A Bridge

In preparation for a school project, Pascal decided this afternoon to build a through-truss bridge ...
All by himself...
From tooth picks and hot glue!

Even the beams running the length of the bridge are made from tooth picks. Pascal first built the end supports, then the lower beams and the truss on each side. Afterwards he connected the trusses at the top, and built the deck.

Attack of the Boy

This is what's left of our old kitchen mixer after Pascal wanted to know what it looks like from the inside...

Emsingen Freight shed mock-up

I threatened to do a mock-up, and those things go together really fast. Building the shed from cardboard took me a mere 20 minutes.

The freight shed sits at to the "Gueterschuppen" track next to Emsingen station.

Emsingen main station and freight shed mock-up.

Aerial view of station area.

I want the shed to not look silly when putting two freight cars next to it, so it needs to be a decent size. Since I'm kit-bashing it, I'm assuming that it was originally built smaller, and expanded later to double its size. The parts I have call for a single-story building with a fairly low angled roof.

The footprint of shed feels a bit large but works well with the freight cars at the loading dock

The loading dock wraps around one side of the freight shed. Dock height will be set to meet car floor at level height.

View from the North. Station access road will pass behind the shed on the right of this picture. In the final model I'll extend the ramp a little bit closer to the curve. There will be stairs to the loading dock.

View of the shed from the street. The mockup is straight, but the ground is crooked. The loading dock along the street is made from wood and supported by wood beams, while the trackside arrangement and foundation are concrete.

Figuring out what the freight shed is going to look like

Now that the Emsingen station building is basically complete, I need to figure out what the freight shed is going to look like. This will be kit-bashed from parts of the attached freight shed included with the kit, and styrene sheets. Do I want two doors to the loading platform or one? Which wall segments will be built from kit parts, which from styrene parts? Do I want to build the shed to the size of roof parts I have? If bigger, should I cobble together the roof from cut parts, or build a roof from scratch?
...
So many questions to answer.

Before cutting styrene I should make a cardboard mockup.

Lunch

This is it.

Time for my flight home. Can't wait. It was really nice spending time with family the last few days, but I'm ready to go home. Two and half weeks is a long time to be away.

Here's a shot from our weekend walk at Monrepos.

The photo quality of my cell phone doesn't even pretend to be near what Tatjana's camera produces. 

Morning Fog at School

It was very nice fog this morning. And even thicker when Tatjana went to school.

Important Literature

Photo credit: Tatjana

Tiersteintunnel

On the way from Zurich to Stuttgart as usual I was watching the scenery outside the windows of IC184. Between Rottweil and Horb the track tunnels through several hills along river Neckar, and to my utter surprise at one of the tunnel portals I read the sign "Tierstein-Tunnel".

I later looked up the Gaeubahn on Wikipedia, and indeed there is a "Tierstein-Tunnel", followed by "Hohenstein-Tunnel", whose name is awfully close to my "Hochwald-Tunnel".  It's amazing how sometimes completely made-up names can be found in reality, not that far away from where I imagined they could be located in my model.

rottweil.net has a few very nice photos of the tunnel portal that in an instant had me wide awake on Friday afternoon.

"Critical" Supplies

A visit at Zuri-Tech yielded a nice set of second-hand Maerklin D-Zug-Wagen. While they are compressed in length, the cars will look reasonably ok on the fairly tight radi used on the Welztalbahn. This gives me the material to model a detoured long-distance D-Zug during operations, and they just look good for an Open House setup.

I also couldn't resist the siren call of a Roco Rungenwagen, and some figures to populate the farmers market in the town of Emsingen. All of the items were on sale so the damage to my wallet wasn't too horrible.

She Arrived

Fun at Zurich HB

Emsingen station interior, part 4

And you thought I would let you off easy, did you ... ?

Just as I suspected, when I put a light bulb inside the station building and turned off the work bench lights, the building walls started to glow:

Yeah, that's really not cool. This is not a scene from a ghost story. The wall on the left got some thick sheet styrene on the inside, which helps, but isn't perfect. The wall on right is not fixed yet, neither is the door. 

The baggage / express freight room after installing a screen of black construction paper inside, which then gets covered up with a thin sheet of white styrene.

The station office.

And the fixed waiting room. The doors are impossible to fix properly at this stage. Before installation I should have painted them black on the inside to reduce the sheen. The wall on the right is covered with construction paper, the one on the left with just sheet styrene. Paper wins.

