Setting up the layout

This year, we had the chance to use a room of the Nordwestdeutsches Museum für IndustrieKultur in Delmenhorst, near Bremen. During the meet there were 11 attendees. We had prepared a plan and a concept for operations to siumlate the traffic around the year 2005.

This article gives an insight into the operationional concept for a typical modular meeting of the americaN chapter of the FREMO.

The Layout

Never the same layout. For every modular meeting, we plan a new layout. The layout is planned to match all the given constraints, like the room, the attendees and the available modules, the choosen era. A layout may vary in size, shape and the order of modules. The modular layouts may fill a small room or a large venue. It is never the same but it is always made for operations.

In the last few weeks I spent some time to replace Wordpress to maintain this page and replaced it with Hugo. Why? For the main part, just because I can.

There was a custom static site generator

I had built a static site generator on my own, for my - now derelict - homepage, about 20 years ago. Back then I used Coldfusion and later migrated the engine to php. But it never had any advanced featues. Yes, it was able to generate menus, but I lost interest in it and did not work on it any further.

For me, there are three main reasons to build modules instead a home layout: Space, flexibility and they are achievable.

Modules take up less space

Modules are flexible

There are two aspects to this: The layout itself and the focus of your modelling interest.

A few members of the FREMO americaN group wrote an article for issue december 2020 issue of the N Scale Railroading Magazine. During a small modular meeting we took photos of the operations. We choose to follow a single train during operating session and explain the thoughts and operations in detail in this article.

A small selection of the content we choose for the article.

Paints, powders, cars and small parts dominated this weekend. In January 2020 we had another Workshop-Weekend. We decided to add more cars to our arsenal and worked on our rolling stock. Some cars needed additional weight, new wheel sets or couplers.

A lot of weathering techniques were applied to the unsuspicious victims. No car should leave as clean as it arrived.

A relaxed working atmosphere with lots of chatting and relaxed work.I replaced the motors in my Atlas EMD SD-24 because they didn’t work that well. After that I applied a my usual dirt-wash to about 60 cars that had been prepared with a good shot of matte varnish.

Cascade, Idaho. Is consists of eight segments and has a total length of about six meters. It has three industry tracks with a total of about 14 spots, a three meter long passing siding and a wye to connect a to a branch or turn trains.

The prototype

Close to the deadline set by our participation at the US Model Railroad Convention 2019 in Rodgau, I ran out of time and kits. I had the kit for a small diner at hand but I had seen this structure on at least two modules in our group and wanted to create a different version of it. So I had to improvise a solution to fill some spaces on my module.

Like every second modeller, I had bought a sample of the Walthers “Co-Op Storage Shed”. I have seen it on some modules before, sometimes modified, sometimes not. I needed a ground level storage shed for a small business on my Cascade Module. Today the “Lake Cascade Sport & Marine” is located at that place. I have no Idea what has been there in the 1950s, but I chose this kit as a base to build my shed.

South of East Mill Street in Cascade Idaho are some interesting buildings. At the far south of the town there is a Rodeo arena with its stables. Due to space limitations I decided not to model it, but I added a freelanced workshop and wanted to add the diner I already had bought.

The workshop is completely scratch built and freelanced. I just created a structure to use the left over plastic parts for a roof and some windows and doors I had lying around. The walls are sheets of scale lumber based on a thin sheet of styrene. I painted it in a red-brown color. After painting I gave it a shot of dullcote to seal the paint on the wooden parts. This dullcote was not as dull as I had thought and made the wooden walls look like a plastic kit. Interesting. I weathered the structure with a mix of dark oil paints and thinner. I will add lights and details later. For this purpose the roof is held in place by a small amount of flexible adhesive and should be easily removable.

Northeastern Scale Models offers a nice Structure “One Story Section House” in its Small Trackside Structures (STS) Series. I got three of these. I used them to kit bash two neighbouring houses, that look very different.

The long one

The kit contains parts for square house with a veranda at one end and the entry to the basement on the other end. I used two of the kits to create a longer version.