 Hi, I'm James Regere and the September What's Neat starts right now. The What's Neat show is sponsored by Caboose, sharing our passion for trains since 1938. This is What's Neat for September 2019. I'm your host Ken Patterson and we've got a pretty good lineup for this month's show. We've got two how-to segments. We look at two different modular layouts in different scales and we interview one manufacturer that creates great 3D printed items for us hobbyists. First of all, David Schornharst shares with us his beautiful modular layout. It's fully automated with a lot of special effects that move. This layout has been set up at 80 plus train shows over 27 years and it's a real treat to see on video this month. Mike Bruski from Dimensional Modeling Concepts, he shares with us 3D printed items that he makes for us modelers, telephone poles, segmented concrete bridges, a lot of industrial air conditioning systems for the top of buildings. It's very interesting to hear him talk about his passion for trains. Bill Selick, he shares with us an end scale layout, a modular layout built to absolute prototype standards. It's called the Galesburg City Layout and it's built about 4.5 feet high so it's really easy to view and see the models that are on this layout. James Regear shares with us his Gretna Grain Elevator Project. This is an actual grain elevator in Canada that he modeled off of photos and satellite images and in fact he and his grandfather used to unload grain at this facility a very long time ago so he knows a lot about the history of this building. Also Mitchell Befoden, he shares with us a way to make canvas loads, covers for our flat cars. So any type of load you might have that needs to be covered up as it's being shipped, he's come up with a way to create really cool convincing looking canvases. Super simple technique and it's great that he shares that with us this month on the show. I'd also like to say if you're out in Lakewood, Colorado, be sure to check out Caboose, that fabulous train store out there. I've been there many times and the one thing I've noticed is that all of the employees out there have an intimate knowledge of the hobby. A lot of them have built layouts so when you go out there you're going to get great advice whereas customer service is A number one. And that's the lineup for September 2019, What's Neat? For this segment of What's Neat, I'm standing with Bill Selick in front of this beautiful end scale layout work, the Spring Creek model show here in Nebraska. And what a magnificent layout you've got. I love the height of it and the detail but tell me about your passion for building this. Well, this passion is a result of a partnership between Jim Wigan and myself. Jim suggested since we both have a love of Galesburg and its railroads, he suggested we work on a layout together. And his idea was to model this short line, industrial short line in Galesburg, Illinois. So we have in front of us the Santa Fe main line and the Santa Fe actually owned these tracks to get to some major industries on this side of town. This layout is so detailed I notice that you model from prototype photos as an aid to get it right. We do, yes. We try to be careful observers of the real thing. Now we're aiming for the 60s so that's forced us to do some research and look up some pictures that they have at the library in town to help us focus our modeling efforts. I am so impressed. The HO scale guys try to achieve the detail like this. I know I'm guilty, I do too, but your track is code 55. I see so many wire etched detail parts and buildings. It's actually, I would say that end scale has gotten much better in the last 10 years with the called details and fine details. Oh my yes, yes. I'm one of the old school guys who remembers how bad things were in the 70s. And end scales come so far. So many details as you say. The trick is really bringing those details and things together and try to model the prototype as closely as we can. What do you use to power this layout? What system? This layout is run by the NCE's DCC system. NCE, so you have good luck with that with the end scale? Yes, yes. It's simple to use and we've enjoyed it a lot. That's awesome. And I notice you use knobs to pull your turnouts, like is that wire attached? Yes, since it's a switching layout, we don't need anything terribly complex. My friend was using some model airplane servos on his portion of the layout. I myself am too much of a simpleton. I'm using the BluePoint switch controllers, which is a simple push-pull type operation. Nice. And for a switching layout, that's just fine. Do you actually have an operating session on this? And if so, how long does it take? It takes quite a while, believe it or not. A switch list consisting of about 20 freight cars in their destinations might take us a couple hours. However, when we operate, it's usually in a train show type environment. So we're often interrupted with talking to people and whatnot. But that's why we're here. That's what the hobby is all about, is sharing. You got that right. This is the best hobby in the world. I want to say this is absolutely beautiful. Where do you set up this layout? Can other people appreciate this? The train shows around here, or where do you set up at? Yeah, usually we're in the Midwest area. And I'll define that anywhere from Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois, certainly, since this layout is based in Illinois. But here, I find myself in Nebraska. And I've had it in the Omaha area a couple of times. Bill, do you all have any social media or internet presence where the viewers can see this layout online? Yes, we do. My layout partner, Jim Wigan, has a page on Train Board about the layout. He also maintains a Facebook page called the Galesburg City Job. I myself do some postings on the rail wire about it. That's awesome. Before I go, how high is this layout? Because the height is amazing. The track level is about 53 inches. And that's about 4 foot 5 inches, I believe. And the whole idea is not to be mean to children, but to bring it, since it's end scale, to bring it closer to eye level. So guys, I can't see. You can see it. Rock and roll, this is a magnificent layout. Thank you very much for sharing this with the viewers on What's Neat. Thank you, Ken. I'm Mitchell Buffone, and on this segment of What's Neat, we're going to do some tart loads on standard flat cars that you can find from stuff around your layout. To start, we're just going to, this is going to be the finished product, but I'll explain, go into explaining that later. Stuff that what you're going to need is just a standard base for what you're going to tart. Now this can be anywhere from something that you've bought to something that you've shaped out of something out on your house. Things you're going to need is also saran wrap, and that is to protect your die as well as protect your car. The tart is made out of nothing more than just standard Kleenex, woodland scenic, scenic cement, and whatever color you choose. Today we're