Model Railroading > Fun with sticks

It's sadly true that scratchbuilding has lost a lot of favor among a large part of our hobbyist crowd, and that's a shame. There's something deeply satisfying about cutting up some sticks and gluing them together to build something, and many of today's model railroaders will never be able to enjoy or understand that.

Photo 1 - Fresh out of the stain bottle, 2x12 and 4x12 stripwood colored in a pint of rubbing alcohol and a teaspoon of black india ink.

Photo 2 - The enginehouse base with Micro Engineering code 55 track glued in place. The short cross pieces are scale 8x8 timbers, and 2x12 boards laid along the tracks come almost up to the railheads. Scale 4x12 timbers will be added directly to the ties between the rails and those, too, are just below railhead height for interference-free operation.


Jeff Johnston
www.trainvideosandparts.com

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I'm with you on the satisfaction of kitbashing and scratchbuilding, but look at society as a whole. As a society we are losing our abilities to design and build because everything comes prefabricated. Fewer and fewer people buy lumber and build what they need. If they want a treehouse, they just buy one. I have a background that includes design and CAD/Drafting, so I can build a building from scratch. But the number of people that have those abilities seems to be dwindling.

Ted Curphey
Ontario, OR

I agree with Ted, Modelers are a dieing breed

What I've noticed is that the cost of materials to build Ted's tree house often meets or exceeds the cost of the kit. I recently built a large backdrop warehouse structure that cost well over a hundred dollars in materials. I've no doubt Walthers could sell it for much less, with better overall detail.

Cost aside, I still prefer to do my own thing. I need that creative outlet.

Chris

How true... Even at our club that was known for it's scratch building. I was taught when I joined some 27 years how to hand lay track & scratch build switches. Now, I offer to teach some of our newer members this skill & there is no interest. "Let's just buy flex track or do Fast Tracks"... "Why waste time doing hand laid"... Very sad...

jburek Wrote:
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> How true... Even at our club that was known for
> it's scratch building. I was taught when I joined
> some 27 years how to hand lay track & scratch
> build switches. Now, I offer to teach some of our
> newer members this skill & there is no interest.
> "Let's just buy flex track or do Fast Tracks"...
> "Why waste time doing hand laid"... Very sad...


High quality flex track has far more realistic detail than handlaid track, which typically has a spike head showing only every fourth or fifth tie. I'd never think about hand laying track, even if I cared with the bother, just because today's flex track looks far more protoypically correct.

Based on my screen name, it should be obvious I know how to build things and I do plan on scratch building my shelf layout. All the structures are on AutoCAD. In fact, the entire layout has been drawn full-sized. When I start to build, I will just plot the drawings to scale.

But I don’t think the demise of scratch building is totally due to lack of interest; it is time that gets in the way. Some of my structure drawings are 10- to 15-years old, but still nothing has been built. It’s time. When you regularly work over 50 hours a week, flex-track and Fast Tracks begin to look real good.

" ... it is time that gets in the way. ..."

Arkytek nailed it. Time is a huge factor in modeling these days, especially when it comes to gluing together sticks and similar endeavors.

We model the Sugar Pine Lumber Company / Minarets & Western Railway circa September 1927. It's a fairly obscure logging line that extended from Pinedale, California, into the Sierra mountains. It was out of business and gone by 1932, so it was in operation well before the crush of railfans that thoroughly documented the later operations like the Westside. Photos and data for modeling are fairly rare for many parts of the operation.

I'm very lucky that all but one of its locomotives were imported in brass because I don't scratchbuild locomotives. There are no kits for SPLCo structures or rolling stock. Everything is either kitbashed from an existing model or scratchbuilt. I want to build an accurate model railroad but I also want to see the day when we can hold operating sessions, so fidelity to scale detail versus getting something done before I'm far older and grayer is a time tradeoff. I kitbash when I can to save time, I make rubber molds and cast urethane parts to save time when I need many duplicates of an item, such as the log bunks for my kitbashed Tichy log flats, again in the interest of time.

