Poolside Rails

There’s a reason why people do what they do. Musicians are generally gifted or talented in music, painters in painting, dancers in dancing, and architects in, well, architecting.

They say it never rains in California, but, man it pours. We’ve seen a long series of storms, each slamming in on a weekend…and I’m talking rain, here, buckets and gallons and other large volumes. We’re in the middle of a whopper El Nino, a drought-ending series of powerful winter downpours.

But the rain falls on the weekends. And I don’t get home from my job at the Evil Empire until after the sun, she sets. These two facts together mean that the railroad projects have moved indoors.

Last year I discovered Google SketchUp and used it to create a pretty nifty track plan. This time, due to darkness and dampness, I decided it’s time to lay out a plan for Paris.

Now, my plan is not done yet, but, seriously, I’ve got about eight hours into this design. There are roads lined out, and I have a general idea of where the buildings will be.

But the problem is with SketchUp. Oh, the program runs great, and it’s easy and fun and all that. The problem is that it’s easy and fun and all that! The program allows you to add all sorts of detail, and that’s the danger! Look at that big building with all those angled roof panels: I spent a good two hours on those windows! You can actually make each pane of glass in the windows transparent…but you have to click on each individual pane on each window to make it so…that’s a lot of clicking!

As you can see, the large three-storied building across the street has yet to be detailed. It is, in fact, in the wrong place as there appears to be no sidewalk. That means the building’s depth will go down, which means I’ll probably just delete it and start over.

Now, about those columns: they sure are ghastly! Perhaps a building-front skin will hide some of the river rocks from which they are made.

The station itself will stretch between the two columns. It will be backed against the fence, with the platform stretching out to the rails.

But, finishing the plan for the station, while critical to the overall success of the railway, requires more hours on the SketchUp. More hours!

In making the plan, it’s easy to get lost in creating a virtual layout…my brother and I said almost the same thing at the same time: who needs to build it if you can lay it out on a computer?

Because Garden Railroading is Real Railroading, that’s why, or, uh, who. We’re modelers, aren’t we? We build, don’t we? Do we plan? Heck no! I mean, yes, but not for the sake of planning, but for the sake of building! That’s why dancers dance and painters paint – because we’re builders! BUILDERS UNITE!

That being said, I’m going back to SketchUp and finish my plan. Because I’m a builder! And we’ll always have Paris, sweetheart.

We’ve done a lot of track designing in Google SketchUp. Beyond the obvious advantage of being free, the 3D modeling software features a huge suite of tools to help you design structures. My wife and I were looking at plants today (landscaping…Hooray!), and she asked that I firmly identify what I wanted to build where so she would know what to plant.

I thought about it for awhile, and realized that I didn’t really know what I wanted in the China Section of the P-P Ry. I reviewed my DVD of Dreamworks’ Kung Fu Panda (which, if you still haven’t seen it, I just have to tell you you’re missing something special!), and found a PDF of a Chinese Pagoda diorama you could build. Well, that got me thinking, and I turned back to our old friend, Google SkethUp.

You can download the program for free by visiting http://sketchup.google.com. Be prepared to be amazed by what you find there. The breadth of the tools available, and therefore the number of applications for this software, is breathtaking.

So, download it, install it, and check with me when you’re done. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Ready?

When you first open the software, you get a picture of a guy standing at the nexus of three colored lines. If you click on the guy and press DELETE he won’t bother you any more.

The Red line represents Width, the Green is Height, and the Blue is depth.

Up along the top there you’ll see a variety of tools. The program should start with the Pencil selected. If it doesn’t, select it by clicking on it. Now click on the nexus point, and drag your mouse along the Red line. In the lower right you’ll see the length of the line you’re drawing extend as you move the mouse.

If the dimensions are too large, say it’s drawing in feet when you want to draw in inches, click on the Magnifying Glass in the toolbar at the top of the screen. Pushing up on the drawing zooms you in, while pulling down zooms you out. When you’re zoomed in close enough, click on the pencil and you’re back in business.

