 I'm Michelle Patterson and the July What's Neat starts right now. The What's Neat Show is sponsored by Caboose, sharing our passion for trains since 1938. This is the What's Neat Show for July of 2018. I'm your host Ken Patterson and this month we've got a really good show. First of all we take a look at Steve Mann's wonderful Chicago Northwestern layout in Acho scale. It's so big it's got open pit mining. We also take a peek at Bill White's gorgeous G scale layout. We built this one indoors and absolutely tricked it out with detail. For layout construction this month, I built a brand new lift out section for my main entrance way on my layout, something functional and small and I really like how it came out this month for the segment of construction for What's Neat. Also the last thing we look at is Ron Perry. He comes all the way down here from Canada and shows us a beautiful Chinese architecture type building that he had built using photographs. You also see this gorgeous auto rack next to me right here. This is a G scale, 129 scale auto rack, something I've never seen before that looked fantastic in my layout room and we do an outdoor photo shoot expose with this this month and five others to go with it. One thing I do want to say is thank you so much to our sponsor Caboose out in Lakewood, Colorado. You know that wonderful train store where so many customers have stopped in and said they've heard about the store on What's Neat. So if you're coming through the state to go to the NMRA national or if you're just on a summer vacation in Colorado, be sure to check them out. Caboose in Lakewood, Colorado, customer service, absolute fantastic. And that's the lineup for this show for July 2018 What's Neat. For this layout construction segment of What's Neat, I built this four foot long lift out section for my layout about five or six years ago and I did a video on one of the previous What's Neat shows on this but I'm kind of tired of it. Now it's made out of foam which is wrapped in plywood and it's bullet proof and it's never warped. But as you've seen me build other lift out sections in the past year or so, we've discovered there's simpler, easier ways to build it and I really don't need scenery here. So the plan is I'm going to take this section out and I want to replace it with a section that's made out of simple three quarter inch plywood. I want it to be about four inches wide. I might stain it and finish it but I'm really more concerned with simplicity. I want to simply be able to lift it out, put it back into place, drop in my wire leads and run a train right away. And plus, if it's only four inches wide, it should be a lot easier to duck under than something like this. So let's see how this segment turns out. I started the project by removing the old lift out section. It was held into place by four door hinges and pins. Removing the pins frees this section from the layout. I also unplugged the microphone jack which brings power to this section. I thought I would use this same door hinge technique to attach the new sections into the layout but this plan changed as you will see further into this video. I placed the lift out section on my workbench and covered it up with a scrap piece of brown packing paper. I then pinned the paper into place on top of the module so that it would not move around. As I used a crayon to mark through the paper, exactly where the rail tops run through the seam. Creating a template of sorts of the complete track flow on the diorama. I cut this template to shape using scissors, making the right of way about five inches wide. I then taped the template into a three quarter inch thick piece of plywood and marked the lines two inches away from the center of the rails to the outside of the wood where we will cut the wood making the shape of our new lift out section about five inches wide. Then using a jigsaw, I cut the new lift out section out of the plywood. I test fit this into place and drew final marking lines with a pencil underneath just to ensure a perfect fit into its location. Now note the T ends on the plywood. This was a hinge mounting platform and as you will see on later on in this video, I cut those off because again, plans on this project seem to change constantly as I develop my ideas on building this on the fly. I used one by four dimensional lumber forming the uprights, which will form our foundation for the lift out section level and smooth. I placed a piece of track onto the new lift out section and the rail heights matched up exactly perfect on both sides. As we are heading in the right direction so far on this project. I did go back and cut off those T wings that we were talking about on the plywood. I cut them off of each end as these will not be necessary. I created a lap joint which will allow the lift out section to sit atop of the existing wood base in the area and eliminate any side to side movement. This was clamped until the glue dried. I did this to both ends making a solid and smooth transition for the track. I attached the lift out plywood to the one by four base with wood screws and wood glue. I also attached the lap joint plywood to the one by four with wood screws and glues performing this process on both sides of