The Union Tank Car Dome

An interesting 30 minute documentary on the Union Tank Car facilities outside Baton Rouge, LA. A 384 foot diameter geodesic dome was constructed with the assistance of Buckminster Fuller to service 50 foot tank cars in a unique circular work area that sported a central turntable which provided great flexibility in servicing multiple cars at once. A car would enter the dome and move to the center onto the turntable and be spun around to an available work bay.

Previous facilities were rectangular which restricted servicing to a linear path where only a few cars could be worked on at a time and a car had to be finished before the next one could be started on. The circular arrangement allowed many cars to be attended to without dependence on finishing any one before another to move cars in and out of the facilities. The downfall of the facility was the introduction of the 60 foot tank car, which did not fit on the turntable.

The documentary presents the conceptual framework of geodesic domes, the design and construction of the Union Tank Car dome, a nicely illustrated diagram of operations near the 4:30 mark (if you are in a hurry), and the ultimate demolition by the Kansas City Southern Railway. When built in 1958, the dome was the largest clear-span structure in the world and was a model for thinking outside the box and inside a dome. A novel and beautiful solution melding an understanding of the car servicing process with a unique an efficient structural system.

Station Stops

While passing through Temple, Texas on a Sunday recently, I took a little detour to see the Katy and Santa Fe stations.

Katy Temple Station (abandoned)

ATSF Temple Station and current Amtrak Station

ATSF Temple Station

Both are great brick structures. They evoke confidence and display a respect for the business of railroading and the customers they served. Definitely worthy subjects for modeling and visiting.

The ATSF station holds an Amtrak office and the Temple Railroad and Heritage Museum. There were a handful of people waiting to get on the Amtrak, but I couldn't immediately understand how they got to the train through the iron fences. I'll have to ask someone. The museum was closed, so I'll have to get up there this summer at some point to see the inside.

I wonder what is going on with the Katy station. It sits unoccupied with a few broken windows, but it is in pretty good shape. It would make a wonderful restaurant, architect's office, or what about another train museum?

Courthouse Part 3

So I finally got to see the McClennan County Courthouse in situ at the Mayborn Museum at Baylor University in Waco. I was on the way back from visiting a client in Northeast Texas, and I was able to take a few minutes to make a half mile detour from the interstate to see my handiwork from several years ago.

The layout is in a high traffic area of the museum and gets lots of attention. I was a little surprised by the size - I had expected it to be a lot larger and stuffed into a room of its own. Instead it is small-ish and free standing so you can walk all around it. Separate loops allow for continuous action on different levels. As it turns out, I could have made the Courthouse a lot larger - to actual scale. That's a little disappointing, because I had created scale drawings from photographs to start with, then was told to make to particular reduced dimensions. A larger model would have fit fine, and it would have been a real show piece. I think it looks good as it is, and it kind of fits the more cute/toylike oeuvre of layout and museum overall. I think it holds up well as a representation, but I would like to attempt a more faithful scratch building project that is more about precise. All in all, a good project, good results, and I think it fits and adds to positively to the layout.

Car Repair Shed

Floor is old concrete with some mud weathering smudged around.

Just finished an N scale car repair shed kit by Heljin. Simple kit, but I spent a lot of time on the weathering to give it a heavily rusted exterior. I used mostly Bragdon dark and light rust powders as well as some Poly Scale paint and Tamiya weathering "make up" system.

This is all Bragdon powder on the main surfaces. Only paint used was on floor and trim.

I'm a huge fan of the Bragdon powders, and I was able to use only the powders on the main surface of the corrugated metal siding without painting the pieces first. the original plastic is molded in silver, and the few area that show work fine. The concrete interior floor is painted old concrete with the Tamiya mud applied sparingly to dirty up the place.

I had about 15 pounds of help from Arresto, my scale figure.

