Layout Video Update 2018 vs. 2024

I recently posted a video to Youtube. Six minutes of the very latest 2024 look and feel of my Kingston's Hanley Spur HO-scale layout. By comparison, this two minutes taken in 2018 are tough to watch. Granted, it was extremely early on in the new Kingston iteration (changing over from Vermont).  Here are some screenshots to show the progress:

Hurricane trees (!) and structure stand-ins with a passing freight (2018 - above). By 2024, structures, billboards and backdrops are in place with a different CP freight in town:

Two more before-and-afters:

A cornucopia of CN work equipment has arrived in the still Vermont-y yard, with more uprooted scenery and the red-brick station kit that would become CN's Outer Station (2018 - above). By 2024, the yard was properly populated, backdrops and scenery in place,  and the passenger station busy:

Aerial View of the Other Side of Kingston

Oh, there's another side to Kingston besides the industrial waterfront trackage and industry I enjoy researching and modelling? Let's turn our back on the Hanley Spur part of town for a moment and look west. There's a university, prison, residential blocks, historic buildings and hospitals out there. Who knew?? 

Well, we all did, and we've all spent some time there (some of us years and years working), so when I received an electronic copy of this Wallace R. Berry original 16x20-inch image that was recently unframed and scanned in high-resolution, I had a lot to look at. I've looked at Kingston 'from both sides now'! Click on image for much larger view:

There are several interesting things in this fine photo. Some help to suggest its date:

• red arrow - vessel at PUC water plant (now Gord Downie Pier)
• green arrow - salvage vessel in Portsmouth Harbour - prior to 1976 Sailing Olympics repurposing
• blue arrow - Cataraqui Bay grain elevator
• yellow arrow - McArthur Hall/College (built between 1969 and 1971)
• orange arrow - County gaol and wall (demolished 1974)

And thanks to Stu's comment below, the new Richardson Stadium not being built yet. So I think we can confidently date this photo as taken in 1969 or 1970.

Collins Bay's Causeway Construction

Another post from Collins Bay, this one describing the realignment of Bath Road, Hillview Road and the Grand Trunk/Canadian National mainline tracks. (Whig clipping dated November 9, 1922 - top). This area has been a perennially dangerous crossing point, with many vehicle and pedestrian collisions, injuries and fatalities profiled in the Whig's pages. When the diversion was underway in June, 1923 CN stationed a flagman at the Collins Bay crossing. It was difficult for motorists to hear approaching trains due to steam drills and a small steam engine bringing in and removing material. Trains were restricted to 10 mph in the area until the diversion was completed.

The Hillview Road level crossing was closed in 1995 after Hillview Road was restricted to one-way northbound traffic. Between Collins Bay and the present Gardiners Road there were at least three private level crossings that have been closed in recent years, also following crossing incidents.

The May, 2011 issue of the Limelight newsletter published by the Kingston Historical Society (KHS - Vol 13 No 5) contained this excellent article by Collins Bay historian Stewart Renfrew. I found this comprehensive account using the KHS's useful Topic Index compiled by Paul Van Nest:

For future reference, the James Reid advertising supplement was actually titled "aswesawit", not "aswewait". Because who wants to be known as waiting for the undertaker?

Aerial views: 1953 (above) and 2004 (below) from Snapshot Kingston

An 1878 atlas image that seems to show the Grand Trunk crossing Bath Road (twice, once out of view to the right), the bay, and Collins Bay Road at left:

CN Property Plan of Hanley Spur

It took me awhile, but I finally got around to getting these CN property plan images from March, 1945 printed. Book customer Jeffrey Smith kindly emailed me pdf images of the CN property plan back in December, 2022. They marinated in my email inbox, perhaps getting better with age, until I finally hustled them over to Staples on a USB a couple of weeks ago, then expectantly picking them up today!  Look what we hath wrought:

How the images looked in the pdf viewer (above) - awesome! I had a tough time picturing just how big they were. I knew they were detailed and sizeable. When I rolled in to Staples an the copy centre clerk told me they would print out 120 inches in length, quick math told me that's 10 feet long! And that's printing them at the maximum paper width of 36 inches! We compromised at 5 feet long on 18-inch paper. There are three images, but I found one of them to be largely superfluous, so here are the two largest printed images on my family-room floor, with a one-foot ruler in the image, and my two feet edited out:

