There’s no snooze button for a cat. At least not for ours. I love her inhibition. The sun is rising and so is her hunger levels (the “very real” fear of “What if there really isn’t ever going to ever be anything to eat again?”). Cat fed. Coffee made. Reading? This year’s seventeenth and eighteenth new books are both underway but I couldn’t settle into either and I needed to make something; even if just a drawing.
Over glasses of wine planning sessions we were discussing the future of the apartment and how we’ll use this space and the broader future for this lifestyle. Our work life remain a pulse of change and that continues to modify the way our lives, well, forgive the pun, work. Last fall, we moved some stuff around to make room for two dedicated offices in the apartment and now, we’re reexamining what we did. We think we can consolidate the separate spaces back into one. Last fall, the decision to open up some new space in the living room also punctuated the life of The Most Recent Shove and, this morning, I wondered if this next choice could also invite A Next Shove?
Because I just can’t get 16mm scale models out of my head, the first design for this space was just an indulgence in wagonloads of clay, sand, or whatever it is that would be fun to play with in little Binnie or Slaters skips behind a Ruston or Lister locomotive*.
A lightweight length of two foot gauge track wanders around three walls of the space that the ad for our apartment calls “office” space. We decorate the walls of this space with posters and think that maybe adding a model railway here provides an aesthetic introduction into the home you’re walking into when you come inside. The large size of the models certainly helps with that: Not just “hey they have trains!” but models large enough that “you should play with this” and “why not? you’re a grown up, you work hard, why aren’t you allowed to play trains when you damn well want to?”
One turnout. We use this as a switchback into an unloading (or maybe it’s a loading) building. There’s always some kind of gimmick in my plans and this one is that there’s a diamond crossing inside this building too. The diamond is completely concealed inside the building and it allows the mainline to traverse through this space and also allows the actual siding inside the building to be longer than it otherwise could be. The roof of this building is complete but dense foliage on both sides of the structure hopefully obscure the fact that a train busts through the sides of it.
Elsewhere along the track I use trees and like foliage to direct attention along the root and inform the viewer where to look. These elements, in this scale, are massive. This works.
The shelf is very narrow. It absolutely can not be wider than a foot deep and I want it narrower if possible. The face of this “shelf” will flow as naturally as the track itself as it wanders through the grass between where something happens and where something else happens.
Categories: How I think, one 16mil, one magazine unsorted content
Prince Street 
Nice! How’s the Lister coming along?
Short answer: it’s not.
Long answer starts with “but I sure wish it was” and includes “because I love it”.
I vividly recall the excitement at the dawn of the new year. I had rebuilt most of the Lister, from the ground up, to correct a few opinions I had rendered in my styrene parts. I got so far as to even fit the motor and drive chains and run it (albeit remotely on a leash instead of by radio as intended) and that was sort of where things stalled – no pun there since, well, battery control…
I realise that by choosing to make the Lister model following exact 1:19 scale has made it just a bit too small to hide the LocoRemote or battery inside it. It’s here I settle into the humility of finally seeing why the IP Engineering kit (that I also have; that is also a wonderful albeit unfinished thing) is a bit larger than scale size: everything fits inside it a bit better. I just didn’t appreciate that at the time.
I got myself into a loop of not knowing what to do, getting busy with the rest of life, and facilitating the near-eternal postponement of the Lister project.
Even as I write this I can feel how much I want to correct this pattern and finish a locomotive in this scale enough to run it. I can appreciate the value of that accomplishment.
I need to get back to the workbench.
…and that’s how?
Chris
How about just popping a DCC decoder and speaker into it?
Don’t laugh but this is where I wish you were closer. I could sure use some help. I can wire that decoder. I even have the decoder.
but
pickups
When the rebuilt model was first powered it ran on track power. I had pickups in place made from phosphor-bronze wire but I couldn’t seem to get them to stay in contact with the wheels. I feel like there’s something obvious about their design and placement I just don’t know but what I was doing wasn’t working.
motor
I like making lists and that’s really the only reason this item is here but I would need a different motor from the 3.7v one that’s currently in the model. I have a lovely Kato motor here and assume I could just make a bushing to bulk up its output shaft from the 1mm it is to the much larger diameter hole in the pinion on the chain I’m using to propel this machine.
DCC would be fine
Since I have all the DCC gear already here it would seem better to try DCC. I could find room in this small model for a “keep alive” capacitor probably too.
I just need to sit down and give this all a try.
Chris
I like the free flowing baseboard edge varying in width. I could see the layout being treated in the same way as the Totternhoe Mineral railway. With the shelves being painted black and the layout sections being carefully illuminated by spotlights. There would be much joy to be had from shuttling a loco and single skip up and down the line as per a real industrial line (like Far Ings) loading them at one end and tipping them at the other.
I completely agree on all points. In such a large scale, it invites an up close and very intimate relationship with the models. In a way, I want a layout that has only this single line of track so I can spend my time watching just as you describe. I can imagine my little trains bouncing their way back and forth off in search of a bit more (whatever it is we dig out and dump into these skips).
I have a couple of videos of Totternhoe (we probably have all bookmarked them) and I was rewatching one earlier today. That’s just such a fantastic presentation and I feel such a connection to it. Certainly, if I may be so bold, ascribe my vision to that aesthetic. Because my layouts all live on shelves their own “benchwork” doesn’t ever need to have any structural value so their forms can flow loosely across the back of a shelf like a milky splash of fresh tea running away from its cup.
Chris