I have to be careful and keep an eye out for Arresto when I sit down to work at the workbench. Sometimes he just really wants to help me with a project, and I have to humor him for a few minutes while he helps. He usually harmlessly moves along, but I have to move my paint water, drinks and glue out of the way until he does. The fur he leaves in his wake is especially voluminous in the summer time. Some day I'm going to try to use it as landscaping grass on the layout.

Faller Concrete Mixing Plant

I spent one full day making this concrete mixing plant kit by Faller in N scale. (kit 222195 Betonmischwerk). I will have to say that it has been a while since making a Faller kit, and I was pleasantly reminded about the precision and straight-forward approach of these kits.

[caption id="attachment_114" align="alignnone" width="581" caption="Parts went together really well"][/caption]

The brass sheet was a surprise, and the excellent detail afforded by brass really made this model. The hand rails, ladders and crane boom are all brass. The box illustration  shows the brass unpainted, but I decided to make the handrails and ladders black to better appreciate the detail and to allow the coat of concrete dust to show better. I left the crane boom brass with some dust as it fits in with the pre-colored crane cab pretty well as is.



Blurry photos, ugh. But you can still see that the model turned out pretty well. The kit was pre-colored plastic parts that even had a wash of weathering applied to it. One could get away with simply assembling as it is, but I added a few bits of weathering just to make it pop some more. Mainly a wash of Poly S "Dust" to give the factory a really used, working quality. Perhaps a little heavy-handed, but my experience around gravel and rock operations is that there is always a slight feeling of junk in the back of your throat as you move around places like this from all the dust in the air. Just looking at the model makes me cough a little. :)



The instructions said to tie a knot in the black thread for the bucket cables. I didn't.This is N scale, and I would still be trying to tie the first one... It looks just fine wrapped around with CA holding it in place. There is some gravel in the scoop and the crane is free to rotate. There maybe a mechanish to allow remote control or animation of the crane as there is some sort of holding device under the gravel pits. No mention is made of this in the instructions, though.



I love the ladders and the protective cages. All of the brass is put together with  Zap a Gap CA glue. I could have used some Zip Kicker, as hlding these small parts together for any length of time without moving is difficult, but I had already run to the hobby shop once this weekend, and didn't feel like wasting another 1/2 hour on a trip. I'll get some for the next kit, though!



I love the corrugated siding and the pipes running between silos and building. My guess is that the cement is in the tanks and the gravel is simply scooped into the top of the pit area (there is a small hole right where the building and pits come together), and then the mixing is done inside and loaded onto trucks below the building.  Good industry to have tank cars of cement and gondolas full of gravel delivered with some concrete trucks to haul away the mix. No concrete rail cars, though, as there is no loading mechanism for them.

A fun kit to put together. N scale is sucking me in; I should build something in HO soon!

A couple of N scale structures for hire

I've got a box full of structures to complete for a client in the next few weeks, and I've finished the first two. Both were very nice kits that were easy and enjoyable to put together.



The first is a British weighbridge hut by Ratio Plastic Models. Everything fit well with almost no fuss or bother. I spent almost 2 hours painting the less than one inch long shack with several different colors. A base coat for the stone walls and concrete for the lintels. Then some individual coloring of the stones to provide a non-patterned multi-chromatic wall. I used a brush with about 4 bristles for that. Then a white/cream wet wash for the mortar and some fun with black and earth for weathering and finally some touches of green moss growing around cracks and corners. The roof has a base dark green slate and heavy black weathering. The brass details for door and window were lightly weathered, but the gutters have standing blackish gunk in them.

The other structure is a laser cut wood icehouse from Branchline Trains. Fantastic kit with tight fits and no sanding and very little clean up of parts after picked out of the wood sheets. The 3M backed details is a brilliant idea - I was skeptical before assembling - but in N scale, it makes attaching the tiny items much easier. The only problem I had was with the ladders because the cut outs were so small, they kept scattering and sticking to everything. Minor annoyance for such a nice kit.