Close-ups. Telegraph lines, streets, railway (single, not double) lines, some buildings, and lots are shown:

"Ground zero" Cataraqui and Rideau Streets (above) and a little farther along Rideau, North Street:

CP's station across from City Hall (above) and CLC (below):

Under the River Street bridge:

Some floor-level iPhone images follow. Tete du Port (above), Montreal Street subway (below):

CN's Outer Station (above), CP's bridge over CN near Division Street (below):

Frontenac Floor & Wall Tile and Monarch Battery across the tracks from the Outer Station (above), Davis Tannery (below):

Now in the layout room: 

My 'Montreal Street Subway'

Until now, I unofficially called this little bridgespace the Continuous-Run Option (CRO). Though my HO-scale layout is officially point-to-point, with CN and CP lines beginning and ending in a schematic straight line, sometimes I want the trains to just run a bit. This CRO crosses the aisle leading into the layout, and it is removable. I snapped a photo of CN crews finishing up my project tonight. Read on to find what's new and what's the same after this build is in place:

One new thing is a new name. I'm going to call it the Montreal Street Subway, the namesake underpass that carried the prototype Montreal Street under the CN mainlines just east of the Outer Station. It actually leads directly to my HO scale Outer Station which was located on...Montreal Street. So the symbolism and the siting signalled spot-on synchronicity! Another unofficial name for this CRO, in its previous form, would be the Bridge of Death due to the danger of rolling stock plunging four feet to the unforgiving hard floor below. Things that are temporary often become permanent, and this little plank was no different. Held in place with four splice plates, its position was flexible and could be lifted out after the CRO piece of flex-track was removed first. Such lift-outs usually take place in the modelling off-season, when I'm enjoying the nice weather and not operating. But now, during modelling season, I'm operating and working on the layout nightly, so it stays in.

Before (above) and after (below). Surprisingly, I had very few casualties take the plunge with this benchwork in place ever since I ceded part of the layout room to my wife's craft space and reducing the layout footprint from 23x10 feet down to 11x10 feet, four layout iterations ago. I can remember maybe two unfortunate incidents. The unwritten layout rules were never park the Rapido locomotive nor the True Line Trains cabooses on the CRO!

High-level views Before (above) and After (below). Casting about for suitable material for the new crossing, I discounted several random boards found in the garage leftover lumber lounge as either too short, too narrow or too flimsy. The Goldilocks Principle comes to the layout room! Dispirited and disappointed, I sat down and spied a previous front-porch layout, the Lyttle-Redd Caboose Co. propped up in a remote corner of the layout room! Would it fit?

As I note in the above-linked post, this layout base was also a last remaining vestige of my childhood home in Amherstview. Hence the turquoise Formica laminate that had de-laminated over the years. But this thing was SOLID and fit the space, so out came the Sharpie. I marked some cut-lines, then out came the hand-saw. I severed both ends on the angle naturally leading from the corner of the layout across the aisle. That's the horizontal. Now the vertical. I needed the track to continue straight across, and had to find the correct level and height. I added together the thicknesses of the Formica piece and a square support piece I had sawed in two, then measured down from track height to attach the support pieces to the fascia.

I had seen some other modellers' experiences building CROs (also known as duck-unders or nod-under, layout height-dependent). Everyone wants a fancy hinge, a dependable drop-down, or some other over-engineered gizmo. The design challenge here is to build something strong enough to support a train, but flexible enough to move and not stenose my spine if I 'come up to soon' while negotiating the subway. I planned supports with pins allowing the 'floating' CRO to drop into place secured by the pins. While getting to that stage, I placed the support piece underneath the middle of the Formica piece, holding it in place with Scotch tape then driving a single Robertson (is there any other kind?) temporarily in the middle.

