I guess I should provide a little background about where I'm heading with this project.
Many thousands of years ago, in a basement far, far away, my Dad would pack is family off to church on the Sunday before Thanksgiving... (he wouldn't go himself, because as he declared "I haven't sinned this week") and he would have a few hours to himself to unbuckle the elaborate system of eyehooks and ratchet straps that held 2-1/2 sheets of 3/4" plywood to the ceiling in the laundry room. As the holidays were drawing near, and as we lived in a Baltimore rowhouse, this ritual was as predictable as the basement sewer backing up when it rained.
By the time we had been properly washed in the Blood of the Lamb, and forgiven and absolved of whatever atrocities a 12 year old boy and his older brother could dream up during the week, the Old Man had assembled the saw horses, laid out the "train boards", and was busily unpacking boxes of buildings, train cars, slot cars, trees, villagers, cows and street signs that would populate our basement club room for the next 60 days.
The boards were just that. Boards. 3x4" x 4' x 8' sheets of plywood (one was cut in half to represent the suburbs) simply laid across the tops of a few old wooden sawhorses purloined from the Candler Building workshop sometime in the 1950s. (you'll be pleased to know that two of these now reside at my house and are presently holding up the metal break I use to trim our soffits...) But no fancy L girders, no lightweight framing, no spline roadbeds. Just cork glued to plywood, with track nailed to the cork. HO scale, by the way, for those of you taking notes at home.
Each board had it's own loop of track. The original was the most elaborate. A long oval, a couple of switches that formed more of a circle halfway up. This was the "belt line" that surrounded the busy village, comprised primarily of Vollmer and Faller German style buildings. When Dad was in the service in the early 50s, rather than Korea, he was shipped off to Munich to, as he glibly put it, "Defend the Beer Halls for Democracy." This gave him a tender spot for architecture offered up in the colorful boxes that lined the narrow shelves of MB Klein on North Gay Street.
The second full panel was a simple oval, though as memory serves, it may have had a siding at one end of the loop. Dad was something of a free spirit, so he didn't work from a published plan that one can go back and reference... In earlier iterations, this panel was placed perpendicular to the other, forming a "T". Despite this creative use of real estate, there was no effort to connect the two routes, sort of a cardinal rule of the Christmas Garden ethos. Later though, after the introduction of the aforementioned "suburban" square, the main panel was elevated above the second panel by about 6" (perhaps the thickness of several World Book Encyclopedias used as shims on the saw horses) creating a tunnel and the opportunity to run to Klein's to pick up that wonderful new invention "Mountain Paper."
The brilliant scientists at Life Like had come up with a way to impregnate kraft paper with a plaster slurry that was flexible enough for the product to be rolled up in a tube, like wrapping paper, for ease of marketing. Then when installed, you would crinkle it and trim it to fit the gap you were hoping to hide, then spray it with water to activate the plaster just long enough to form a more rigid surface. The paper was printed with blotches of brown, tan, gray and green, so it was natural enough to stand on its own, but it really added a sharp angle of realism to glue chunks of faded lychen... you know the kind, gray-green, crumbly, and probably should have been thrown out last year... to represent the lush foliage of the Rhine valley.
So this new board featured a smaller town, with that summer stock theater barn (if you were in grade school during the Nixon Administration you know the one) and a genuine House Afire complete with a water pumping fire truck and a simulated flickering light inside, and best of all, a parade on Main Street. Dad hand painted 76 trombones, and 101 coronets right behind. (The marching band is also squirreled away in a box in my tender care as well) My brother and I would argue over which Hot Wheels cars would carry the Grand Marshall and the Farm Queen.
The final piece at the right end, The Suburbs, was a 4x4 square that had several contemporary style houses and an A&P grocery store that my brother Mark had built from scratch as a project for his Junior High drafting class. I liked this scene the best, because Dad had built up the scenery a little bit to put the houses on little rises, with cool sloped driveways... extra fun for us Hot Wheels drivers. The hills were layered up plaster, probably wall patch leftover from 100 unfinished improvement projects, and this panel weighed a ton, despite its size. On this was a simple circle of track, and again, set at a slightly higher elevation so the main loop could pass through a tunnel at one corner, and the elevated housing development creating a wonderful cut at the side that one could easily imagine being filled with rusty shopping carts and broken televisions for the train to pass.