Drawing a line begins and ends with a mouse click. Draw your next line at the end of your first, moving the mouse straight up. You’ll see that your line turns green, indicating you’re following the Green axis. Click to finish that line. Now draw a line on the Green axis starting from the other end of your first line. See how SketchUp automatically squares up your corners when you get to the same length as the second line? It makes it very easy to draw a box. When you’ve clicked on the end of your third line, click again and complete the rectangle by going back along the Red axis and connecting the tops of your two Green axis lines.

Your rectangle should automatically fill in.

If it doesn’t, one of your lines doesn’t lie along the Green axis. It’s hard to see in the 2D view. Click on the picture of the earth with arrows around it – the Orbit button. The cool thing about modeling in 3D is that you can move the drawing around however you like, and look at it from multiple sides. When you find your misaligned line, click on the Select Arrow at the upper left of the toolbar. Next, click on your bad line, and it will turn blue. Press DELETE and it will go away so that you can draw the line correctly.

There is an interesting feature called “Push/Pull” that will save you a lot of time. Once you have a filled-in rectangle, click on the Orbit button and tilt the drawing slightly down, so that you have a slight perspective on it. Now click on the orange icon that looks like a rubber stamp, and then click on your rectangle. Your filled in area becomes filled with little dots. Now, slide the mouse along the Blue axis…your rectangle becomes a box!

That’s all there is to basic SketchUp manipulation. There are a gazillion other tools, and you’ll get to ‘em as you progress with your drawing. I included a sketch of a shed I built in my backyard based on a SketchUp design…the real deal turned out pretty darned close.

When I’ve got my Chinese structures designed I’ll share ‘em with you. I also have some plant information that you will definitely want to look at…shall we say tomorrow night?

What if you had a massive, 108 foot wide canyon to cross with your railway and timber was in short supply, but bamboo was plentiful? Well, you know that bamboo can be remarkably strong, with a tensile strength greater than steel, and, as you are the chief construction engineer with the French railway company building the trestle, you know that in China, bamboo is the traditional building material of choice. So, you decide to build your bridge out of bamboo.

You are in China, so you consult with the local Chinese authorities on building the bridge. After all, they are, in this year of 1901, the absolute authorities on building with bamboo. They help you sketch out a plan that takes advantage of bamboo’s awesome strength and natural beauty.

Well, I didn’t have any Chinese authorities with which to consult, but I came up with this plan nonetheless. And I’m not French, either. But the bridge design is graceful, to scale, and can be built from bamboo. It will be a stunner when finished.

Although in the 1/1 scale world, bamboo is one of the fastest growing plants on the planet, with some varieties growing as fast as a meter a day, and is incredibly plentiful, I don’t have ready access to a good supply. What I do have is a good supply of soda straws. Yes, soda straws. You can’t beat them for price, or for versatility. And darn if they don’t look like 1/18th scale bamboo!

So, here we are in the China section, tasked with building our chasm-spanner out of soda-straw bamboo. I tried out a small section, just to see what would happen. It looks pretty good!

Here’s how we’ll build the bridge: Two sheets of plywood, cut to the shape required in the plan, separated by a 2×4 which serves as the roadbed. We’ll plate the roadbed with craft sticks, cut to shape of course. They’ll represent bamboo boards. And we’ll use popsicle sticks to line the inside of those arches.

To make the bridge look as if it’s made of bamboo, we’ll coat the plywood sheet with epoxy and embed the soda straws, plastic, not paper, and straight, none of that bendy stuff. The straws will stay stuck in the epoxy, and the epoxy will waterproof the outside of the bridge. We’ll shellac the crackers out of the entire assembly, of course, as a measure of weatherproofing.

In the sample I built, I painted the front of the assembly with Rust-Oleum flat white. My goal was to provide a uniform base color and give my cheapo acrylic paints a tooth-some surface on which to cling. You know, of course, that acrylic won’t stick to hydrophilic surfaces like smooth plastic, so you have to add a base coat of some etching paint. Rust-Oleum works great.

