Trains @ Station Studios

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.

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.

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:

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.

I moved next to laying track. The PM&TCo. is my first model railroad to use handlaid track so I took some time to practice building switches before working on the module. I found it very enjoyable and not that difficult; just take your time and make sure everything is the right gauge.

If you are interested in handlaying track, I strongly suggest Kalmbach’s new book on track “Trackwork and Lineside Detail for Your Model Railroad”. Tony Koester’s chapter on building switches is the best one I’ve come across. Another good resource is Rick Fortin’s articles in the May and June 1998 issues of Railroad Model Craftman.

I pretty much followed Tony’s methods. One area I was not too happy with was using diluted white glue to glue the ballast down. I have a few spots where I got some white residue on the ballast. Next time I will probably try something different, like Woodland Scenics dry ballast glue which you mix with the ballast and then wet.

I cut my own throw bars from a 1mm thickness printed circuit board. I followed suggestions from the On3 e-mail group and used Radio Shack’s silver solder to solder the point rails to the throw bar.