The American Model Builders gas station is now on the Edge of Town micro-layout. It still needs weathering and the area around it needs scenicking but that's all for a future project or two. For this year, I'm running my Marx Christmas train on the EoT. Last year it was run on the larger layout. The engine I was using to pull the Marx Christmas consist gave up the ghost so I pulled this bright red train from my New Marx (aka Modern Marx) work train set. Enjoy! Opa Fritz
The train is a mix of Modern Marx and custom pieces
Work on my train layouts always slows down in the summer, regardless of what else is going on in my life, because it gets too uncomfortable out in The Cave to do much of anything.
My Edge of Town micro-layout had a plastic Littletown filling station made during the 1950's. Littletown buildings were made around the same time as Plasticville but then Plasticville bought them out. For unknown reasons, Plasticville chose not to reissue the Littletown station but chose to go with a plainer, blander design of their own. With its bay window, the Littletown version had more visual appeal but it was a tad bit smaller than the P-Ville one. And that's precisely why I chose it for the Edge of Town - it was smaller, thus using less train layout real estate. But in the end I wanted something even smaller still and chose to go with this O-scale laser-cut wood kit from American Model Builders (AMB). I'm a slow worker and haven't gotten far with it but here's some preliminary shots of the station with the walls built-up. BTW, I've already sold off the Littletown station :-) Enjoy! Opa Fritz
I'm opted to not use the station sign that came with the kit and am gonna keep the one I already had on the layout.
Here's links to some of my fairly recent Y'allTube videos. Some are for the Edge of Town layout while others document my very slow progress on the new Milwaukee North Western layout.
With the start of a new layout with larger diameter curves which can accomodate bigger engines than the diminutive Edge of Town, I can now play a bit with some new technology. Lionel's Lionchief command and control system has been out for awhile but I saw no need to buy any of their sets or separate-sale engines until the bug hit me quite recently. Fortunately they offer a series of small 'starter' engines - 2-4-2 Columbia's - in several roadnames that are affordable and reliable. Each engine comes with a Lionchief controller and operation is simple. I bought an engine in Southern RR livery because I didn't yet have a Southern engine (or any rolling stock either) and I've always liked that green and gold scheme. The silver smoke box sets it off quite nicely.
There aren't that many controls on the hand-held controller so it's not option intensive and the instructions included with the engine are clear and concise. With these command-&-control set-ups one turns the transformer on all the way so the track is receiving max power. The instructions on how fast to move, direction, etc, are all controlled by the on-board circuitry. I like all the features but for my money the best one is the crew talk. By pressing the "announcements" button (bottom middle button with microphone icon) you get three short announcements. 'Short' is the key word here - you don't wait a half hour for 'crew yammer' to stop before you move on out! The engine smokes but I've noticed this is not a real strong smoker. You should only put four drops of smoke oil in the smoke stack and it'll go strong for a bit then peter off. But overall I'm still happy with the engine. I reall have enjoyed playing with this thing! Enjoy! Opa Fritz
I think for the most part we all do it. Do what? Well, we build a train board, lay track, plop down buildings in the middle and call it a day. Somewhere along the way we may add a bit of scenery and a single grade crossing with a road going off the board to the fantasy world beyond. Seldom do I see a layout wherein there is more than one way onto or off the board. This bothered me a little bit as I would sit at the EoT and allow my mind to wander down those rural paths in mid-central Wisconsin. Somehow it didn't seem right that the whole look of my little enclave was a dead-end. I wanted a way for travelers to come into the area and head on out again without having to doo a U-turn. The solution turned out to be simple. Right next to the newly graveled-in parking lot the flagstop station rests on was a space perfectly suited for one of Lionel's single-lane plastic grade crossings. All I had to do was cut down the crossing so that it would fit the space, and slice out a section of the Marx roadbed track to accomodate the crossing. Now motorists can enter and leave the area relatively unimpeded (unless of course traffic at the farmer's market ties things up some). Enjoy! Opa Fritz
Welll, the big news of late is that my Edge of Town micro-layout made it into the pages of Classic Toy Trains! I have the cover photo as well as a feature article! Whoopee! LOL When I was a young 'un and into HO scale model railroading, I marveled over the layouts of people like John Allen, Jim Findley, Earl Smallshaw, John Olson, and Malcolm Furlow. Their layouts were stunning and I wanted a big layout like theirs and have it featured in Model Railroader magazine (a Kalmbach Publishing product). Alas, my HO scale mega-layout never came to be, Classic Toy Trains magazine didn't yet exist, and I wasn't into toy trains until much later in life.
