Up Front The inspirati on for this building was the Kaw Valley Designs stairway, of all things. Someti mes it is the litt le things that start a big project.


Mortar Last month, I discussed my wife Donna’s method for creati ng mortar — fi ne Hydrocal exposed to high humidity to set. The results, shown below, add to the stonework’s detail.


Creative


For those of us old codgers that grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, our mentors were young in the 1930s and 1940s. For most of them, to be a model railroader, you had to be a skilled scratch- builder. They built locomo- tives from soup cans and carved boxcars out of a block of pine. Some of those models looked surprisingly realistic, while others looked more like soup cans and blocks of pine. In the 21st Century, you can have a decent model railroad and


84 RAILROAD MODEL CRAFTSMAN


Stonework Methods CRAFTSMAN/Bob Walker, photos by the author


never build a thing from scratch. The problem I see lies in how ev- ery single model on that railroad is on thousands of other layouts. This fact is difficult to disguise, and everyone quickly recognizes most of the modelwork. Many of us want some unique models exclusive to our efforts, and kit- bashing will only get us part of the way there. I cannot speak for others, but I like the idea that some models on the pike exist nowhere else on earth. I must be mentally flawed, because some of my most pro- ductive thoughts occur in that hazy five minutes before I go to


sleep. Many of my friends con- cur with this assessment. One night, for some unknown rea- son, I was reminiscing about the time (I believe it was 1987) when Dennis and I built Accurail’s first building (not a model) and poured the concrete foundation. We constructed the foundation in the standard way, with wood- en forms, and the truck spewed concrete into the gaps. BINGO! The proverbial light bulb clicked on in my head. Why not do the same thing on a model? Within seconds (in my head), miniature styrene forms formed four walls and plaster poured in and dried.


SCRATCHBUILDER’S WORKSHOP


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