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."