Kitbashing Background Flats And More Ghost Signs

I've noted here now and then that a good successor to the now-gone Kingmill line of background building flats is Angie's Trackside Flats. The principle is very similar, photo-realistic images of older brick buildings, many with very appealing details and ghost signs. I've also noticed that modelers, including George Sellios, have been very creative in kitbashing Kingmill flats, but so far, I haven't seen Anglie's Trackside Flats matched with Kingmill.

One of my favorite Anglie's buildings carries a ghost ad for Texas and Pacific "23 Hours to St Louis Free Reclining Chair Car". However, Angie, unlike Kingmill, puts its image directly onto a sheet of foamcore. I find that a paper sheet attached to foamcore is in fact likely to warp, so I like to build a more substantial backing for either Kingmill or Angie's.

Not only do top, side, and bottom pieces stiffen the front, but I put an intermediate horizontal piece inside, backed up by the rear wall, to stiffen the assembly further. So far, I haven't had warping problems with Kingmill buildings roughly this size if I build this type of backing. However, I wanted to add this Anglie's building to a larger Kingmill flat I did several years ago. I found the amount of stiffening I added to the larger Kingmill did lead to a certain amount of warping, but it's still acceptable for a background building. Here are the two assembled into one piece:

My experience with the slight warping on the building to the left led me to use the more substantial form of backing that I now use on the Angie's T&P building.

I've also found a supplier for ghost sign decals that will fit on DPM type buildings, T2 Decals. You can get them most cheaply on Amazon. I do find that they're quite hard to get off the backing, and in fact on the set I got, I had to soak them in water for about half an hour and then use an X-Acto blade to peel the decal away. But it finally came off. Here are two examples on model buildings:

Finally, Blair Line makes business sign sets for DPM type buildings. A couple of sets have lasted me many years. Here's a sign I just recently added to a 25-plus year old DPM building:

A New Subdivision For Bay City

As I was poring through my hundreds of Franklin & South Manchester photos that I've downloaded to my hard drive looking for inspiration, I suddenly remembered a piece of a former layout that I'd begun in the early 1980s that wound up on a closet shelf in the basement. When I pulled it out, I discovered that it had five mostly built structures with it. These were Design Preservation Models kits, and I think at the time I built them, the line was pretty new.

On several, I added dry transfer signs and wall ads from Vintage Reproductions, a company long out of business. Here are two:

I never added "glass" to the windows, so I'll need to do this, as well as add various details to the sides and roofs. I'll probably also add Woodland Scenics Light Diffusing Film and Just Plug LEDs to the interiors.

When I pulled the layout piece out of the closet, I saw that I'd added lighting components of the old incandescent flashlight bulb variety with the intent of lighting all these buildings. I pulled these off, since I'll now be using Just Plug components. Here is the base with the lighting elements removed:

Apparently I found a wood laser cut city sidewalk somewhere, and I used a European cardstock cobblestone street for the road surface. You can see that I also built the street with a slight incline. The photo below shows where I added interior locating strips for the buildings made from used fireplace matches and drilled holes big enough to pass Just Plug lighting plugs through:

I found a spot behind Bay City on my layout where I could just fit this base. I have it shimmed more or less level. I may or may not need to do some more work to steady it and level it up. Here's a shot with two more of the buildings from the closet mounted on it in place:

So now I'll have quite a bit to keep me busy finishing the scene.

Layout Maintenance And Upgrades For DCC Operation

The oldest part of this layout is 30 years old, and in its current location, it's 25. Inevitably solder joints come loose, screws loosen, wood warps, paint fades, and so forth. The upside is that once I began converting to DCC, many necessary renewal projects can come with DCC conversion benefits. Most recently, I had a switch machine power connection come unsoldered, but decided that rather than just repair the old connection, I would simply replace it with DCC control of the switch via a stationary decoder, in this case a Dgitrax DS52.

As it happens, I had a panel that had previously mounted an Atlas Selector with a gang of Atlas Controllers for analog DC operation of staging tracks. I uninstalled these as part of the journey to DCC and have largely dispersed the Atlas components to friends still on analog, But then it occurred to me that the old panel could now be used to mount DS52s for this part of the layout. Here's the result:

You can see the NCE handheld radio controller on the right, with the switch address on it. This makes switching much, much easier, since the local panel shown below is about eight feet away, and I would have to keep walking back and forth from the local panel to the train to throw switches. Now I just throw them from the handheld.

