Downsizing a layout without losing character
constructed of ¹⁄₂″ plywood and ¹⁄₂″ Homasote®
I’ve (which is getting harder and
harder to find). The narrow far end is rural, filled with structures from my old town of Arroyo which loosely copied the real town of Fillmore.
already
added the large citrus packing plant, a box company, a feed mill and my old Suydan SP station, all carefully packed and moved up here. Yes, I know there is a better laser-cut kit out there but this one is significantly shorter so it fits the spot; plus I’m rather attached to this old cardstock kit I found at a swap meet. I’d never built anything out of cardstock before; it was so much fun that I later built the entire lemon packing plant out of card stock (RMC, August, 1991). There’s a little arroyo between the city and rural sections so I could recycle my bridges from the previous layout, though I ended up keeping only the already shortened Central Valley Bridge. I built a new two part though-girder bridge be- cause the old single span was too long. I used Central Valley 72-foot Plate Girder Bridge kits but cut one nearly in half so the pair would fit. The arroyo makes the distance between the edge of downtown and the rural areas seem further apart. However, in the era I model–the mid-
By saving the old downtown with its street, foundation and sidewalk, the author was able to put the models back where they be- longed (left), including a couple of his fa- vorites such as the old Magnuson resin ho- tel model with its giant R.K.O. sign on the side and the “Want Ads” sign on top (both actual things from 1950’s L.A.). The awnings on the Grants building (below) help to keep the sun from shining in the display windows and also shade passers-by. The hardware building next door had been located in the town of Arroyo before the author’s move.
Track twists and pops off, switches get broken, and I ended up having to scrape off track and ballast and start over. Though there are many new con- struction techniques, I built rather tra- ditional L-girder benchwork, shaped roughly like a pie slice, wider at one end than at the other. According to my calculations, with one end resting on a ledge attached to the wall, I could have supported the whole 14 ½ foot L-girder on a single leg located near the two- thirds mark but I found that so hard to believe that I added another. The rest of the benchwork rests on L-girder ledges fastened to the garage walls, with smaller girders actually support- ing the top.
The downtown section of the old lay- out top was attached to the new layout at the widest end, with a few additions for the yard and the edge of town. The new sections were fitted to the rest, also
44 OCTOBER 2013
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