I weathered up the tar paper roof a bunch since it is so large and visible to try and give it the same level of detail as the scribed wood siding. I love how the decking turned out after I applied a little antique oak stain from Hallmark Home Decor (from the craft store in a 2 oz squeeze bottle). I scruffed up the wood siding and dry-brushed the siding and decks to bring out some detail and weather them up a bit.

It was almost a full day of work building the two - mainly because of the painting and making a quick run to the hobby shop for supplies.

Courthouse Part 2

Compromises for compression and time

A couple of detail shots of the courthouse reveal some great classical motifs. This stone work with the architrave, engaged pilasters and Corinthian columns are fantastic - but hard to carve in a reasonable amount of time. The model has always been thought of as a background piece that lends flavor to the museum layout, so I swallowed my fanatical tendencies towards exactitude in design and execution in order to get the model done without going any more crazy than necessary.



So the main features with as accurate flavor as I could get out of a chisel was the goal. A student of mine started the process on the side panel doing a tremendous job at transferring the depths of the original to the scale model. She nailed the overall feel of the detailing so that there was no doubt what the building was, even though several bays were omitted and prominent details like the capitals had to be generalized.

Tools

A jewelers scroll saw and wood hand saws were used to cut the blocks of Balsa Foam to size. (A piece of cardboard was used as a drop cloth to make cleanup easier.) I used several different Dremel tool bits to grind down the major shapes, and smaller carving bits to do some of the details. Chisels were employed to make the cuts and evacuate material for the relief items like the windows and pediment as well as various dental picks and odd tools that had different sized pointy ends. A metal ruler was used as a guide to scrape the straight lines of the rustication and main features with a sharp pick.The detailing in the architrave was accomplished by cutting a round wood dowel in half and sanding to size, then just poking the end into the Balsa Foam (see below). The image above shows the two stages of doing the side walls as well as the roughed out dome.

I jumped in to complete the model after the first side was done, and tried to do as good a job as my student. (I came pretty close, but I think her efforts were better.) Her side is shown below:

Messy work

As you can start to see in the lower left of the above image, working with Balsa Foam is pretty messy. The material is very fine and the shavings are powder, which means they float around like orange dust. Wearing a mask when doing any sanding is a must, and don't have a fan blowing on your work surface. There is still a fine layer of this orange dust covering everything in my workroom, and it will take some time to get it off all the books, and equipment in the room. It cleans up really well, but you should wipe any metal objects fairly promptly to keep it from rusting. I had to sharpen the chisels once during the process because of the grittiness of the material. Next time I plan on using some plastic sheeting hung from the ceiling around my work area to keep the dust better contained.

Handcarved Courthouse Model Part 1

Custom model for the Mayborn Museum in Waco, Texas

I was asked by a friend of mine to construct a model of the courthouse for an HO scale model railroad layout at the children's museum in Waco, Texas. The layout depicts Waco, and has several loops of running trains with representations of several of the buildings in town. The courthouse, which would measure about four feet long at actual HO scale, had a spot of about 11 1/2" x 8" reserved for it. Heavy compression led to a caricature model, as I call it, that has all the elements of the original courthouse without the heavy footprint. A perfect strategy for layouts on a diet.



First a drawing was made of two faces, the front and a side (shown above). This was done in Adobe Illustrator by tracing over a photograph and then scaling it down to fit the footprint. The third of three sides was the same except for the addition of stairs and an entry door, which was added on the fly without a drawing. The fourth side is left open, as the model will be up against a backdrop about 10 feet from the viewer. This was then overlaid onto a 1" thick piece of Balsa Foam II, and the drawing transfered with a pounce wheel. The Balsa Foam can be acquired from Dick Blick's art supplies among other places. It is a Phenolic foam which has no memory characteristics and will hold an impression so it can be "dented". It is flame retardant and self extinguishing - just in case. It accepts all water based and most solvent based glues and paint finishes, and it comes in several hardnesses depending on your application. I used the 12lb density, but next time I will try the softer 7lb density, which should make carving easier.

Next posts will show some progress shots and discuss techniques used to carve and finish the Balsa Foam.