There's room for another trwo DS52s, which will control another four switches on this part of the layout. The whole thing is visible and accessible without climbing under the layout. Below is the former local panel that controlled these switches and the analog DC blocks:

Right now, the panel is just hanging by one screw, since replacement of the switch and block toggles is under way. Unfortunately, the switch toggles on the upper routes are going to have to stay, as they control European style switch machines for the European prototype on that part of the layout. I used those because there wasn't enough clearance below those tracks to install Tortoises, and the European switch machines don't work with typical DCC stationary decoders, since they are screw control.

If I were redoing that part of the layout, I'd either use the new Walthers switch machines, which can be mounted sideways, or Kato Unitrack. Probably Unitrack on balance. But I probably won't have to consider redoing things there, at least I hope not.

I'll leave all the local panels in place, covering the old holes for the switch toggles with paper labels giving the new decoder addresses for the switches as shown.

More Work With Foamcore Buildings

I've been playing around some more with the possibilities of finding building images on the web that can be downloaded, sized to model railroad scales, and glued to foamcore building shapes.

One of the big obstacles to doing this is the effect of perspective and lens distortion on the images. Unless the subjects are very small or very distant, the images won't be the rectangles or right angles we expect to see on a model. There are ways around this, which include selecting smaller parts of the image, finding images that have had the distortion minimized, or using software to correct the image. In my experiments, I've found two productive directions. One is to find sites that specialize in ghost signs. The photographers often take care to record the signs head-on as much as possible, and the photos often include other parts of the building, like windows and doors. Here are some examples:

One of the best sites is drkenjones.com. This photographer takes great care to square up his images, I believe by taking multiple photos of small areas on each building and then stitching them together. As a result, he sometimes creates whole walls, like in the examples here:

I was able to download the Roberts Hardware immediately above, print it out, measure the height distance on the image between the windowsills on two floors, and determine how much to reduce the image to N scale, assuming the height between floors is 12 feet. Then I built a form to those dimensions, measuring from the image, from foamcore to attach the image to.

This gets me to a front wall. But finding and downloading other ghost sign images on the web, I can easily find and resize images that can be used for side walls. I did this with an N scale Joe's Pizza building that I did using a front wall image I found on Facebook. I was able to add to the effect by using ghost sign images that I resized to fit the area I needed:

The roof can be detailed using more conventional model railroad roof techniques.

This technique isn't perfect. One difficulty I've found is that using spray adhesive, you have to set the image in place perfectly the first time, there's no leeway to adjust it. As a result, I've tried various techniques with diluted white glue to attach it to the foamcore with a little time to adjust the position. The best way I've found so far is to use Elmer's School Glue to tack the image in place at two corners and make sure it fits properly. Then I use two other dabs of Elmer's School Glue to tack the other two corners down. Then I use a cotton swab with diluted Elmer's regular white glue to soak the paper. As it dries, this will shrink the image into palace flat onto the foamcore.

The problem with this approach is that it will cause the ink to run slightly and also fade the image slightly. So far, I can accept this, since these will be temporary and/or background buildings. The upside is that even factoring in the cost of foamcore, glue, paper, and ink, each building costs well under a dollar.

Manhattan Transfer Updates

Over the years, I've collected and saved hundreds of photos of George Sellios's Franklin & South Manchester layout on the web. His models are always an inspiration, but one thing I've found in reviewing all the photos I've found is that he takes interesting shortcuts that I've been applying to my own building models. One is that many of his buildings are three-sided or sometimes just flats. Another is that he moves them around. In addition, his techniques have changed over the years.

I think I discovered King Mill building flats a little before he did, but a lot of his more recent work uses them. His own ideas are inspiring the ongoing work on my Manhattan Transfer terminal headhouse:

In the photo above, I found a faded Coca-Cola ghost sign, resized it to fit the precise measurement on the building side, and glued it to the basic King Mill building. This is pure Sellios. Another thing he does is use small castings to give texture to building flats. I've added air conditioners, vents, stacks, and fans here, and I'll keep doing it as ideas come to me.

Another thing Sellios does is make concrete foundations and retaining walls. Below I've added a foundation to the bottom of the headhouse building:

You can also see behind the Penn Central geep that I added a lighted news stand.