The last three photos are exposed for 3 secs with 5.6 aperture. I used an LED flash light to briefly light up the walls and simulate some moonlight. No digital editing done.

Busy time in Emsingen

The transfer run from Emsingen to Talheim is extra long today. The Talheim switcher will have some work to do...

Emsingen station interior, part 3

It's done.

Station office and baggage / express department

Waiting room now with passengers

Tonight I built the luggage department. The shelves are made from styrene, and the boxes / bags are cut from some balsa wood strip. Putting it together isn't really that hard, but it took forever.

I updated the waiting room with the arrival and departure information (thanks for the idea, Wolfram), as well as waiting passengers. This is the first time that I painted figures this small myself. The paint looks appropriately clumsy. However, when they are behind glass inside the building you can't quite see all my mistakes, so it's acceptable. I'll get some more practice when I paint the remaining 40 sitting passengers in the package...

The rooms are now permanently installed in the station building, the light mask is adjusted and cut out ... and I have this nagging feeling that I'm not done with this topic yet.

Emsingen station interior, part 2

I was encouraged by the success of the waiting room, and continued to build rooms behind the track-facing window front. Next up was the station office, which also houses the ticket counter.

Hey, look! There are papers and folders on the desk.

What I found interesting is that it doesn't take much details to suggest a room behind the windows.  I'm likely going to add a Preiserlein somewhere in the office to make it look more "lived in".

Now I only have the express shipment and luggage department left to do before I can return to the regular construction of the station building.

I'll leave the top of the rooms open, and place the bulbs for general building lighting high enough, so that they illuminate the decorated interior spaces as well.

The bird has landed

Emsingen station interior

When I got to the step to install the interior paper mask of the Emsingen station building, I realized that all the first floor windows have "closed" grey curtains. Urgh. Not how I envisioned this. Over the last couple days I looked at dozens of floor plans of station buildings from around the late 1900's. Baden-Wuerttemberg's Staatsarchiv in Ludwigsburg is a treasure trove of such plans. A surprising number of plans is available on their Web site. While the navigation is sub-optimal, the information is awesome. 

Anyways, I learned that most small to medium stations typically have the following rooms on the ground floor level:

- Eingangs-/Schalterhalle (entry hall, ticket counter)

- Warteraum (waiting room, sometimes separate rooms for passengers travelling 1st or 2nd class)

- Gepa (Gepaeckaufgabe, i.e. luggage services)

- Dienstraum / Fahrdienstleiter, Stationsbuero (official railroad business rooms, typically the ticket counter would be on the wall between this room and the entry hall)

- Toiletten (rest rooms)

Depending on the building passengers access the platform through the waiting room, or a hallway from the entry hall.

Tonight I decided to try and build a waiting room.

The walls and floor are made from sheet styrene. The benches are survivors from my Dad's layout, as is the sign. The door in the corner is left-over from another kit. The floor is painted. I intentionally left the brush marks to make it look a bit more used. I added the vertical "wood beams" to give the walls a bit more structure.

The waiting room is in the left corner of the station building facing the operators. If I go through all this trouble at least I want to be able to see it, too.

View from the outside. It's subtle for now, though I think it'll look really nice once I add interior lighting, and add a few waiting passengers. By the way, this is the wall that was missing in the Testing pictures from last week.

Time to think about how to arrange the Dienstraum and Gepa.

Testing, testing, testing

Mockup placement of the main station building in Emsingen, now that I have most of the major wall sections built.

Oh yeah! This is working nicely. The station building has a more commanding presence than the stand-in I used so far. It visually pushes back the city a bit and helps to create the forced perspective effect I was hoping for. The city uses 1:87, and 1:100 buildings. I'll continue adding 1:87 along the left side of the city. Overall, the scene becomes much more balanced now. I'm excited!

Emsingen station building started

I started work on the station building for Emsingen.

This is Faller 110114 "Trossingen". Faller wants you to build the main station with the freight shed attached, but thankfully they provided a window front (the 5 ground floor windows in the photo) if you choose not to do so.

The freight shed is neat, but too small. I'm planning to kit-bash it and double its size utilizing as many wall sections as I can from the kit. I'll probably build the missing wall sections from Evergreen wood panels similar to the paneling under the roof line of the main building.

Busy Kids

Saws are awesome tools for making things.

Walking on Water

You can have a lot of fun by mixing water with corn starch. ... Especially if you scale it up and fill a 2 foot deep trench with that stuff.

