feeder and the bus was done with 3M Scotchlok IDC wire connectors, model 567. The only soldering required was to wire the feeders and the frog wire to the microswitch for the turnout control. These connectors are not the easiest to find; in the US, try Mouser Electronics; in Canada, try Electrosonic.