Missouri, Kansas, & Texas Railroad along the Missouri River by Cathead - 1/87 (HO) scale - model railroad with steamboat

[Canute]

Good idea, bracing the walls of this kit. I brace walls in wood, plastic, plaster and resin. The bracing increases the available gluing area, along with the obvious strengthening. 

Yes, Blair Line makes some nice kits. Is that house the start of the "wrong side of the tracks"? 😄

[Keith Black]

11 minutes ago, Canute said:

Is that house the start of the "wrong side of the tracks"? 

 Hey, get off my grass! 

[Cathead]

1 hour ago, Canute said:

Is that house the start of the "wrong side of the tracks"? 😄

That's pretty much where that phrase comes from, right? The fact that railroad lines so often divided communities and helped create distinctly different districts based on income, class, race, etc.? Certainly I'm using that as a subtle visual cue here.

[Cathead]

OK, it's been over a month since I updated this, past time to share the small bit of progress made. This will be two posts; the first one covering the latest building.

 

This one is a small laser-cut kit from Berkshire Valley models, which I modified to fit my scene. It's meant to go against the backdrop next to the scratchbuilt Inman & Sons, but the kit is deeper than the space I have, so I needed to chop some length off the kit version. Below, you see the original roof & floor with the walls shortened to the length I needed.

Assembling the walls and floor after airbrushing:

The fancy false front, built up of thin layers of laser-cut wood, pre-airbrushed to different shades. And one of the side walls with light weathering.

I wanted a basic interior for this one, even though it's a backdrop building, because the front windows are so large. Since this sits right behind the depot, my vision is that this is a basic trackside eatery/bar serving passengers, train crews, etc. So for the interior I mocked up a few tables and a bar. These aren't painted yet in the photo below.

And here are a couple shots of the finished building, with strong light so you can see into the interior. I did just enough for the shapes to be visible and hint at their purpose, I don't intend to light this internally or otherwise go overboard. 

This is roughly where it goes, behind the depot. This will also get its own base, and there will be a planked sidewalk running in front of both buildings, since we're still in the muddy-street era of American small-town architecture. You can see examples of these in the historic photos.

In later years this would be considered a diner, but that word hadn't come into routine use in 1900. Instead, this would probably have been considered a tavern, and that's what I'm going to go with. I don't have a reference for a real name in this case, so I'm trying to decide whether to go with the generic Rocheport Tavern, or come up with something more poetic or creative.

 

In the following post I'll cover a scenic development.

 

[Cathead]

I also solved a long-standing scenic issue. I really haven't been satisfied with the color of the dirt/gravel roads in town, but hadn't found a solution. I want them to have the same grey/tan color as the surrounding bedrock, but still look like fine material. Railroad ballast is roughly the right color, but too coarse and uniform. I've played with other purchased scenic ground covers but none are the right color or stand out enough from the surrounding terrain. I finally hit on the solution, literally, by accident.

 

I had collected some chunks of limestone from along the real right of way, intending to crush them for coarse rock debris at the base of the bluffs along the right of way. But as I was hand-crushing these samples, I realized that the limestone was actually powdering quite nicely in addition to forming coarser rubble. So I made a point of finely crushing some of this material, then sieving it out to separate the rubble from the powder. The latter was perfect for spreading as extra-fine road material and also had just about the right color (of course!). 

Here's what the new road surfaces look like. The right grey/tan shade, similar to but distinct from the railroad ballast, and finer in texture. Also stands out from the surrounding land without being too bright.

A few more shots at different angles:

 

I'm definitely pleased with this and it's infinitely renewable with just some healthy exercise effort.

 

You might notice two more foundations in the shot above; I built them to match their intended buildings, glued them down, and then worked scenery material up to blend them in. This gives me somewhere to set buildings without having to be super-careful about working wet scenery material right up against carefully built wooden buildings. Here's a closeup of the elevator's new foundation.

 

I'll do most of the rest of the buildings this way too. Doing this lets me move forward on some scenery work I'd been holding off on, until I got foundations properly in place.

 

Finally, here's a fun update showing the arrival of a late birthday present.

Although I'm obviously focused on 1900, this line was operational into the mid-1980s, when trains were very different. I'm also a fan of the MKT's late-era yellow and green paint scheme, and as a geologist would very much enjoy running modern(ish) coal trains one day. So a late birthday present was an MKT SD40-2, which the railroad specifically purchased for unit coal train service. These never actually operated through Rocheport, because (a) the railroad didn't haul unit coal on this line and (b) the track wasn't up to standard for these large 6-axle locomotives. But I'm indulging myself in some alternate history so that, down the road when more mainline is completed, I can watch MKT coal trains roll through here. Given that the Union Pacific tracks on the other side of the river still host unit coal trains to this day, I feel quite justified in this little departure from reality.

 

It's also pretty fun to be able to see 80 years of railroad history nose-to-nose! And as this unit is also sound-equipped, it adds quite the different tone to the layout to hear a loud diesel blast and engine rumble in contrast to the shrill whistle and gentler puffing of the steamers. I should acknowledge the Katy Railroad Historical Society here, which worked with the manufacturer to produce a special limited run of Katy-specific diesels for members to purchase, including this one.

 

It's a fun twist, and all of these hobbies at their heart are supposed to be fun. I hope you had fun reading these updates, and thank you for your patience with my intermittent updates.

 

[Keith Black]

 You had greater success with your material coloration issue than I did, Eric. Great looking road surface in both color and texture. 

[Canute]

This scene looks great, Eric. I like your adding the tavern interior. Will you do up figures? The differing sizes and colors looks spot on. Love your work.

[Cathead]

Ken, no figures in the tavern for now. It's too obscure and figures are expensive. I'd rather feature them where they're more visible. I left the roof detachable so I can change my mind someday.

 

As for the differing colors, that actually raises a point I left out but can address: thinking about the color palette for different parts of this scene. While buildings in this era could certainly be colorful, I wanted to think about how to compose the scene in a way that would influence viewers. For example, I already talked about three subtle "zones" of town; the prosperous west side (no buildings yet built), the workmanlike depot area (most buildings now built), and the lower-income southeast side down along the floodplain on the "far side" of the tracks (one building now built).

 

Another part of that is choosing colors. If you look carefully, you'll see that the buildings in the depot area all share a compatible reddish-yellowish-grey palette. This was quite deliberate as it ties them all together in a district. I didn't want, say, a bright blue building clashing with other buildings there and standing out. Since the depot was set as the railroad's yellow/green scheme, this also sets the non-railroad buildings subtly apart from the depot while still not clashing with it. Inman & Sons stands out a little, but not in a clashing way that it would if it were, say, light blue. 

 

My intention is that all the "far side" buildings will be an even more muted dull white/grey/raw wood palette, to emphasize their lower-income status and again to help that district subtly stand apart (and emphasize the transition between it and the depot area).  Whereas the prosperous west-side district will have brighter colors (clean white farm houses, redder barns, brighter-colored storefronts, probably some nice blue). So you have this visual transition all the way across town in both design and color palette of structures that helps subtly tell a visual story about the economics of even a small town. Just to be clear, as I reread that sentence, I don't mean that in a political way, just in a "that's how it really was" way and I think it makes the scene more interesting by dividing it up into mini-scenes that both the viewer's eye, and the trains, pass through even in this little diorama.

 

The final point is that, since this is set in late fall / early winter, too many bright colors would contrast with the general muted end-of-season color palette. So I'm making all sorts of behind the scenes decisions to help the entire scene "feel" right, not just look right.