Sometimes details are not only models in themselves, they are “mini-scenes.” You know them when you see them, like this beautiful steam traction engine and the crew waiting while a mechanic under it addresses some problem that has stopped the work.
While not exactly putting food on the table, the sales did pay for the mold. I usually stick to the kind of details that I cannot buy. Doors and windows, apart from being on the difficult side, are best left to the likes of Grandt Line and Tichy. I can, and have, done doors and windows, but those folks sure do them better. Besides, it is all those other little detail items that are fun to scratchbuild.
In some parts of the country older buildings had external sewer and vent pipes. I make them out of styrene rod with rings of larger tubing to simulate the joints. I keep a butane cigarette lighter on the bench to heat and bend the styrene rod to shape. Be careful here: just wave the flame briefly under the rod in the area to be bent enough to soften the material. Believe me, it does
Station scenes are always great spots for grouping details. The freight room end of the building has a baggage cart being repaired while a sidewalk superintendent looks on. Scale figures are details, too, and these are positioned logically for this scene with some interacting and the rest just waiting for the train. The board by board platform looks bet- ter than scribed wood, at least in O scale; the benches are commercially available items.
not take much heat to do the job. Hold the rod in position for a few seconds and the plastic will “freeze” in the de- sired shape. A few swipes with an emery board will remove the distortion created by the bend. Keep a glass of wa- ter handy for when your heating opera- tion goes south and the rod catches fire. (It can.) Also, keep the water out of el- bow range unless you like to keep washing the floor. I needed a chimney that no one made and decided to build one out of individ- ual styrene “bricks.” I started with a section of Evergreen square tubing, then applied .020″-thick, scale 2.5″× 7.5″ styrene bricks to it. After a few hours it came together better than I ex- pected, so I made a mold of it. I used a length of toilet paper tube to make the dam. The rubber was flexible enough to allow me to push the casting out from the bottom of the mold. Because of the severe undercuts, I was only able to get 15 chimneys out of the mold before it tore, but I don’t feel cheated. Fifteen of the same chimney casting will keep me going for a while. I may be going out on a limb here, but I could never see spending a lot of time on detail that will remain, for the most part, unseen. I foolishly spent about ten or twelve hours detailing the inside of a caboose only to realize that in order to show it off I had to pluck the darn thing off the railroad, pull the roof off, and wave it under some poor visitor’s nose. Non-railroad visitors looked at me like I had a screw loose. (I wonder how they knew.) There was no way that detail was visible through those tiny (even in O scale) windows. Rolling stock underbody detail is al- most (I said “almost”) as invisible on some cars. I believe (admit?), however, that if it is possible to see, it probably should be modeled. If you have to par- tially disassemble your model or re- move it from the railroad to show off some of the detail you had better be entering it in a contest.
There are all kinds of things you can add to make a model more interesting. Look around you. Study railroad pho- tos, town photos, buildings and scenes and you will quickly see the possibili- ties and get ideas for your layout. One last note: “details” tend to be somewhat self-sorting. Whether parts, pieces or piles, they are usually some- how associated with whatever struc- ture is next to them. Not only that, they are not usually as disorganized as one might think. Things (details?) tend to be grouped together in some manner, especially if they are being saved for re- use at a later time. The same applies to scrap metal or lumber; it stays close to its origins. Why move it?
RAILROAD MODEL CRAFTSMAN 77
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