Using what I had on hand, I flowed watered-down flat Espresso colored acrylic paint between the straws, then washed the whole thing in watered-down flat Ivory acrylic. The two colors blended nicely, and the Ivory adds enough of a yellow tinge to look fairly realistic. To really push the detail, we’ll paint little bands of brown to simulate the joints in the bamboo. In the real deal, of course, we’ll need to use an oil based paint for the colors, as the acrylic won’t hold up under the weather.

I haven’t priced out scale bamboo yet, but it can hardly be as cheap as a box of a 1000 soda straws from Smart & Final and a tube of epoxy. Plywood is cheap, and I have a gazillion popsicle sticks on hand from a dozen other projects. All I need is a fresh 2×4 and I’m on my way…in fact, the piece cut off from an eight foot length can serve as internal blocks to support the bottoms of the arches…better yet!

So, there it is: an inexpensive bridge that should look like a million bucks when it’s done. Now, it’s finding the cheap labor to actually build it…

Okay, I promise, these are the last CAD drawings I’ll post, unless requested or unless I create another I think is worthy of posting. These may not be worthy of posting, except that they show you how to create buildings and trees.

I was reticent to include buildings and trees in this track plan because they’re difficult to draw in SketchUP…well, the trees are, but the buildings are a snap!

But now that the Paris buildings are in place on the drawing, my life has become much easier. Now I know how many buildings to build, and where they will sit, and what size they will be. The detailed picture of the buildings shows a large, rhomboidal structure in the foreground, bordering the tracks. This will be the Gare St. Lazare. I had originally placed it at the apex of the curve off to the right, because the original builder of the layout had his station there. But who places their station on a curve? Seems to me like a recipe for disaster and a magnet for derailments.

So, Paris is done, sort of. Obviously I didn’t go into detail on the buildings because we’re not to the constructions stage yet.

Walt Disney’s engineering guys came up with a really clever method of modeling full scale buildings. If you walk down Main Street or New Orleans Square in either Disneyland or Disney World, you’ll see multiple story buildings surrounding you. To maintain an air of openness, however, they didn’t want full size buildings crowding the skyline. Instead they created buildings with full size first floors, but with second floors 25% smaller in scale. The result is a building that looks normal from the street but is in fact rather short. If you look carefully, you’ll see that the windows are really rather small. The scaling is magnificent, right down to the clapboard siding…there is nothing to tell your eye it’s being tricked!

In model railroading I know it’s a common practice to reduce the depth of structures in order to save space. But what about reducing height by scale compression? The advantages in model railroading might not be as pronounced as they are in a theme park, although you could build monstrously tall-looking buildings that weren’t, and thereby save materials. In backyard railroading, too, you don’t necessarily want your buildings topping the fence line. Actually, now that we think about it, what is the number one icon of Paris? I’m certainly not going to model the Eiffel Tower in 1/18th scale! But a smaller scale relief model backed up to the fence would benefit from height compression…Hmmm.

I wonder if scale expansion would be feasible? What if the second floor was 25% taller than the first, and the third 25% taller than that? I imagine you’d have a powerfully big city filled with three story buildings!

Those trees: I wanted to locate the trees geographically so that I could build around them. Clearly, God’s terrific creations can’t be replicated by my clumsy 3D modeling hands. But, now we can at least see where the trees are. The process is simple: draw a circle and then “pull” it up to represent the trunk all the way up to full height. Then draw a wider circle at the top and “pull” it down to represent the carefully pruned branches: look! A topiary Popsicle!

That middle picture: I called the picture Scene_Changer.Gif to make it easier to figure out what it is. You know that a good railroad is like good theater: the train is the actor, moving from scene to scene throughout the production. Well, my train needs to move from the Ukraine to Kazakhstan, but visually there’s nothing to separate the two. So, the Scene Changer will be a tunnel or railway bridge or something that helps the eye distinguish one scene from the next.