Fast forward to 2016 when I dismantled my larger Marxville and Plateau layout and resurrected my small portable layout from its resting place out in The Cave turning it into a permanent display. But that was fine and I enjoyed running trains on a smaller board. By 2019 I had grown tired of its toylike appearance - perhaps my yearning to go back to my HO scale days when detail was king! I didn't want the layout to be micro-detailed like the HO-scalers do, but I wanted it to be more than it was and so I embarked on an evolutionary journey to transform the relatively plain, uninspring train board, into a semblance of a model railroad - albeit with toy trains running on it. The process started in late 2019 and after nearly a year of on-again, off-again work, the layout began to take on the appearance of nicely detailed model railroad. Towards the end of 2020, one of my Y'allTube subscribers (Cody Holmes) mentioned that I should submit some photos to Classic Toy trains - it couldn't hurt! I was expecting perhaps a photo or two to show up in their 'Photo Album' section but in Nov-Dec 2020 after a series of discussions with Roger Carp, Senior Editor at CTT, an extensive questionnaire, and a few extra photos it became apparent that we were aiming for a full fledged article. It was to my great surprise then that a couple of weeks ago I saw the pre-release announcement of the upcomning May 2021 edition featuring my layout AND cover photo. WOW! Was I stoked.
So as it turns out, I did make the pages of a Kalmbach magazine, it just wasn't Model Railroader. AND, not only was it not a mega-layout, but was among the smallest layouts they've ever featured for 3-rail O-gauge trains. Everything worked out in the end. A Big shout-out and Many Thanx to Cody for giving me that nudge to submit photos, and to Roger Carp for working with me to polish up a nicely done article on my tiny Edge of Town layout!
For anyone interested, digital copies can be purchased at Zinio:
While sitting at the Edge of Town layout the other day and pondering what to do next, some 'low hanging fruit' sort of popped into my head. 'Low hanging fruit"? huh? That is to say: easy to get to or easy to work on projects that can be finished up in little time. Welll, I got tired of that billboard sticking up like a sore thumb in the lower left corner of the layout and pulled out my scenicking material. Plopped down some hedges, moved a tree from the lake area over to that corner, applied a couple packages of Woodland Scenics Tufts, some cows, and voilà: instant pasture. Oh, I know it's not a proper pasture. There should be a fence paralleling the track and that wooden fence along the backdrop removed, and a pastoral scene added to the backdrop to make this a more realistic scene, but it'll do for now. I can take the cows off and it simply becomes a fenced in plot of land. Enjoy! Opa Fritz
I pulled out the cows first to see what it might look like.
Then came the hedges, then the tufts, and finally the tree.
I'm okay with this for now and it definitely adds a rural flavor to the layout.
You can see here that if those cows aren't careful, the road crew's gonna have road kill steak for supper! Got the A-1 Steak Sauce guys? LOL
In other EoT news I replaced the Marx uncoupling track on the siding with a regular straight track. Seems that the couplers on Lionel (and other trains) were getting caught on the blade that sticks up
Also, the troublesome postwar manual switch was replaced with a prewar electric switch. I haven't hooked it up to a control button yet.
Had a brain dump. Seems I totally forgot to show you guys what this year's Christmas layout ended up looking like. I posted some in-progress stuff on December 12th but then forgot to do any more. Anywho, here it is: two separate layouts actually, one in "Snow Village' and the other in Tintown. Enjoy! Opa Fritz
Did everyone have a Merry Christmas, Feliz Navidad, Frohe Weinachten, Mele Kalikimaka, Kelemesz Unnepeket? - okay I'm running out of ways to say it here LOL Ours was good. The grandbaby made out like a bandit - Opa Fritz got chocolate hahahahahaha
As one would imagine, work on my Edge of Town (EoT) micro-layout had pretty much come to a halt. What with the Halloween layout, then the Gettysburg set-up, followed by the Christmas layout, the EoT has taken a back seat and I even stated in one of my Christmas layout Y'allTube uploads that nothing would happen until next year. I lied. :-) Anywho, this past week found me with a couple of days in a row with some actual, real life, honest-to-goodness 'me' time! Wow! how did that happen?
I was sitting at the layout running a recent acquisition, a Williams NW-2 lettered for the Wisconsin Central.
Then I got to thinking about the latest project I had been working on (and slow leaking): a 'new' passenger platform for the layout. Until now I have been using a Plasticville Freight Depot (an odd choice of names by Plasticville because the thing looks more like a suburban passenger shelter).
But as small as this is I've been wanting something even smaller, something that hearkens back to my days when I was really into narrow gauge/shortline/branchline type of railroading. So I bought a junker freight depot off of fleaBay and modified it by cutting it down, cutting off legs and re-positioning them. This was where I stopped about 6 weeks ago:
Fast forward to this week and my 'me' time, and I was thinking there was enough time to do some more work on this by adding a new deck (to hide the post holes in the original deck), framing it with 'boards', and distressing the plastic to look like really old beat-up wood. I then pulled out a Plasticville 2-stall outhouse and cut out the middle wall/partion and sanded the back wall. It was glued to the deck and everything given a coat of tan primer.
Funny thing, but when I had the idea for this I was trolling the Internet and found a picture of a real one that looked almost exactly like this (I forgot to save the pic tho) but here are some other inspirations culled from the Net. In rural communities these small platforms could either be flagstop stations, milk platforms, or a combination of the two. I'll be using it in a combination mode.
below photos credited to the Internet!
It's not finished yet but this shot shows the look I'm going after
The Marx news stand was also removed in favor of a much smaller Woodland Scenics news stand.
