Part 3: The Details

ITS ALL IN THE DETAILS

Many of the ideas used are basic and can be applied pretty easily, whether wiring concepts, table construction or scenery techniques. But, for me, I wanted to go to another level. There are many little touches that you can add to a layout that really bring it to life, they can add a little humor and set it apart from others. I call these the “details” phase. And the neat thing is that you can keep adding these long after the basic layout is done and you are happily running trains.

Some of these take but a little time, others take more (don’t try painting 2 - 300 figures at one sitting!). But each project adds a real dose of character to your layout. Most are pretty self explanatory and you may have different categories, but here are examples of some I have so far.

Fill Those Windows
Fortunately the availability of building kits in O gauge is much better than it was just a few years ago. What this means is that there are a lot of buildings with vacant storefronts staring at me every time the residents of the Seligman and Paulden Lines wander down Route 66 in Seligman or drive home through Paulden.

I must admit I am not patient enough to super detail building interiors. In many of the buildings all I have done is to install lighting, and using colored construction paper, made window shades and fake interior walls to block off some of the light. But those storefronts still look awfully empty, especially when lit.

So, with Nick’s Cafe in Paulden, I played around with an idea for what I would call interior detailing light. It has worked so well, I am applying it to may of the remaining empty storefronts. Basically, I construct a false interior that is small enough to slip inside the main building. It works because most building kits are either open on the bottom, or have a floor that can be mounted separately. The interior contains lighting and enough detail so it shows well through the store windows, and uses some tricks to make it look more detailed than it really is.  And a nice benefit is that the projects can be done on the workbench and installed later.

Nick’s Cafe is a Downtown Deco building about 4 by 8 inches. To make the interior, I took a piece of 1/8” Masonite and cut it so it just fit cleanly inside the outer walls of the building. A false back wall and a little shorter than the height of the roof is glued just ahead of the outer rear wall. This leaves a chase in which wires are run from the lights down through the floor and to the layout wiring.

A post and a beam run from the top of the rear wall to near the front of the building. Interior lights are hot glued to the beam. I use 12 volt grain of wheat bulbs for all my buildings.

When this has all dried, I went to my computer and ink jet color printer to make up some patterns for the floor and walls. This is really simple, just take the graphics part of your word processing program and make rectangles the shape of the floor, side and rear walls. On Nick’s Cafe, I then used the same graphic program to add a doorway to the kitchen and a pass through for food delivery.

Glue a few pieces of furniture to the floor. I used a couple of tables and dressers from an inexpensive set of plastic dollhouse furniture that I found at the local hobby shop. Finally, glue on a few sitting figures, a waiter or cook.  Slide the unit into the building shell, wire up the lights and watch for the magic as this simple project brings the building to life!

Signs and streets
They are everywhere. But if you just limit yourself to commercially available items, you are missing a great way to personalize your layout. With streets, they need the addition of centerlines, pedestrian crosswalks, stop bars, parking stripes, etc. This was done with 1/16” automobile striping tape in white and yellow.

I like a variety of roadway signs. For my Route 66 town of Seligman, I just had to have correct Arizona Route 66 signs. Nowhere could I find an O gauge Route 66 sign, let alone one marked for Arizona. To the rescue comes the computer. I did find a neat web site showing all sorts of highway signs.  Lucky me, the web site was hosted by a fellow Arizonan, so many of the names were local. I was able to copy many signs, speed limit, curves, stop signs, etc. I then pasted them onto a single page on the computer (making several copies of frequently used signs) and printed them onto an unperforated sheet of Avery label paper. I pasted signs onto a piece of properly sized and shaped styrene and glued them onto posts, ready for placement on the layout.

But the Arizona Route 66 proved more difficult as the web site didn’t have one. It came from a lucky find, I was browsing in the real Seligman and happened on a postcard with nothing but a highway sign - for Arizona Route 66! So to the computer and scanner, and we now have the correct sign for the modeled Seligman.