One thing I notice about Sellios's work is that he'll take interesting signs and construct a building around them, often a three-sided one or a flat. On this site I've found copes of a number of signs that he's used for buildings on his layout. I made a two-sided building corner using some of those signs to fill an empty spot in the Manhattan Transfer yard:

This was a test using foamcore for the basic shape, and I think it turned out very well. The clapboards are part of the sign image, simply printed onto ordinary copy paper and glued to the foamcore. At any distance, it looks like clapboard siding. The faded image is also just part of the print. It took me a couple of hours to do the whole project. I'll add more vent and stack castings to this as time goes on and also blend it into the scene a little more with vegetation.

Finally, a Just Plug LED installed in a Fos building flat:

Progress With NCE Illuminators

Well, after several weeks of struggle with NCE, I'm making progress. I got four Illuminators back from support, though I was still puzzled that only one port, the one defined in the documentation as the W/G port, would light. The others were "off". Now, the NCE Illuminstor is generally thought to be an equivalent to the Woodland Scenics Light Hub that I talked about here, except that it runs off the DCC bus and can be controlled from the DCC command station or cab.

What gets me is that NCE has a real winner of a product in the Illuminator. The Woodland Scenics Light Hub requires a separate AC/DC circuit or even a wall wart. Then it needs special accessories to gang light hubs, control extra functions, turn things on and off, and so forth. These cost money and take space. The illuminator will do the extra functions via DCC commands without extra cost, takes less space, and is still otherwise fully Just Plug compatible. But NCE doesn’t even market it as a Just Plug product, and now I find that you have to reprogram it to make it work with Just Plug. But what other use can the product have?

So I finally heard from higher-ups at NCE, who at least explained what the actual defaults are in an Illuminator and how to turn the other two ports on, which are off by default. Except that fewer than half the Illuminators I bought were shipped with those defaults, which of course was part of the confusion. But at least I now know how to make a product intended to act like a Woodland Scenics Light Hub actually work like one. Here is my Illuminator installation reinstalled. These nine ports control about a 24-inch segment of 14th Street in Bay City.

It simply would not be possible to mount equivalent Just Plug Light Hubs in the same space. The nine ports control nine different lighting features, six buildings, two street lights, and an East Coast Circuits lighted River Point Station mantainer's truck. I tried out two Walthers Cornerstone street lights, which I spliced into the Just Plug-compatible plug pigtails that come with an Illuminator:

These are the concrete column lights, which look a lot like the ones near where we live. These Walthers lights need one Illuminator port per light.

Here are the structure lights. These are done with Just Plug stick-on warm white LEDS, with the plugs fed into Illuminator ports.

And here is the River Point Station maintainer's truck in its final position on the layout. This has the lead wires spliced into the Just Plug-compatible plug and pigtail provided with the Illuminator. These have come in very handy for my lighting projects.

Clearly the Blue Bird Cafe is also due for lights. Once I got the Illuminators figured out, I'm seeing that lighting projects are fairly simple and fairly inexpensive, but they add an enormous amount to a layout. And since I'm pretty much full-up with rolling stock for the rest of a lifetime, lighting is a good way to put effort into a layout that doesn't challenge existing space constraints, since it mostly involves buildings and scenery that are already in place.

Struggling With NCE

I've said before that outside of the cabs and boosters it makes, I've had a 30-50% defect rate in NCE products across its line. I'm not sure why the boosters and cabs seem to be exempt from this. I've had a Power Cab for seven years that's worked without a problem, and earlier this year I got an SB5 that so far works fine. But their decoders are a completely different story.

The NCE Illuminator is a recent product that can substitute for the Woodland Scenics Light Hub in its Just Plug system. It has some real potential advantages that include the ability to program individual outputs for features like flashing, random on-off, and even flickering fluorescent bulbs. Another one from my point of view is that it can run off the DCC power bus, which can minimize layout wiring. In particular, since T-Trak uses the Kato Unijoiners to carry power between modules, the track can become the DCC bus, and Illuminators can run off the track DCC via a terminal strip on individual T-Trak modules.

The problem is that, as I've been working with Illuminators on T-Trak modules, I've been finding the defect rate is about the highest I've experienced with any NCE decoder. Last month, I packed up four and sent them back to NCE for warranty support. One problem, though, is that NCE's warranty support is slow -- even if they replace a decoder, it takes them weeks and months to ship the replacement, which puts any project on hold or requires you to buy a new one anyhow if you want to finish the project on time -- but there's no guarantee that the new one or the replacement will work, either.

