Placing Place d'Armes

One of the largest swaths of my Hanley Spur HO layout is the central peninsula on which I've situated CN's Wellington Street freight shed and trackage extending through the scene to CLC and the Kingston Shipyards. But how best to utilize this fertile, fallow space? Today, I made some changes! The opening portal to the layout, nominally Place d'Armes is right at this corner, and the continuous loop (foreground, top photo) and track to the freight shed (curving, top photo) are very visible. Actual billboard and signage taken from vintage photos set the stage.

Place d'Armes, comprising paper, modelling clay and wooden timbers now opens the way to the peninsula, as CN 3120 'heads for the shed'. That grey structure will soon become the Bajus Brewery (above). Compare to last year's video capture in which Millard & Lumb occupied this space adjacent to Sowards Coal. Millard & Lumb, too, has been relocated to a more prominent place:

At road level, 3120 passes some sectionmen with Millard & Lumb and Sowards' visible down the track. I'm looking forward to showing more of life on Wellington Street through this portal.

Boats on Flat Cars

Back in the Athearn blue-box era, I always thought it was a bit hokey to see their Boat On Flat Car (BOFC) kit. No longer - once I came across this photo of the motor vessel Aylmer being loaded or unloaded from Chicago & North Western flatcar 42543 at the Kingston shipyards in June, 1949:

-from George Lilley fonds, Queen's University Archives

Hanley Spur portable layout display at Railfair 2019

Volunteering at today's second annual Railfair hosted by ARK, it was my job to politely hold off the early-birds until opening hour of 10:00. ARK members Kayleigh Hunter, Kurt Vollenwyder, Andrew Chisholm and I were at the door as the last few exhibitors and first few attendees arrived. All was in order, so it was time to check out the show! Making my way into the rear room at the Royal Canadian Legion Branch No. 560 on Montreal Street, I noticed a familiar-looking couple checking out our ARK Hanley Spur Portable Layout two-table display - my brother and his wife!

Right next-door was ARK member Grant LeDrew and his Kingston Shipyards module. Grant mentioned that he too had been archiving, and that there were 23 buildings on the shipyard site!  He's included several photos that show prototype views.

The more that I looked into Grant's display, the more I spotted the many details he has included. He got the lettering just right on those gantry cranes that extended into Ontario Street:

 Next door is the current Pumphouse Steam Museum:

 Grant's upright display showing historic photos and his modelling process:

 Characteristic coal piles dot the waterfront:

Not shown is Grant's lift-in flooded drydock which includes a tugboat. In this view, the drydock has been drained:

 Looking down Ontario Street toward City Hall. CPR 2468 is just visible:

ARK president Dave Cook printed off this insurance map plan of the first two other modules we're planning at Rideau and Cataraqui Streets. Dave also added track and rolling stock, and my National Grocers and Bailey broom factory (not its best side) added to the scene:

Continuing down Montreal Street after the show, progress on the Bailey broom factory redevelopment included new roof and wall:

 I'm going to try to use this for a backdrop of the woolen mill:

ARK member Bob Farquhar was moving a tote full of rolling stock at extremely attractive prices. My purchases fill my need for more cars for oil, steel products and coal on my layout!

ARK Railfair chair Paul Hunter's modern-era layout was nearby:

Concise History of the Kingston Shipyards

Though it's not mentioned in this excellent history, the Grand Trunk Railway was authorized to build a siding to the shipyards premises in July, 1915.

from: Finding Aid for the Kingston Shipyard Collection, Marine Museum of the Great Lakes

Ready for Railfair!

We have two tables available for tomorrow's second annual Railfair train show. Above is the display board I'm bringing to back up one of them: chock-full of photos, maps, text and interpretive goodies for show attendees. Stay tuned for some photo updates from the show.

Club Sandwiches at the Club Meeting

One thing I really like about ARK meetings is the venue - Denny's! Another thing I like is perusing the menu...or not. First choice - will it be breakfast for dinner or dinner for dinner? Very often, it's the club sandwich for me. With fries. Easy to ingest while engaging in discussion about trains and such! But what about those sandwich sticks that hold the stacked sandwichial structure together? Consigned to the kitchen scrap heap? NO!

I stacked the collected ones I brought home and decided to re-use them. My waterfront modelled locale always needs fences, so with the help of a few tools, it was fence time:

Cutting them to a near-uniform length, aligning them and adding stringers and it was time for a snack while the glue set. Sadly, my snack was not a deliciously delectable Denny's delight, only in my dreams. Painting or weathering remains, but here is the finished product sandwiched in at the end of my freight shed trackage!

What some have called environmentally-friendly or slow-modelling! Actually building stuff.

Hanley Spur in Jeopardy?

The TV show, that is. Jeopardy Clue Crew's Sarah was onboard Boston's Marine Two this week, for the category 'Fireboats of Boston'. The Hanley Spur fan in me recognized that this vessel was produced by MetalCraft Marine, located on the former site of Canadian Dredge & Dock, on the Inner Harbour. This plucky little firefighter maintains the long legacy of shipbuilding in the former Davis drydock site, adjacent to Kingston's waterfront trackage! Not mentioned in the clue was this bit of history. What is...

Railfair 2019 is Here!

Well, it's almost here. The second annual Kingston train show hosted by the Associated Railroaders of Kingston (ARK) will be held at 734 Montreal Street on Sat., Nov. 23. Our ARK Hanley Spur module group met this morning to plan our display. The Gothic windows of St James Anglican Church let in lots of light as show signs were being prepared:

At the same time, other members of the module group discussed what our display will include. Though we have no finished modules yet, Grant will be bringing his Kingston Shipyards module. We also plan to have my Bailey Broom factory, and 1:1 paper trackplan of our first two modules, as well as information on the prototype Hanley Spur and artifacts.

