month’s column is the ¹/₄″ O scale “Building the Railroad” cyclorama. Funded by the Railway Supply Indus- tries Committee, it occupied a rotunda space under the high dome of the Rail- road Building. It was eighty feet in di- ameter at the base and towered 28 feet high. The trains operated at the visi- tors’ eye-level with another on an up- per elevation with a streamline eight- car passenger train. Lower, parallel tracks had two 12 to 15 car freight con- sists. Eight feet was the smallest ra- dius inside tunnels, with 10 to 12 foot radii on open curves. As visitors entered the rotunda, they
KING COPPER CORP
walked a wide, gradually-rising circu- lar ramp around the display which was divided into eight quadrants covering industries such as ballast quarries, lumber, brick and cement, oil, steel, an open pit mine, a blast furnace and rolling mills. There was also a locomo- tive erecting shop, fuel, lubrication, maintenance, engine terminal, freight car shops and passenger car shops. All this was located in a modern metropo- lis with Art Deco buildings and a Grand Central-like terminal interior with underground tracks and operat- ing subway trains beneath. Thanks to reader Jim McVoy, who supplied a copy
of the souvenir brochure for this dis- play, we can better appreciate what has generally been ignored because of emphasis placed on the large “Rail- roads in Action” layout. With trains so near visitors, they
were modeled better than those on “Railroads in Action.” Because of the distance between viewers in that the- ater and the layout, freight cars were of- ten too crudely finished to read well, and buildings were simply detailed. Here, more care was given to close-up train models and architectural struc- tures, such as erecting shops and mills, and the machinery needed to achieve the work. Other buildings farther away were more simply constructed; the fact that they were identified was sufficient, as there was no need to superdetail them as we might expect today. It was a temporary exhibit, not meant to be mu- seum quality. It was developed by Bill Bowen and H. Raymond Bishop of Out- hwaite Exhibits, with Leonard Outh- waite the designer and director. It was enough to set many model railroaders salivating at the sights be- fore them. Remember, this was a peri- od when OO and HO were still in their infancy, with the latter yet to become a real threat to O scale. Walthers 1941 O scale catalog had photos of locomotive models he supplied for this particular layout. Examples are a freelance, streamline Hudson and Pullman pas- senger cars, plus a Berkshire, Moun- tain, 4-8-4, and two Moguls. We read all were generic to not call attention to any one particular road in the Confer- ence and were built using Walthers Polydrive system of plug-in geared modules, each with a pair of drivers al- lowing creation of many different pro- totypes. In his catalog, we also read any prototype (or freelance) locomo- tives following Model Craftsman or The Model Railroader articles could have been built using them. He didn’t
RAILROAD MODEL CRAFTSMAN 89
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