What made the whole thing indelible in my mind, though, was when the lights went out. Using the best available technology of the day, old strings of Christmas tree lights, Dad had meticulously surveyed each piece of real estate, located and drilled a hole big enough for a couple of wires and a small lightbulb to pass through, and wired it together with a combination of black friction tape, magic, and cigar smoke.
Over the years we added off the rack street lamps, and finally even a dimmer switch and soft blue background lighting along the wall. My god, the hair is standing up on the back of my neck now just thinking about it.
Did you notice I have hardly mentioned the trains yet?
The low line through the small town with the parade featured a Southern Railway SD-24, an Atlas model made by Roco. It was given to my dad by Phil Provens, the Washington District sales manager of the Southern Railway, who after one of our Christmas parties pointed out that there was a critical gap in our fleet. This engine replaced an old PRR F unit, probably a Mantua or some other ancient name, which had a full metal frame and a faulty motor. The main level around the Big City featured the Royal Blue. The big Blue Pacific lettered for the B&O pulled a string of Tyco streamliners, which was full of joyous passengers silhouetted in black against the window glass. How I envied them, although the flickering cabin lights might have given me a migraine.
The Suburban line was home to the Seaboard Coast Line's Bicentennial U-Boat, festooned in red, white and blue, with the road number 1776. The Old Man did add the matching caboose (a slightly off Santa Fe type, but who was splitting hairs at my age?) but didn't see the series of Bicentennial freight cars as a good investment.
Toward the end of its run, we added a circle of track to run a streetcar that was Mom's favorite, and a full city block was established by a squared circle of Aurora Model Motoring track that my brother, the budding electrical engineer, had rewired to run right hand running for two way traffic. Brilliant!
All of this combined was too intoxicating for words. The lights would dim, the trains would roar, the slot cars would whoosh, the lights would twinkle, and for those 60 days, there was nowhere on earth I would rather be.
During the summers of my Junior High years (12, 13 or so) I would be home knocking around, and when the parents were off to work and I was left to my own devices, I would crawl under the basement steps and pull some of the boxes out to just ogle at the locomotives, buildings and other details. It was like going to the B&O Museum, casting one's eyes on those great, storied behemoths, but in the stillness of memory and imagination rather than the full excitement of operation. At one point, I had left some evidence behind that I had been rummaging in the train boxes, and my dad suggested that this year we should build another board just for me, but there wasn't much room so we should try that new fangled N scale stuff.
I counted the minutes until November. We went to the lumber yard for some plywood... I suggested 3/8" mounted to some 1x, as I dreaded lugging another heavy 3/4" panel around. We trimmed it to 3' x 6' to fit against another wall in the basement, and I began studying that "Nine N Scale Track Plans"... the Old Testament, if you will, to find just the right layout. Then that Sunday came, I bounded from the Plymouth Satellite into the basement, smelled the unmistakable aroma of cork roadbed, ozone and stale lychen, and I got to work on MY layout... (It was tucked away into a corner enough that Dad didn't make me take it down in January!) Somewhere in a crippled hard drive there are photos, but I can still see it clearly in my head.
In looking at the photo that
@David K. Smith posted, I believe I built the exact same plan. A loop around the outside intertwined with a figure 8. Passenger trains on the wider friendlier outer loop, and a fast freight running the 8. Mountain paper of my own, structure kits to experiment with, and a cigar box for rolling stock to be stored when not in use. Lots of mistakes, lots of frustration, but when it was good it was the best thing ever.
Long story short, (too late for that, right?
) this is the atmosphere I'm going for. Not rudimentary in design or execution, because afterall, we've hopefully learned from a lifetime of model railroading mistakes, but nostalgic in its simplicity, it's magic, and its ability to transport me back to a place of wonder that seems harder to find the older I get.
I've got two trains running right now, in opposite directions, at slightly different speeds. It sounds just like the surf working up and down a beach on a warm, calm day. Perfect background noise for a busy couple of weeks.
All the Best,
Lee