the lift out section. I then drilled two three-eighths inch holes through the three-quarter inch plywood. These holes will be the attachment method using three-eighths inch steel pins that I found at the hardware store. These pins fit through the holes making for a very strong attachment point to the existing plywood on my layout. Now moving back to the workbench I ran quarter inch oak plywood cut to fit along both sides of the lift out section forming a protective wall in the event that a freight car would fall over. It came out to be about a half of an inch high and it flowed perfectly with the main line on both sides of the module. This was held into place with screws and glues and a lot of clamps to help along. I then stained the wood to match my studio's color theme and then applied four coats of polyurethane to the wood to seal it. Wet sanding between coats for a smooth finish. This clear coat will prevent any warpage of the wood from the humidity in the area by the door as this lift out section spans almost five feet and I do not want it to warp. I soldered together two sections of track being about a foot longer than what we will need for the area so that I could form a smooth and flowing curve when bent into place on top of the newly placed lift out section. I cut the track to fit with a flush cutting track nipper. Once I had the track curved to match the adjoining modules, I attached the track with a painter's knife and a smooth coat of DAP quick seal plus flexible adhesive to hold things into place. I then carefully set the track into this glue, carefully lining up the ends of the rails perfectly on both ends to match. At this point everything's got to be perfect before the glue cures. You've got a good 30 minutes to work with it, but the glue did cure and clear in about two hours. I then masked the lift out section with masking tape, leaving only the track exposed. I painted the track with a little bit of Rust-Oleum Coma-Flage Brown spray paint. Removing the tape revealed our newly weathered main line. Turning my attention to bringing power into the lift out section, I made a small box from scrap pieces of quarter inch oak plywood holding this together with wood glue. I drilled a hole into the wood box to accept a two conductor plug-in quarter inch microphone jack. Screwing the nut on tight with a nut driver, the female jack is now mounted permanently into our new wooden box. I drilled two small holes through the wood to accept power feed wires, soldered to the track. The other ends of the two inch wires were soldered to the terminals on the female microphone jack in our wood box. Now the box will fit perfectly up under the module and will be glued into place, ready to accept power when the quarter inch male power connector is plugged up into the box, providing current to our new lift out section. I applied Woodland Scenic's fine gray ballast through the main line right away and carefully worked this into the ties with an artist brush. I then glued the ballast into place by dribbling directly out of the bottle the Woodland Scenic Scenic Cement, directly onto the center of the track and allowing it to permeate the ballast and soak its way to the outsides. This worked really well with no mess. I allowed about four hours for this to dry and when it was dry it held the ballast firm into place just like cement. And just like that I had a new and simple lift out section, held into place with steel pins, making for a fast removal or install, winding the rails up perfectly every time and being easy to duck under. Another successful and functional project and that ends this layout construction segment of What Sneed. For this segment of What Sneed I've got Ron Perry all the way from Canada and Ron's brought a lot of an array of beautiful buildings here, brick buildings, frame buildings and this building that represents a building that's in China, an actual prototype that you build from photographs. And I think what you've captured on this that I want you to talk about Ron is the lack of building codes, the fact that you absolutely captured it. Look at the tile wall. Look at the individual tiles one at a time, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell me about the stucco that you made for those tiles, the grout. The grout is made from basic dirt, dust. It's not dirt, it's the dust that's on the dirt. So I guess the basic secret is you throw your dirt in a bucket and it's the yellow water. It's not the stuff at the bottom of the bucket you're looking for. So you pour that yellow water off and save that because that's the good stuff. You want the sediment? Yeah, the sediment. And you let you dry out that sediment? Yeah, it takes days and days but you can get lots of it all in one shot. And that's how you made the grout and did you put individual, it's a styrene? Yep, styrene. So 12 by 12 tiles. Now it looks like they needed to do an addition so they literally built another house on top of another room on top of the roof of this house and you captured that effect I mean very well. Thank you. Down to the tarp, the blue tarp and the weights to hold it down. And this is the architecture that you see in China. And I can only say that it's a lack of building codes. It