(Not So) Wordless Wednesday #17

Columbus, Ohio Union Station in 1949, looking west. Fourth St. Viaduct over the rails center photo, North High St viaduct over rails very top of photo. The Columbus Convention Center today sits where the station is located. Photo from the Columbus Citizen-Journal (defunct since 1985). Retrieved from Central Library Consorium, https://catalog.clcohio.org, accessed 18 January 2017.

I haven't done a Wordless Wednesday in a long time, and I think #16 was the last one way back in June 2016. Since it has been so long, I feel compelled to include some commentary. Hopefully Lance Mindheim reads this blog, most of my esoteric rambling below should be right down his lane...

If you have followed this blog at all (I commend you if you have), you have seen me basically bounce all over the place with potential topics to model. Passenger operations, steel mills, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Toledo, etc. That continues to today, and this post is no exception as the photo above indicates.

Some model railroaders know exactly what they want to model, they plan it out in a few sketches and maybe a CAD design program and they get right to it and they don't waver from their goal. At the other end of the spectrum you have those who have an idea what they want but don't do a lot of planning and they "fire and adjust" (military term from my days as a tanker) as they go, preferring to get tracks down as soon as possible then solve the Rubik's Cube of layout design while they build it.

I am a meticulous planner which is why I have been in armchair modeling mode for so long. Probably because of my background in military operations which has been part of my entire adult life. The US Army doesn't take a dump without a plan, but for good reason. This lesson has been learned over a couple hundred years and has been paid for with the blood of thousands of servicemen.

But, I digress - back to model railroading. With money, time, and space being at a premium, I have chosen not to cut lumber (with a couple minor exceptions...) until I have a plan down on paper (and/or pixels) that I am satisfied with and know will work. That White Unicorn continues to elude me.

Some modelers use the concept "givens and druthers", unfortunately for the reader due to my military operational planning background I use terms like "constraints", "facts", "assumptions", "critical tasks", "implied tasks", "specified tasks", and the list goes on. Same idea, different terminology with much more detail involved in each term.

As an example, in military planning a Critical Task is a task that must be performed to accomplish the mission according to the Commander's Intent. In my model railroad, I am the Commander (and the planner). The big Critical Task I can't get out of my head is passenger operations.

What that means in lay terms is, I just can't seem to abandon the concept of building my layout around passenger operations. I've tried, but it is the one subject that keeps coming back no matter how hard I try to do something else. Time to embrace it.

One of the constraints I have dealt with is the size of my layout room, which is 13' x 27'. A size that at first I thought was enormous, but have come to realize is really quite small. Another constraint that dovetails into room size is the fact that 85' passenger cars in HO scale need very broad curves to operate reliably and to lose their toyish appearance in a curve. MRH ran an article back in 2009 where they determined that model railroad locomotives & rolling stock need to have curves 5x their length (or more!) to operate most reliably and with the most realistic appearance. With an 85' passenger car in HO scale being around a foot long, this would be a 60" radius curve. Coupler mating for 85' cars on a 60" curve is essentially the same as coupling on straight track. Fortunately though, the HO equipment today is capable of operating on tighter curves than that, and with some smoke and mirrors you can also reduce curvature and still have a fairly realistic appearance in a curve. MRH determined that 3.5x length (about 42" radius for our foot-long passenger car) is about the minimum you can have to achieve smooth operation and have the cars look decent from the inside of a curve.

Recently I have come up with some ideas on how to work within those constraints and I will go more in detail on those ideas in future posts.

There is one other constraint worth mentioning here because it leads me to the end of this post. The big one is the fact that I already own several hundred dollars worth of HO scale passenger cars in the Pennsylvania RR, C&O, and B&O paint schemes.

To conclude this post, recently I decided to take a look at the Columbus Ohio Union Station, which is the photo at the beginning of this post. I took a look at an Ohio railroad map and noticed that five class-I railroads ran to Columbus in 1950, something I really never paid any attention to before. The PRR, B&O, C&O, N&W, and NYC. Then I googled Columbus Union Station and one of the photos I found was the one above. In 1950 there were nearly 50 passenger trains a day that ran through this station, with PRR having the most. What really caught my eye though was the fact that it only had four platforms with 8 tracks. Compare that to Cleveland which had 25 platforms, Cincinnati with 16, and Toledo with 8. PRR didn't use Cleveland or Toledo Union Stations.

I've been down this road before though, so I am not getting too excited about Columbus just yet.

Kudos again if you made it this far reading this post! Lance, where are you???

Construction Report 01/03/2017

I normally don't make New Year's resolutions because they are usually forgotten by Groundhog Day.

That being said, this year I am determined to get my first module built.

A while back I posted how I bought a 4' x 8' sheet of 3/4" plywood at Home Depot and started ripping it into pieces for my first 2' x 8' module benchwork. I planned from the beginning to use plywood for most if not all of the benchwork in lieu of dimensional lumber. The module bench is nearly complete and within the next couple days I plan on finally turning it up onto its own legs so it can stand freely.

After buying this pathetic bundle of 1x2's at Home Depot - and this was the best bundle they had and the only one still banded together - I decided to make it all out of 3/4" plywood. The 1x2's are mainly for leg bracing and will work fine for that, but I was going to also use them as the short girder on the L-girder legs. The contractors get the pick of the litter at Home Depot and the rejects are what you see on the shelves. Next time I think I'll try Carter-Jones lumber to see if they have anything better.

The basic frame of the bench and my template for all following modules. The cross-members are 2' from the ends, and there will be one more cross-member in the center that will actually be laid flat and flush with the table top. The bottom table top layer will be 1/2" MDF which I have a few 2'x4' sheets of, so I will need the center cross-member to lay flat so I can screw the MDF to it at the joint. The legs will be attached to the frame at the vertical cross-members with screws or bolts (haven't decided which yet) so they can be removed, and the table top will also be attached with 1-1/4" drywall screws for removal. The frame and L-girder legs can be glued and tacked together because I don't see the need to disassemble the legs or the frame.

The bench frame is glued at each joint and tacked with 1-1/2" finishing nails from my air nailer. To hold each joint in place while I glued and nailed it together, I used this handy 90 degree clamp I got at Harbor Freight for under $20. Double checking the angles with my framing square showed that the clamp is dead on the money at 90 degrees.

In an earlier post I mentioned how after cutting the 4" planks I also ended up with two planks that were 3-3/4" instead of 4". These 3-3/4" planks are what I am using for the legs of the bench. Having decided to use plywood for everything, I ripped one of the remaining 4" boards into two 2" planks (actually about 1-7/8" after cutting) to form the short girder of the L-girder legs. The L-girders were also glued and clamped and then also tacked with more 1-1/2" finishing nails.

The whole process so far has been quite easy to do, mainly because the plywood is straight as can be and also because I was extra careful to make all my ripping cuts accurately. Taking the extra time to make accurate cuts cannot be understated. As I glued and tacked the legs and the frame together, everything lined up perfectly and nothing was out of whack like it would have been had I used dimensional lumber.

This bench is going to be quite sturdy and probably overkill in hindsight for a 2' x 8' bench, because this 3/4" plywood is very strong. The only downside I foresee is that it may be a little top-heavy at 48" tall due to only being a 2' x 8' bench.

One thing I have noticed about this Home Depot plywood is that it is not as good a quality as I originally thought, even though it is their best plywood. It is 7-ply plywood but the sanded outside veneer ply is paper thin and splinters easily on cut edges. I am going to shop around at Menard's and Carter Jones Lumber in the future to see if they have anything better.