So, these are the last of the CAD drawings. I’m dying to pour my concrete. Tomorrow is Saturday…what better day for pouring concrete than a Saturday?

When I adopted this railway, a result of buying a house with a pre-built railway in the backyard, it had no formal existence. The guy who built it wanted to watch the trains go ‘round and ‘round and his wife wanted to have an exotic garden. A match made in heaven!

You know that every railway has a story…if not a prototype, at least an operational story to give it existence. The story adds credence to the railway, and helps you, the modeler, focus your modeling efforts. It gives the viewer a sense of place and time. At least, that’s what a model railway is supposed to do. I can’t imagine the boredom of watching trains go ‘round and ‘round a track without purpose or meaning. Seems to me rather a waste of time.

Anyway, I am the quasi-proud owner of this modified dogbone ‘round and ‘round track that I’ve left to nature for some years, and now I’m resurrecting it.

Our railway operates in the year 1910. Automobiles are making an emergence on the streets of Paris, which is where our journey begins. We leave the Gare St. Lazare and creep through the paved streets of an iron-embellished downtown Paris aboard our custom-built narrow gauge locomotive. Although I’m fairly certain there wasn’t a narrow gauge track that ran out of Gare St. Lazare, we’re making an impossible journey anyway, so what the heck. Our journey takes us from Paris across the Ukraine, where we see some onion domes behind the local Ukrainian train station. We pass through the steppes of central Kazakhstan without seeing a soul. Across central China we see a hillside village, even a palace, way up there in the peaks, before we arrive at our destination; Shanghai. We just reach the outskirts of the sleepy town before looping back home.

As you’ll see from the track plans I’ve posted this week, my layout features four distinct segments, or panels, as part of its original design. It runs along a wall to the west of my swimming pool, across the face of stone columns that support the fence. Each of these columns makes a natural break, and in each of those breaks is where we shall separate the different nations. At the southern end the track makes a turn to the east. That turning point will be central China, and Shanghai will be at the extreme eastern end.

I’m quite concerned about modeling downtown Paris in 1910…that’s a lot of scratchbuilding. And you know that we’re placing this all outdoors, which means we need to scratchbuild in a weatherproof manner, with water runoff being an issue. Ma foi!

That means we must return to SketchUp once more to design the Paris plan to give us a feel for what needs to be done. Although it’s fun, SketchUp is rather time consuming…but you’ll be able to see what a 3D rendered city plan looks like!

I had started remodeling a Bachmann 4-6-0 from its native 1/28th to my needed 1/18th, which, I may tell you, is quite an adventure. The remodel will take it to a 4-4-0 able to navigate my four foot radius curves without hassle.

But, I began the remodel from a western prototype, not the European prototype required for this new rail venture. Back to the books!

Okay, this is it. I’ve goofed around in SketchUp to the point of making mountains…yes, it can be done. Do you want to burn your time on it? Well, maybe, if you want to make an exact, and I do mean exact, 3D plan of your railroad.

How do you model mountains in SketchUp? The secret is in the sticks. Look at the middle illustration, above. You draw the outline of your mountain flat on the ground. Starting “on face”, which is SketchUp’s term for ground zero, you raise those sticks along the “blue” axis. You raise a stick for each altitude contour feature you want to model. When you connect the sticks, SketchUp senses a flat plane and fills it in. You can fill the plane in yourself either with color or with SketchUp’s supplied bitmaps. I believe you can supply your own, too.

So, if you wanted to model your model mountain to the exact inch, you could do it by adjusting the length of the stick you raised off the face of the drawing. Why would you? Well, that’s another question, isn’t it? I did it just to test out the concept, and it works rather well. My mountains are already in existence, so modeling them in this manner is not only very difficult, but a complete waste of time.