creates such a beautiful array of architecture in one piece like this. Yeah, it's a real mosaic. Tell us about the stucco on this side. How did you do that? So for this side I laid down some weld bond glue like I always do because it's perfectly clear and if it doesn't show like if you don't get enough dirt on it, the glue doesn't show white or opaque, right? So you put your weld bond glue on, you put a little bit of your soot dirt. I don't know what to call it yet. I don't know. And then you spray it with wet water, which is water with glycerin or dish soap. And that will pull the glue through the dirt and then, you know, you let it dry and that's what you get. Boy Ron, thank you for sharing this. Now I know you all see other buildings in the background and we're going to talk about those in the August What's Need, right? Right. So thanks for coming by, Ron. Thank you. For this segment of What's Need, I'm with Steve Mann in Aurora, Colorado. And I got to tell you what, Steve, I am looking at my dream layout in your house. You've got a double-decker layout here that captures everything that I see in mining. I see the Midwest. I see Nebraska. I see various segments of the country here. Tell us about the spectacular layout. It's a model basically after the Chicago Northwestern. It has the kind of the Midwest, a lot of the industries, meatpacking plant, a lot of grain elevators, just all sorts of switching on that part. As I kind of move west, I get out to Wyoming and I've got coal mine and run-through trains that I do. The layout is really designed as an operating layout. So I usually have nine or 10 people running trains and just try to keep everybody busy. I love this little neighborhood over here with all the houses in it. It seems like we got the detail up front and the trains in the back. It's a perfect spot to put a neighborhood. And tell me about this P&H mining machine. I see this mine. Yeah, the mine I bought years ago, I got it on the internet. It's a diecast shovel and I just wanted to kind of add more detail to the mine and make it a reason for the mine being there. On my layout, I have an open area on my second level that has no place to put a mountain to hide a pillar, because I have a metal pillar in there. And so I have a coal mine here and I decided to have a coal loader with the big silo here. And I decided the way to hide the other one is put a second silo next to it and then put the conveyors going up to them. So I had to split the back of the PVC pipe. This is a large PVC pipe and so I could kind of wrap it around the pole. And it's just very simple and I put a little weathering on to make it look like they pour the concrete in layers and to give it something a little bit unique. No, that's fantastic. I love these little towns and you've got this valence lighting underneath. Tell me about that. Yeah, we just took regular utility lights and took them apart and just stretched out the fluorescent bulbs. So that actually gives me about 10 feet for each utility light. Han, what era is this? It's the mid-90s, so it's before the Northwestern was acquired by the UP. So when you guys get together and operate this, about how many hours? We'll run probably four hours at a time. This is an awesome layout. Now have you been on a tour recently for anything in Colorado? NMRA, narrow gauge. Well, we had the national narrow gauge was here in Colorado and I had my house open house for that. Was involved in a Rocky Ops session where we had people operating from different parts of the country and mine was one of the layouts on that tour. Man, I love this layout. Thank you so much for sharing this with us for the viewers of What's Neat. Okay, thank you. Hello, this is Michael Gross and you're watching What's Neat with Ken Patterson. For this segment of What's Neat, I'm outside doing a photo shoot today with some beautiful models, something we've never seen on the show before. Now, I'm using a 12 foot long diorama that I built better than 15 years ago and never have finished or had a reason to use it until today. So I plan on ballasting and finishing the grass and making this look beautiful on a future show. But check out the models that are sitting on this diorama. These are large scale, 129 scale auto racks, fully enclosed auto racks, detail, chain, end doors that open, see through screens. Who knew that beautiful models like this existed in our hobby? This is something that's available from Trains USA out of Massachusetts. They've got a nice website, but check out these models, how nice they could look on a mantle or in a layout room. You don't have to have a garden railroad to appreciate something like this. And I had to share it with you because that's the whole point of the show. When I find something really exciting, I got to talk about it and this is cool. So I just wanted to share this with you on what's neat. For this segment of what's neat, I've got Bill White here in Littleton, Colorado. And I'm looking at his gorgeous indoor G scale layout. I know we always build these outside, but you've built this beautiful work of art inside Bill. Tell me a little bit about this gorgeous work of art, Bill. I always liked, I'm more of a modeler than I am a operator. So it's the