Did I mention temporary things becoming permanent already? I think I did. Once I removed the tape, I liked the free-floating, self-levelling, somewhat-adjustable bit of engineering I had unwittingly created. The view while entering the layout:

Just a bit of track work needed doing. I trimmed the CRO piece of track a bit for a better fit, screwing it to the CRO and ensuring track joiners could slip into place once the Montreal Street Subway was put in place. The height was good, and support on both sides was good, with a bit of flex horizontally because I WILL come up too soon or otherwise klutzily collide with the new Subway at some point. The finish of the counter-top underside actually matched my 'barnboard' Dollarama fascia sticker finish. And that bit of turquoise reminds me of 'home' so I just might keep it for awhile. No Last Spike here, but the work has been done well in every way, if I do say so myself!

City of Kingston Street-sweeper

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? This phrase may date to the seventeenth Century and the pedantic theological discussions of the day, but it resonates with me today - how many rocks can sit on the surface of one of my HO scale streets? After publishing the previous post on the Rideau Public School structure just installed on the layout, a sharp-eyed fellow modeller mentioned the gravel evident on the street and that I should get a street-sweeper! (Previous to the plumbing supply house, this location had hosted the Sowards coal office and access road!) I just happened to have a street-sweeper on hand, so I quickly posed it as if it were doing the clean-up:

Compare the before (above) with the after (below) and down below you'll find more on this transformation!

This 1999+ Matchbox street-sweeper is typical of their products that catch my eye in Wal-Mart, Toys R Us or even the local dollar store, while I'm reliving my second (kids) or third (grand-kids) childhood! They're inexpensive ($1.00-$1.50) and can be really good stand-ins for higher-priced scale models $25-40, if they are in fact available). In this case, it's an Elgin Pelican-model street-sweeper, scaled at 1:74, a little larger than HO scale which is 1:87 (prototype:model ratio i.e. 1 foot = 87 HO scale feet).

The Matchbox street-sweeper features moving parts: wheels that turn, a collection basket that raises, inverts, and dumps, and two side rotating brushes. The more I looked at my quick photo with the 'Metro Disposal' paint scheme above, the more I knew I needed to improve on it. (Though I chose to not pose a figure at either of the steering-wheels roughly modelled in the cab. This would have entailed disassembly and possible desecration of the model!) Also not modelled, the whirring noise and attendant Schroeder-like dust-clouds.

With only vague recollections of seeing a City of Kingston street-sweeper working downtown, and no prototype photos to refer to, I went with an overall cream-coloured paint job. Other options were overall white, or the long-applied turquoise-and-white scheme used on a variety of city works vehicles. I replaced the front toy-like wheels, painted all the wheel hubs, the basket, and most surfaces, then painted the brushes and tires grey. A coat of dilute grimy grey coated many of the just-painted surfaces. I touched up the running lights and top flashing light, hand grabs, leaving the stencilled equipment number at cab bottom. 

Posed in action, the basket comes out and gets dumped into a waiting truck:

The street-sweeper is ready to clean those messy Swamp Ward streets! Now, to add a tiny city crest to the cab...

I was lucky to not have this garish paint scheme to cover over with light coloured paint! The Matchbox street-sweeper has been produced in at least a half-dozen paint schemes, from purple to green to gold, tan and white!

And as Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed in his famous 'sweep streets' speech: 

"If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of Heaven and Earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well."

From School to Plumbing and Back Again!

In an earlier post I profiled my building of the Rideau Street School/King's Town School structure. I had made a point of trying to appropriately span the decades of this still-standing school's life. This skewed the structure's guise to my modelled era circa 1970. It was constructed as a school in 1868, later becoming a commercial building before returning to its original purpose as a school in 2004.  In fact, my grandchildren attend the school and my daughter-in-law teaches there. But in 1970, it would have been a plumbing supply house, and that's what it is now, settled in on Rideau Street, sidewalk, scenery and all.

I plainly lettered the building sign and a commercial pickup truck for Warren Plumbing Supply.

Neighbourhood ladies heading to the store....and back.

Having built the structure 'on spec' for the enjoyment of family, I decided after putting that much work into it, that it deserved a permanent home on my Hanley Spur HO-scale layout. Rideau Street is definitely an area that is central to my modelling. So, even though these structures are not railway-related, they are 'core' to setting the scene, and to representing the part of Kingston I'm recreating!

This is where those ladies were heading for their groceries!