After a couple of very busy weeks dealing with house guests, as well as
Hurricane Karin (great time, BTW, especially our day-long visit to
Rick Spano's), the house is finally empty and quiet--even more so now that we're getting snowed in. Perfect excuse to get things done on the layout!
First up, a couple of Creative Executive Decisions.
CED #362: Since the
JCIR is getting locked into an 80s era, the el would have to be nixed. I didn't like the idea of losing it, though, so since the HMR is 30s era, I'm giving it the el. I've added it to the track plan (black lines):
A reference image helped me arrive at this decision. It shows a factory faced by an el, with trucks parked at the freight docks underneath. The industry to the left on Willow Avenue will mimic this scene.
Another similar scene helps reinforce the feeling I'm attempting to capture:
At the lower left corner of the layout, the el will rise sharply from street level, similar to this (although the street level portion likely won't fit):
CED #387: This one might stir up some discussion... I'm seriously tempted to make this a "monochrome" layout--that is, all done in shades of grey, resulting in what amounts to a 3-D black-and-white photograph. It's not an original idea, to be sure, and it will certainly be a challenge--but it surely couldn't be harder to pull off than a dual-era layout. The biggest hurdle will be nailing the greys: they need to all be perfectly identical in color temperature, or else the effect will fail. So I know in advance I'll be mixing a lot of paints, always starting from the same sources.
There's been some progress on structures. In the view above, the large industry at top center is Hills Brothers Coffee, an homage of sorts to the giant Maxwell House Coffee plant that used to dominate the Hoboken skyline.
In the foreground, below, is a factory based
very loosely on the Stahl Soap Company, which still exists and was at one time serviced by the HMR
The path of the former curved siding can easily be seen in the reference image below.
Next up is a hotel and an apartment building. They are DPM kits that have been enlarged to balance the heft of the industries.
One last structure, the gas station (visible to the right in the first pic) was swiped from the JCIR. With the change in era, I decided to use a more modern service station on that layout. The older one originally intended for it fit the space on the HMR perfectly, with no modification needed at all.
My goal is to not have any duplicate structures between the two layouts, save for an apartment building that will utilize the same Reeds Books DPM source kit, since these buildings were ubiquitous throughout all of the towns in the area. I might also use the Atlas Middlesex kit on this layout as well, assuming I can't find a suitable replacement.