modeling part of the hobby that I really enjoy. It's easier to do modeling, nice modeling, important modeling, in the larger scales. Living where I do and there's some of my friends in what have you have done this sort of thing before. And it's like, wow, I love that. I love it. And that's what I want to do. So that's sort of what got me into it. But the nice thing about it is you can build really, really, really cool stuff in the larger scale. And plus it's a larger scale and you actually have to do a little bit of, you know, really modeling. You really have to model. Yeah. O-Scale has a lot of that. It's really nice because there's so much available. There's so much really nice stuff available. So, but if you know where to look and how to do things in what have you, you can get a lot done in this scale. Your attention to detail. It turns out really cool. You like airplanes too. I see you've got this beautiful little setup here where they're fueling and getting this airplane ready to take off. I just see Amelia Earhart somewhere in the scene. And it's just absolutely amazing the degree of detail. I mean, every single panel on your fence is painted an individual color. And your buildings, you're using paper for some of these buildings. And it's magnificent. Yeah. If you want the boarding house here is paper. This brick isn't really brick. It's just paper. I have discovered, again, living around here and some of the other modelers that live around here and discovered that for that sort of thing, paper just works perfect. It works. It really, really does. It makes it come off. I mean, this is a regular plastic model. But you put the two of them together and you really don't notice a whole lot of difference. Right. And so plus paper is a lot easier. And if you use the right kind of brick paper and what have you, I mean, it looks great right out of the box, is it? Or now I see a rolling stock. I see a bunch of Bachman material here. And do you have other? What kind of rolling stock and engines are you using? It's all plastic. There's a Bachman LGBT. You name it. If it's something that I think is going to work by it. It's mostly painted in detail and what have you. It's a variety of different scales. The box cars are 1 to 24. But you know, you got 1 to 24, 1 to 22 and a half, and 1 to 20.3 are the three major scales and large scale. Correct. And you have to be kind of careful. But if you are, you can sort of mix them all together and make it work. Yes. Yes, you can. And so I basically just generally choose stuff because A, it interests me. And B, it's going to, it's the right size. It's going to work. Now we're going to walk over this way and look at your gorgeous scenery because I see you've modeled some bridges here and pine trees. Let's go check this all out. Now this train here, I see this gorgeous caboose. Well, let's say, see, this is a perfect example because this is an LGB car, which makes it 1 to 22.5. Okay. Actually, I'm not even sure who made this, but it's a standard gauge car. It's actually 1 to 29. So as is the tank car. The two box cars are 1 to 24. The engine on the end is a Bachman engine and it's 1 to 20.3. And these trees. So they're all three scales in one train. All these decennaries, magnificent. Every little bush, every weed. The rocks look just like the rocks I saw driving over here just 30 minutes ago. You've got the color and the bridge here, this girder work. And there's one other thing I want to look at. And you've got this mine over here on the side of the layout. Is that a mine? You bet. Let's go check that out, guys. And it's on both sides. Now your bench work looks like it's a good 48 inches high. Is that about right? Um, yeah, I think that's about right, yeah. And for large scale, that's just the right height. Yeah, the layout's flat. There's no, there's no grades anywhere. So I can use a regular, you know, I use tsunamis that are designed for O-scale, but they work fine here because there's no grades and the trains aren't that long. Now tell me about this beautiful work of art. I see a steam engine that works, the hoist works, your lights are lit up. There's a lot of time in that, isn't there? Well, if you notice, you know, when this is all finished, this whole corner's all finished. There's a tramway here. And the tramway goes over there in the corner of that mill. But I wanted a mine that looked big enough to actually support a tramway by itself. This isn't a one horse kind of a show. I didn't have a lot of room, so I ended up going very, very high. But I just sat down and sketched out kind of what I wanted and started building. And this is where we ended up. It just kind of grew. So did you want to see how some of it worked? I think it's absolutely awesome. After we're done with this, I can't wait to run a train because that's what we always like to do. Okay, we can do that. Bill, let me thank you for sharing this awesome work of art with the modelers and the watchers of the What's Neat show. And thank you for taking your time with us today. Well, thanks for stopping by. I appreciate it. All of the model railroad products seen in this episode of What's Neat are available through Caboose in Lakewood, Colorado, or order online at MyCaboose.com.