Their warranty support is a guy named Matt, whom I've gotten experience working with over the past year or so. He's a passive-aggressive sort of guy who's slow to get back to you. Rather than use e-mail, he leaves phone messages, and if you try to reply to his phone message with an e-mail (rather than play phone tag), he simply doesn't answer. But if you return his call, he wants to talk to you for half a hour.

Based on my experience this past week, I located the guy who seems to be in charge at NCE (he isn't listed on the web site), who seems to be James Scorse. I sent him a snail-mail letter, since his e-mail isn't public:

Dear Mr Scorse,

Over the past several months, I’ve purchased eight NCE Illuminators. Five of these have had various problems, including not functioning at all when connected to DCC power and output ports set to non-default values. In two cases, I was able to debug the problems myself.

Nevertheless, I think you’ll agree that a new product unpacked from its factory package that does not function according to the documentation shipped with the product is defective. This is a defect rate for recently purchased Illuminators of over 60%.

I was unable to debug three of these and returned them, along with another one that had burned out, to Matt in Warranty Support, on October 26. Matt left me a phone message on November 6, and I had a phone discussion with him on November 7, at about 11:15 AM EST. In that discussion, Matt insisted that there was “nothing wrong with” these Illuminators.

It took about 15 minutes for me to ask enough questions to get Matt to explain to me that what happens is that at the factory, technicians will do things like turn off the Illuminators or change CVs to test them, but they do not return them to factory default values. Matt was, in my opinion, extremely argumentative and sometimes sarcastic and condescending in explaining this, and his view seems to have been that I should have figured this out for myself and not claimed the Illuminators were defective. The entire discussion lasted over 30 minutes, in my view because Matt was unwilling to acknowledge that NCE had shipped defective decoders.

However, the decoders were either non-functional or did not function as documented when shipped from the factory. Matt admitted as much.

I can’t tell you how to run your business, Mr Scorse, but it appears to me that you have a problem in your factory, which is shipping products not set to factory default values, and you have a problem in Matt, who seems extremely defensive and unwilling to resolve a legitimate customer problem promptly or courteously.

My experience with NCE is that its products have unacceptably high defect rates, with support staff unwilling to resolve problems promptly or courteously. My preferred DCC vendor is not NCE.

I applied additional pressure on NCE to retrieve the four decoders I sent in (or get replacements), and I got a shipment notice Friday. We'll have to see how many work when I get them back. I'm hoping to salvage at least a few for use on T-Trak modules, but I've decided it's too much of a crap shoot to continue using them on my HO layout.

I'll update if I get any reply or better treatment from NCE, but I'm not expecting anything.

The Little Hell Gate Portals Are Almost Finished

For the last few months, I've posted now and then on progress with the strange pylons that make up the portals the Austrian engineer Gustav Lindenthal designed for his Little Hell Gate bridge, which spans a former East River channel in the Bronx. This would have been a major bridge itself, but Lindenthal didn't want them to detract from the Hell Gate Bridge. Even so, I find them fascinating and much better suited to a model railroad! They seem to reflect a tendency in US architecture at the time to stress abstract form, and they remind me a little of the architect Bertram Goodhue's (1869-1924) late work.

To recap, after studying all the photos I could find, including screen shots from videos taken from Amtrak trains, I started the project by building a paper mockup to help me understand how the overall proportions would fit the T-Trak module:

After giving it some thought, comparing how it looked in the photo to known dimensions and other photos, I made some adjustments, came up with basic dimensions, and began to assemble the basic structure from 1/32 basswood sheet, using old fireplace matches for stiffeners:

I settled on wooden craft beads from eBay held up with dowels to create the balls at the top:

Then I used Elmer's Wood Filler to build up the curved shapes:

This starts out in a violet shade, but when it's dry and ready for sanding, it turns to a wood color.

Now ready for sanding:

The sanding has turned out to be easier than I had expected, but it's still a pretty long process. It's a question of sanding close to the shape, then filling in where needed, and sanding some more.

As I study photos, I realize these don't need to be perfect or perfectly smooth, as the concrete has spalled and eroded over more than 100 years, and I'm not sure if they were perfect in the first place.