Similarly, almost every building on the layout has its own custom made business sign. Most are done the same way as the highway signs, although for some I print them on regular paper and glue it onto a cardboard or wood backing. Some have also been done as decals where there are transparent areas such as where a sign is painted onto a building.

Finally, every town on the layout has a railroad sign with the town’s name on it. These are done for visiting operators so they can identify each town or siding. Real railroads did the same thing for the same reason, so operating personnel not only know where they are, but can communicate with others.

People

We all have people on our layouts. It has been part of trains forever. Times are good on the S&P lines and you can’t imagine how many people it takes to populate the sidewalks of several cities, line station platforms, fill the automobiles and buses on busy streets, and fill all those seats in passenger cars.

I have probably used every source of people available, from old Plasticville figures (many times cutting and reorienting limbs to reduce the number of little girls jumping rope) to commercial painted ones such as made by K Line, Model Power or Life Like as well as unpainted figures bought in lots of 100’s. One caution.  I found that many figures are made in a 1:43 proportion. These look oversized when next to many 1/48th scale buildings, vehicles.

When visiting some really great layouts, I noticed almost every one uses scenes to bring interest beyond the trains themselves. A scene is just something happening that is instantly recognizable to the viewer. It may be composed of almost anything, but usually tells a wordless story or presents a recognizable image. Let me describe a few scenes on the S&P.

Cop giving a ticket. Here I bought a Diecast Direct Arizona Highway Patrol car and added a flashing LED to replace the original red light. Of course, the cop has chosen to pull over the blonde driving her convertible down Route 66.

Seligman street scene. I looked at downtown Seligman as a scene and tried to position cars and pedestrians so that it had the feel of a busy commercial street. Street furniture like the mail box, telephone poles, etc come from many sources while sidewalk joints are simply thin pencil lines drawn on the painted Masonite sidewalk.

Covered wagon. Dumb, perhaps, but hopefully also a delightful surprise. Now, most of the rest of the layout is pretty straight forward and there are not many covered wagons still plying the back roads of Arizona. But this is a cute little die cast toy, maybe two inches long, that I tucked between some trees toward the background. Around the corner are two Canadian Mounted Police overlooking the trains going by below. At least the Jaguar, the skunk and the 10 foot tall turkey were relegated to the prewar layout.

Aguila’s Lionel Factory. This scene wasn’t really designed to be such, but draws about as many comments from visitors as any other on the layout. It just seems to work but is nothing more than the parking lot in front of the Lionel factory in Aguila.

The scene has all elements in it, landscaping with hedges and flower gardens, fence, flagpole - both of these courtesy of Plasticville - striping on the parking lot, a couple of classic cars and two executives chatting at the doorway. It just all seemed to fit well together. Unfortunately, nobody seems to notice the joke on the Lionel domestic production factory sign. Despite announcement of moving all production overseas, we are fortunate to have found the one remaining Lionel domestic production facility in Aguila, Arizona (don't tell anybody!).

Country shacks. I had finished a couple of craftsman building kits for a house and some small shacks and needed to find locations for them. A corner of the layout was going to be just a wooded transition area from the backdrop forest to a track rounding the corner. Then I thought these buildings might make a good rural settlement. So, they got a dirt road, some fences and trees. The largest house has two good old boys sitting on the porch, drinking a beer with their old ‘56 pickup sitting on blocks to the side of the house.

Fox hunt. This shows how you can blend unlikely sources and have them work. Mary Jane’s passion is horse and carriage driving, so anything not trains in our household is horse related. One year while at York, we saw a reproduction Britains fox hunt scene. The figures are just barely three dimensional and are brightly colored. But the scene seems to work. It is right outside of Paulden and includes a groom with a horse hitched to a dog cart, waiting to carry the hounds and their master home from the hunt. To give it a bit of life, note that the fox has outsmarted all but one of the dogs.

Animation
We have seen animation scenes on layouts for years; the fellow flying a kite, painting a house, the highway roller smoothing a new road. But I had never tried one, feeling they were often pretty artificial looking or repetitious of the same animation on other layouts using the same product.