But when I need just one model for the layout -- such as the log pond sinker derrick shown in the photo -- I happily carve out the time to round up the materials and give it a go. This one used Sheepscot etched-brass crane boom parts, a huge time saver. But doing the model was well worth the time invested as it will be a centerpiece of the mill area.

Time can be a problem, yes, and if something like scratchbuilding is a passion you make time for it. It would be good to see more of today's modelers at least give it a try.

Jeff Johnston
www.trainvideosandparts.com

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Nothing like building unique models. I applaude your modeling skills

Javier Cervantes
Castle Rock , CO

Beautiful modeling Jeff!

> I want to build an accurate model railroad but I also want to see the day when we can hold operating sessions, so fidelity to scale detail
> versus getting something done before I'm far older and grayer is a time tradeoff.

Well said. I face the same struggles. It can be easy to get bogged down in details that, in the bigger picture, are unnoticeable on the finished model, so I'm learning to be more aware of those and omitting them where it makes sense. For those one-off scenes, though, there's nothing like the satisfaction of scratchbuilding to really capture our mind's eye view of a prototype. In the attached prototype and model pics, I'm sure I could have found stand-in kits to capture a generic enginehouse look in this area, but scratching all these structures and details (except for the old Silver Streak 8000g tank car body used for the left-most sand tower) resulted in a scene that takes me back to a lot of pleasant visits to the prototype.

> But doing the model was well worth the time invested as it will be a centerpiece of the mill area.
>
> Time can be a problem, yes, and if something like scratchbuilding is a passion you make time for it.

I actually don't view the _methods_ used in scratchbuilding to take that much more time than building from a kit. Looking at your outstanding derrick above, for example, I can't imagine that having it in kit form would have been a breeze to build either. In many cases, a modeler could probably measure and cut a part from styrene stock just as quickly as they could cut it off a sprue and clean up the flash. I think the real difference is that many of the things we choose to scratchbuild are prototypes that we "need" simply _because_ they're so complex, unique, or otherwise recognizable in setting a scene, and they'd be slower to build whether our parts source was a kit box or an Evergreen sleeve. But if we have to have them, we take the time, regardless of how the project is sourced. On the other hand, easy-to-build kits are often based on prototypes that would also be easy to scratchbuild.

I say that to encourage those who've been fearful of scratchbuilding to give it a try. The scene in the pics below includes my first scratchbuild attempts, and I was surprised at how enjoyable it was.

Joe Atkinson
Council Bluffs, IA
www.iaisrailfans.org/../Sub4WestEnd

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Excellent modeling, Joe, very nice prototype depiction. Great fun to work from a photo to achieve this type of results.

These shots are the log dump at the SPLCO mill in Pinedale, again, no kits, so I had to scratchbuild everything. The rollway and concrete footings I did as urethane castings for the benefit of a couple friends who also model this line, as well as being able to sell a few.

Jeff

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> Great fun to work from a photo to achieve this type of results.

Thanks very much Jeff. I couldn't agree more! That's one of the main things that makes this hobby so much fun for me - being able to preserve and re-live a favorite time, immune to change.

> These shots are the log dump at the SPLCO mill in Pinedale, again, no kits, so I had to scratchbuild everything. The rollway and concrete
> footings I did as urethane castings for the benefit of a couple friends who also model this line, as well as being able to sell a few.

That's super impressive work Jeff. I'd love to see more of your layout.

Joe Atkinson
Council Bluffs, IA
www.iaisrailfans.org/../Sub4WestEnd

Sorry don't agree. Flex track looks too uniform, too perfect. All ties the same color & too straight. We stain our ties 2 different colors then randomly glue them down using a jig. You can't beat the look of the natural wood either. It just "looks" real despite the lack of spikes every tie. Once ballasted the look is very genuine. Just my opinion as everyone has their own preferences...