They're also deceptively large and will turn out to be the major feature of the T-Trak module where I mount them. In fact, since I guesstimated dimensions to fit the module and Kato Amtrak equipment, I probably made them smaller than actual scale. They should be ready for paint and installation in a few days.

Two Test Runs

Having basically lost patience yet once again with the NCE defect rate -- around 30-50% across every product in its line except the boosters and cabs -- I decided to swear off NCE Illuminators for all but T-Trak modules and am in the process of replacing them for lighting on my HO layout. I would have preferred to stick with something that runs off the DCC bus, but I do have two 16V AC circuits that cover the whole layout with plenty of terminal strips, and the Woodland Scenics Just Plug system will run off 16V AC from a power pack.

So I got a Just Plug light hub as proof of concept and installed it under the benchwork at the Manhattan Transfer stub terminal.

I only had enough LEDs to fill two ports, but they work well.

I took a new Broadway Limited SW7 in Indiana Harbor Belt for a test run. Broadway Limited locos are very sensitive to dirty track, but this one isn't too bad. I ran it down to pick up an MP boxcar at Forley Lithography in Manhattan Transfer.

The building behind the PRR semi trailer has Woodland Scenics Light Diffusing Film and a Just Plug LED installed, powered from the Light Hub shown above. The street lamp and the lighting in Red's Hot Dog stand is an earlier project running off the existing 16V AC circuit. More buildings in this area will be lighted off the Just Plug system.

You can see that the area under the building above the roof of the Penn Central baggage car is lit. This is also off a Just Plug stick-on LED. I plan to add more of these under this building, which serves as the Manhattan Transfer terminal head house, to light the platform area there. This would not be possible using the old incandescent bulbs and encourages me to detail this area further with newsstands, platform gates, and so forth.

Working With The Just Plug System

When I started this layout 25-plus years ago, I wanted to incorporate lighting in many of the structures. I did in fact do this, although the available means were basically 12-volt flashlight bulbs in little screw stands from Bachmann and Model Power. Over the years, these have pretty much all burned out, come unsoldered, been damaged, or whatever. Discovering the Woodland Scenics Just Plug system has rekindled my interest in lighting, and I'm beginning to install new lighting in buildings or reinstall Just Plug LEDs to replace old burned-out bulbs.

In addition, last week I picked up some woodland Scenics Light Diffusing Window Film at the hobby shop. This is very useful for letting light shine through windows, while keeping a viewer from looking inside the building and seeing there's no interior. For instance, here's the Light Diffusing Film installed in a Campbell Carstens Flophouse lobby. (On my layout, this is the McKittrick Hotel on 14th St in Bay City.)

Even without the lights, this is very useful stuff. For instance, I found a basic set of walls for the old SS Ltd San Francisco office building at the old Caboose Hobbies in Denver several decades ago. I built them into a nice oblique corner building for Zenith. I even went as far as to add floors and an elevator shaft, but I knew adding a full interior would be something I'd probably never get to, even though the large windows beg for it. Here was the result:

I added the Light Diffusing Film and another type of tinted film that comes in the same box to darken and block out the view inside. I think this is a big improvement even without lights in the building.

There's other capability available with the Just Plug system, which is the ability to set individual strings of LEDs to turn on and off at random. I am doing this with an option in the NCE Illuminator, which runs Just Plug LEDs off the DCC bus, but Woodland Scenics offers a light hub with the same ability. Basically, if you add interior walls to a building, or have LEDs in separate individual buildings, you can have them turn on and off at random. Here's how I've set this up in a pair of storefronts on 14th St next to the McKittrick Hotel:

Here are the lights turning on and off individually. The storefront windows have also had the Light Diffusing Film applied:

I'm doing the same thing with lighted buildings on the N scale T-Trak layout.

However, as I work more with the NCE Illuminators, I'm finding these have a high error rate -- like 30-50%. While NCE has a return policy, their support staff is hard to deal with, makes errors (I had to send back to them a set of decoders they'd fixed for a different guy, and they want to play phone tag instead of use e-mail), and they keep your defective decoder for weeks before sending a replacement, which itself will be iffy. As a result, I'm going to continue to use Illuminators only with the T-Trak modules, where running off the DCC bus will minimize wiring, while I'm going to move to Just Plug light hubs on my HO layout.