SketchUp is a 3D modeling program, however. Once you’ve build your mountains, you can use the program’s Camera feature to walk down your main line, looking from side to side as you go. That’s pretty cool, considering you haven’t driven a single spike!

I’m done with SketchUp and track planning for the moment. I think you can see the shape of the railway, especially now that the mountains are down there on the south end. There will be a road that passes under the extreme eastern end of the railway and climbs up the steep hill, crossing over the railway on its way to the south side of the mountain. Given the complexity of drawing it correctly in SketchUp, I might just skip it and airbrush it in using MS Paint.

Can you use SketchUp, available free from Google, to draw your track plan? Absolutely! Given the simplicity of the tools, can you get the hang of it in an afternoon? Absolutely! Will you have a terrific plan at the end? Absolutely! Do you need that level of detail? Abso…well, that’s up to you, isn’t it?

I took some digital pictures of the Mission Cart when I was out at La Purisima Mission, near Lompoc, CA. I was fascinated by the construction…no power tools here! I dragged the pictures home and roughed out the plan above. When you click on it, it should open up into a full size drawing. What’s missing? That’s right, dimensions. As I recall, the top of the wheel was a little over waist high…make it 42 inches in diameter. The cart was just about that wide as well…let’s round ‘em up to four feet each. The tongue was probably eight feet total. I would imagine a donkey would have pulled this thing.

My railway is going to begin in France and end up in China…maybe I can modify it to look like a Chinese ox cart!

Planning your track can be as complex or as simple as you like. If you’re like me, you’ll probably draw it up on the back of an envelope and call it a day. But, for the purposes of teaching, I decided to get down to drawing in some detail. The more detail you do in the planning stages, the less trouble you’ll run into during construction.

Around my house, we joke about the adage “measure twice, cut once.” I’m always doing it backwards, because I tend to rush my projects more than I ought. Measure once, cut twice, cut again, throw the piece of wood away and start over. If it doesn’t come out the right length, who cares, nail it on anyway. That’s my motto. Square corners? What for?

I bring it up because you need to be careful in your track planning. Tiny mistakes in measurements can have drastic and very nasty results. Sometimes you can get away with “about a quarter inch”. Sometimes things will match up okay. But track needs to handled carefully, unless you’re good with a hacksaw. The worst thing I’ve done so far was to quasi-carefully measure the amount of track I needed, laid track all the way around the layout, until, at the very last, at my Promontory Point, I was a half inch short! The problem was a by-gosh-by-golly measurement somewhere, probably in a curve, that I just plain got wrong.

So, here we are in the digital age, and we can use computers to do our drafting for us. My father was a draftsman, and was a genius at using drafting machines and triangles and French curves to design whatever he wanted. His art disappeared with the advent of the PC and CAD software, but it was a joy to watch him work. Yesterday I reviewed three pieces of software, each available for free, that could do the job of drawing up your track plan. Two of them, CATrain and Googul Choo Choo 3D, didn’t have the degree of finesse required to make an accurate plan.

The third one, Google’s SketchUp, is extremely powerful. So powerful, in fact, as to be a little daunting in its presentation. The software is designed to create objects in three dimensions. If you’re building a shed for your garden, for example, the software lets you design and walk through the shed before you’ve put hammer to nail. There are several tools that work quite simply, but that, I’m certain, mean something important to architects, and will save them tons of time in their design work.

But track plans are traditionally two dimensional. That’s okay, because SketchUp let’s you change the angle of your view. You can set your angle so that you are looking straight down from above. What you draw, then, will be two dimensional, as if drawing your design on the ground.

Messing with it today, however, I discovered another way of thinking about that 2D track plan of yours. Sure, it’s 2D because it’s a plan. But what if you could raise the track to go up hills? What if you could actually raise the landscape around the tunnels? I tried it, with some success. The pictures at the top show the 3D rendering of my garden railway. It sits atop a two foot wall surrounding the south and west sides of my swimming pool. As you can see, the plan comes out pretty cool.