But Mary Jane felt differently, she really likes them.  Then we started noticing really well done scenes by Willard Animations at York. So, a couple of years ago we took a couple of them home - a rabbit hunter and a track repair welder.

The secret I discovered was to blend the scene into the layout to it doesn’t look like an addition. And I have to admit it, they really worked and both are instant crowd pleasers. In fact, “regulars” when bringing friends over will often go over to the rabbit hunter and demonstrate the animation for their friends. So, there will be more. Both Lionel and K Line have added beautifully done scenes to their recent catalogs. The new Lionel lumber jacks arrived at York just in time to come home and is now operating and fully set into the layout.

Using Styrofoam scenery makes it easy to place animations into your layout. Willard Animations come in boxes which must be attached to the layout framework, but those from Lionel and K Line are shallow enough to be set right onto it by cutting away the Styrofoam or Celotex to hide the bases.

What is Next?
Is the layout done? No, not at all. There are several major projects left to do. I have finished building a stretch of freeway that Mary Jane always thought would look neat. The subway station finally got built and I am now working on scratch building a model of the real station that used to be at Seligman.

What is more, the first major change has been made to the layout. We have decided that since I am having so much fun with the high rail layout, the S gauge layout was taken down and a mountain division for the high rail layout was added to its table top.

It has lots of curves, mountain grades, a coal mining branch line to load the coal cars destined for the rotary tipple at the Douglas power plant, and lots of mountain scenery.  Mary Jane has always liked the look of scenery stretching up from the floor to mountain tops, now she has that.

That has been keeping me really busy as it is almost, but not quite done. Yes, they really are correct when they say, “a layout is never done”.

A Postwar Layout
The principal layout in the train room is the around the wall, high rail layout built to be as realistic as I can make it.  But, despite its neat looks and operation, it still does not complete the toy train experience. What is missing is the sound of my original #2026 whizzing around sharp curves, blowing its air whistle and stopping to dump its load of logs. For the sake of realism, the hi rail layout doesn’t have a cattle pen, a gateman or my #175 rocket launcher. But I can’t put away the joy of operating trains in classic tinplate style.

Thus, when sketching out the plan for the layouts, I left some room at the end of the return loop in Douglas for a second level, a purely tinplate layout. Using the freeway to mark the transition between it and the high rail layout, the postwar layout was built as an L, eight feet on a side and four feet wide, covering only 48 square feet. Even though the finish and appearance is pure 1950’s tinplate, it shares the same photo backdrop as the rest of the layout and blends in well with it.

Within this space, I was able to fit seven 022 switches, three uncoupling tracks, and more than a dozen accessories, signals, crossings, etc. There are six different routes a train can take, three in each direction.  The controls are pure 1950’s. A LW transformer runs the trains and a SW transformer powers the accessories Banks of 022 controllers, uncoupling buttons and the #175 rocket launch controller complete this very traditional control system

I have always liked the military and space accessories of the late 50s, so the tinplate layout features them and the cartoon version of traditional accessories that Lionel produced in the mid 90s. Now the seriousness of the Seligman and Paulden lines has its counterpoint in rockets blowing up ammunition dumps, Wiley Coyote trying to grab the Roadrunner as he leaps out of the crossing shack and aliens popping their heads up from box cars. The new atomic reactor prepares fuel pellets for shipment out from the nuclear waste transfer station of the 1950’s.

Now, when we have visitors and they finish viewing and listening to the spectacle of six prewar O and Standard Gauge loops roaring with trains and they have used the CAB 1 for a run of the Super Chief from through the Arizona scenery from Douglas to Seligman and back, we wrap up a visit by going over to the postwar layout.

It is important that they can help by letting me know when, prior to launch, that the astronaut is properly sealed in his rocket. Then it is their job to launch the helicopter off its platform to photograph the rocket which just lifted off the #175 pad. And if they really get into the mood, they can fire off Nike missiles to blow up the hidden ammo dump rather than the nuclear reactor which would blow up all of Lionelsville!

Serious, no. Silly, probably. But it sure is fun!

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