Most meetings of our Hanley Spur group have been graciously hosted by group member Andrew's (that's not St Andrew!) St James Anglican Church. A central, well-used and welcoming environment!

Kingston City Directories

In the process of searching through the Queen's University Archives, there is a short waiting period for the day's materials to be retrieved by the very helpful staff. I use that time to do more sleuthing. In this case, a shelf of Kingston City Directories often grabs my attention. Being nearby, I page through them for some neat nuggets of information. Here are two very random, but very interesting snippets. If you needed to phone Kingston's CLC plant, the information was therein presented (top photo).

A sample page showing Kingston's CN and CP facilities (below). Throughout the pages of these directories, various formats of listings i.e. by name, also list occupations of Kingston householders. So many were employed by old-time but vital commercial enterprises like railways, the CLC, the woolen mill, oil and coal dealerships and many, many more. A coal mine of information!

One Year, One Hundred Posts, One Layout

I found myself downtown, at Ground Zero for the Kingston & Pembroke (later, CP) operations into downtown Kingston. Parking in a particularly sun-dappled, memory-soaked, nostalgia-nuanced parking spot, I was directly across from the smokebox and stack of CPR 1095, stuffed and mounted since 1967 (top photo by Notable Travels). The ex-K&P station and City Hall were visually stacked up in a parallel series of tangible tranches of history.

Extrinsically, the nostalgic in me tried to imagine the hoot of vessels' steam whistles in the harbour, the heavy clank of industrial activity, and the hustle and bustle of what would have been...one hundred years ago, give or take a few decades!

Intrinsically, the modeller in me thought back on the genesis of my basement HO scale Hanley Spur layout, our Associated Railroaders of Kingston Hanley Spur portable layout group, and the one-hundredth blog post on this blog, all of which took transpired in the last year alone. Bringing my modelled locale home, after many years away in Winnipeg, Vancouver and Vermont! A real hands-on Hanley spur year!

Our tax dollars well-spent, the City of Kingston rejuvenated, rebuilt and repositioned 'The Spirit of Sir John A.' and now she fairly gleams in the morning sun.

Photo by The Passionate Hiker

Switching the Freight Shed - a Great New Deal!

My switching of the ex-Grand Trunk, CN freight shed at Wellington Street and Place d'Armes used to involve a full change: 4-6 'old' cars pulled, with 4-6 'new' cars spotted. Boring.

So, I decided to try another approach. A new deal! Dealing out the car cards of the old cars, I turn them upside down and shuffle them, drawing out the corresponding number of new cars I'm bringing from the Outer Station yard. In this operating session, they were three in number. I placed the car cards with the old cars for the sake of illustration:

Then, it's a matter of shuffling the cars around the two freight shed tracks, pulling the old cars and adding them to the switcher consist, while placing the new cars along with the remaining, not-pulled old cars:

The only rule in place here is that since cars might be unloaded using portable bridges between tracks, 40-foot and 50-foot cars must be spotted beside each other to ensure access when switching is completed. I use the nearby lead and team tracks (at bottom of photos above) to hold cars during switching.

This new deal makes it much more interesting to pull and spot the freight shed!

Modelling the Davis Drydock

Ever since I'd worked Canadian Dredge & Dock into my list of industries to include on my Hanley Spur layout, I was dogged by the question - What about the dry dock? Besides dredging, vessel construction and repairs were a big chunk of CD&D's business. While vital to the prototype operation, would it be vital to mine? Looking at a 1924 fire insurance map, the then-Davis operation DRY DOCK (centre) was fairly surrounded by railway tracks and spurs: both CN and CP lines to the waterfront, the CP roundhouse, CN freight sheds, later oil tanks and coalyards:

A proposed location (above) which I then marked out with Sharpie (below) and the curved bow end, using an age-old kerosene bottle from some long-forgotten hardware store long before WHMIS regulations:

The prototype dry dock was 200 feet long, around 12 feet deep. I had much less room than that to work with, and the good news that many of the boats I've seen photos of in drydock were much, much shorter. So I got out my Mastercraft multi-tool, hoping to take a bite out of my plywood layout-top, realizing that the structural integrity of same depended on a 2x2 just behind the layout fascia. Marked out and making the cut:

I should have issued a seismic activity warning to the HO scale citizens of the Swamp Ward. Many of them fell over, vehicles moved over one parking spot, but fortunately no freight cars derailed! The resulting U-shaped cavity:

I reused the cut-out piece for the bottom of the drydock. I simply screwed it to the bottom of the 2x2 in foreground. Didn't seem deep enough. Cut and added another 2x2. Too deep? Oh well, I can always review that decision later. To produce the walls of the drydock, I used a piece of corrugated cardboard which was easy to bend over edge of layout to produce the bow-curved end of the drydock:

Not long enough! Got another one. Then I used Robertson screws to screw outwards, the cardboard in to the ground-level plywood, then more to screw inwards, holding the cardboard to the cut-out piece at bottom:

I then placed the end-gate and will cover up that offending 2x2 with a walkway or some fake water! The resulting drydock, so far (below). I placed my plasticene tugboat on makeshift blocks and brought in the cranes that would be used to lift materials in and out. I liked the irregular look of the cardboard just above ground level. More scenicking to follow!

A few prototype photos for inspiration. A Stefan Nybom shot of the scene from atop a dredge:

And his corresponding shot from atop the Esso oil tanks. The curve of the bow section of drydock is plainly visible:

Thirty-nine years ago, my Dad and I were driving around Wellington Street on a cloudy November morning and caught the CD&D tug Bagotville up on blocks. Note to self...add a safety railing so no HO scale dockworkers tumble in!