What hasn’t worked out well in SketchUp is landscaping. I have a mountain in my south division that is important, but I haven’t yet figured out how to give it dimension. SketchUp likes to fill in rectangles with a flat pane…you draw four lines it recognizes as forming a flat space and it applies a “filled” sheet over the space. It works great on panels, but fails to recognize what I consider solids in landscaping. For example, those angled panels at the south side of the layout are supposed to be rocks. Hmph.

You can do some amazingly sophisticated work with SketchUp, however. This drawing represents about two hours of work. There’s a story about Albert Einstein and an assistant trying to get into a locked file cabinet. They can’t find the keys, but figure they can pick the lock with a paper clip. These two rifle the office, looking for a paper clip. Along the way, Einstein finds the keys, but tosses them aside: he’s searching for a paper clip! That’s the danger with this kind of software: I’m trying to appease the software by making my track plan fit its parameters…after a while, you begin to wonder who’s really in control!

Again, planning your layout can be as simple or as complex as you like. Taking the time to make accurate measurements of your space, and carefully thinking your track plan through will reward you with an easy construction project. Or, you can do it my way…tearing up your track is almost as fun as trying to cut a section of flex track only half an inch long!

Yesterday I spouted off about the importance of planning your railroad. I did it without having a plan to share with you. I have the plan in my head, but not on paper.

So, I went to my favorite download site, www.downloads.com, and typed in “railroad track plan”, without the quotations. While a few railroad track planners popped up, most of the software offered helped you manage your plans and schedules for vacations and things. Oops.

The first freeware program I downloaded is called CATrain v 1.82. It’s a rough little program, but getting command of it takes about five minutes. I was able to draft out my railway crudely, but close enough to get an impression of how it works. As there is no scale adjustment, and no zoom, what you see is what you get. You can adjust polarities on the rails and then run trains, which is helpful for global planning. Interestingly enough, while there is no capability for creating scenery, there is a tool for building up your train consist. Weird, huh? Although it’s difficult to create a smooth or accurate curve, the grids are quite useful.

The second program I brought down is called GoogolChooChoo. It’s a 3D modeling program that lets you choose between Window’s Open GL or Windows Direct3D to render the image. It’s shareware. It’s a little more smooth than CATrain, but is a far cry from an accurate representation of what your track will look like.

It differs from CATrain in that it allows you some degree of terrain building, but only a small degree. In fact, when you use its built in generator to create terrain, it automatically assumes you mean mountains, and the train layout you created goes UNDER the terrain through a tunnel it generates. It’s a bit of a surprise on your first go-round, I can tell you.

Still, it’s a nice little program, certainly wonderful for the price. It’s a bit glitchy, shutting down on me three times in a row. But, beyond that, and beyond the limitations of scale, it does feature the nice chance to ride around on a train in an environment you created…for free!

Also for free, and most effective, was Google’s SketchUp program. If you’ve played with it, you know that it, too, is a 3D modeling program. I used it to design the sheds I’ll built in my yard, and to design a nifty dollhouse for my daughter.

It has a very comprehensive set of tools that will help you gauge distance and curvature exactly. The plan I drafted in SketchUp appears above. The program is a hog for space and memory, but runs very well and, despite an annoying tendency to join corners together when you don’t want it to, is a pleasure to run. It, too, is for FREE, which speaks well for it.

To create the plan at the top of the post, I created a plan in SketchUp to make sure I got the dimensions correct. Then I exported it as a JPEG file to my hard drive. I opened the JPEG in Paint and added the titles. It’s a little distorted, especially that turn in the northern division, because I cut and paste the image in Paint and wasn’t careful.

Paint will take you a long way in scenery design, I’m thinking. Any other drawing program will as well, I’m assuming.

So now I have a track plan as it exists today. But I am in the process of radically revising the railway, and so I need to revise the plan. I’ll share it with you as soon as it’s done.

I had promised to pour concrete today, but time got away from me. As soon as I do it, you’ll see the process and the results. Thanks for reading!