Dorfschmiede done

Alte Dorfschmiede in the perspective as it will be seen by most people visiting the layout.

Today I finished up the blacksmith house (Dorfschmiede), including some weathering and installation of lights. As usual I used Pollyscale paints and Bragdon powders to give the house a bit of personality and help with removing plastic sheen and weathering.

After some more consideration, I didn't install additional outside lights, since there will be street lights around the house. I also realized that the miniature lights I do have are either oversized, or their shape looks funny on a house like this.

The work shop with the big hammer is visible.

The lighting arrangement in this kit creates some really nice effect with the open shop doors.
 

At night

The "rear" of the house (well, really it's the front door...) is rather bland and will face towards the market square. I do need to spend a little bit more effort on hiding the gap above the front door, while keeping the upper part of the house removable for maintenance.

More experiments in Emsingen town

Last night I continued working on Faller's "Dorfschmiede" (1903961, black smith). The kit is a bit fidgety, and has more small parts than I expected. Some filing, filling, pushing and shoving is needed to make everything fit neatly, though the parts fit much better than Vollmer's "Alte Feuerwehrwache". Can't really blame them. There are 20 years or so between those two kits.

Either way, at the end of the evening I put the half-finished building into the town arrangement for Emsingen. Works quite nicely.

Here's an overview shot. The town of Emsingen develops to the left. The old city center is in the middle of the photo. I'm planning to add a market square with a small fountain in front of the city call. With some selective compression, to the right the town peters out towards the forest. I may, or may not, keep the bungalow on the far right. Some rich guy plastered his family home on the edge of town ... or, I'll put a small barn and/or an apple orchard there instead.

On to finishing up the black smith house ...

bye bye Maui

Die Alte Hammerschmiede

"Die Alte Hammerschmiede" is a fun little kit from one of Faller's low-end "let's move stuff on Christmas at Aldi" combination boxes. Nevertheless, there are some neat models in those boxes, and the others make a good base for kit-bashing.
At some point Faller sold this with a mini-motor to animate the hammer. I thought about doing that, too, but then skipped on it. I will add some extra lights though.

A recent two evening project

Putting together one of Vollmer's Bahnhofstrasse kits. It's a neat little kit, and fits quite nicely in Emsingen.

The original plastic kit is painted with Pollyscale colors, and got a dusting of patina with Bragdon powder paint. I typically paint everything on the sprues in one evening, and put it together the second evening. There's usually some touch-up work, that might spill over to the next day.

Hanging out trackside

I used the opportunity on the way to the airport to hang out a bit at Sand Creek where the BNSF and UP mainlines cross at grade. I was hoping for a nice shot of a train crossing the diamonds, but the crossing is located right under a freeway bridge and aside from being not photogenic, it's also very hard to see without getting on railroad property or climbing the freeway embankment.

Instead, I went for this shot looking south towards the huge (and quite smelly) refinery. The photo was taken while recording an HD video. Given that it's basically an HD still, it's not too shabby, but it would have looked really nice at full resolution.

Welcome to Denver ...

 

... this airport rest room is a tornado shelter.

Welztalbahn News

Two weekends ago I cleaned up the work mess on the layout and got it ready to run trains again. Thanks to Stefan for his help dealing with cleaning track and finicky locomotives. Here's the VT98 on the bridge just north of Emsingen. I need to come up with a name for it. "Steinlebruecke", maybe? The entry signal to Emsingen from the north is just barely visible in the background.

Both the previous view and this one are only possible with a camera. I put an old station building where the Emsingen station is going to be. The old building is nice, but with its brick architecture doesn't fit into a Black Forest setting at all. It would work great, if I were building a layout set in northern Germany.

Pascal and I started work in Talheim station adding a base for the road and raising the area around  the station building. 

When I built the tracks in Talheim station years ago, I installed cork roadbed. I later learned (and realized from photos) that station tracks typically have drainage pipes under the roadbed, so water is drained away from both the track and the station area. The shape of the ballast is different as well. It would have been better had I used cork sheets in the station area, so that tracks are basically level with the ground around them. 

I fixed this in Emsingen over the last year, and now we're doing the same in Talheim. We started by removing the angled edges from the existing cork roadbed. I don't want to pull up the track, so this ended up being a bit surgical in places. Talheim is much easier to access, so a 10 year old boy can help in meaningful ways. He seemed to enjoy it, too.

My Cappucino Today

The barista at the cafe surprised me this morning. What a nice start of the day.