going to be using earth. I've used it in the past. It makes a great canvas looking color and the era I model, it just looks great. So to start, you're going to take a piece of saran wrap, set it over your car, which is essentially your work platform. You're not doing this on a bench. This is something that you're doing on the model itself. Next you're going to take a piece of saran wrap and lightly and carefully wrap your die. In this case, it is a transformer. Now you don't have to worry about getting the creases out because when you go to paint the Kleenex on there, it will actually make it look like a tart being swept by the wind. And it looks pretty cool when it's done. So just set it on your car, like so all wrapped. Take your Kleenex, drape it over, take your woodland scenic cement, apply it to a brush, and start slowly coating the Kleenex. Now if I wanted to speed up the process, could I simply take the woodland scenic cement and dump it over the load? You could, you just have to watch your model. Watch what part of it. Hold on, Austin, grab us some paper towels, please. Is that enough? Pick it up and Austin, wipe it up. Once you have the unit taken down and wetted down with your glue, you're just gonna slowly start moving the tart as well as the load into the position that you want it with the brush. Now Mitchell, how long do you think we should dry this bark? We dry this overnight and it would be okay? If you dry it overnight, it should be good. The glue generally takes, once I get it all cut up and trimmed, I just, you just start slathering on the paint and it all dries them all together. Well, let's do this. Let's put it in a convection oven for 30 minutes and see what we have next. All right. Once you've got it out of the oven, just simply grab your exacto knife and you just want to start cutting away at the lower edges of the Kleenex, lightly and slowly. Once you get done cutting away all your excess tissue, which is a lot, you will just start kind of forming and cleaning up any imperfections you have. The great part about the tissue is we only partially dried it, so with it still somewhat wet, it gives you a good workable material that even if it tears slightly, you can repair it pretty easily with just a little bit of a patch and it actually looks like they actually patched the tarp, which happened all the time back in that era. Once you get finished with this, then we step on to painting. I personally prefer the earth. Just dip your brush, just start adding the color. All right. So we're just finishing up paint here and as you can see, the earth color gives it a nice tan canvas color and you can still shape with the brush because it is still technically wet. Now, through this, you can show some rigging on the back and it all depends on the type of car you have, how you want it, but you can show different rigging on the back here, like some bars coming down that are welded down. I'm not going to do so much on the front with that just because of the position of the load, but past that. So after you get this paint on, do we put it back in the oven and dry the whole model? Yes, sir. It is ready to be dry. And then if you needed to apply tie downs, ropes, bungee cores, what would you do next to this model? What I would do next is take an X-Acto knife and just poke a little hole here on each side and then take your rope. We use thread, you can use chain and bring it down to one of the tie downs on the car and bring it up high and then you could do the same here where you could rather do a cross bracing since you're already giving the illusion of tie downs on the back, so you could do cross bracing up for extra support. So we're going to get this off to the oven, get it dry and then we'll show you the completed model. We'll come over to this model and this is what your finished product's gonna hopefully look like. It's tied down, we added some extra stuff to give it a little more detail to it. This has been doing a tarp load for What's Neat. For this segment of What's Neat, I'm standing at the Dimensional Modeling Concepts booth here in Nebraska and I'm standing here with Mike Brusky and you've got one heck of a thing going on here. I remember interviewing you in Kansas City at the NMRI Meet and you had that beautiful thing that loaded, intermodal, right, that loaded trailers. I saw that on Stephen Priest's layout when I did an interview with him and it's an absolutely, it is one of your signature models. But tell me about your passion for trains and some of the new products you're making. I've been doing modeling trains since I was 15 years old and there's a lot of things out there that as modelers we need that nobody else makes and when I retired a few years ago I got into 3D printing as a way to first produce models for me of the stuff that I needed but then thought it would be a great way to bring some of those concepts to other people and to also bring other people's concepts alive for them and then in a way share that with the rest of the modeling world as products that we then sell to our customers. You've done that. Now when we were in Kansas City you had a really cool device that made fences and I remember filming that. It was something that had four rolls and it made a perfect fence like you'd see in farmland in the middle of nowhere and we saw this fence on this layout. I remember filming it on this beautiful layout that was set up. I think that was a prototype. That was a Fremont layout. A Fremont layout. Correct. And your fence material sold a lot of us. But the trick is you've got something that you use to roll that out with and I want you to talk about that in a minute. But yesterday when I met you in the store at Spring Creek you showed me some brand new telephone poles and things like that. Tell us about that. That's what we have here. When you drive down the highway you see a lot of these wooden poles out there. The big power towers and the wishbone. They're along the highway. They're going across country. You see them everywhere but nobody's modeled those. And I thought this would be a great way that I could bring those to all the people out there for their models. And the other thing that's nice about them is they don't take up a lot of space on your layout. Right. Because that runs overhead and literally you've got two poles or one pole in the ground and you've taken up no space and like some of the towers out there that have a big base on them. It makes sense. You need real estate. You just don't take real estate. So I thought that'd be a great thing to bring out to everybody out there. Because again it's a very common element that we see everywhere and no one has it. That's true. So I wanted to bring that out. So we've got double arm wishbone, single arm wishbone. The really big power tower is the 75 foot towers. And then some of the old TT style that you see. I mean basically you see these everywhere. Sometimes they're all together. Sometimes they're spread out. So I wanted to be able to bring that out to everybody out here. This is a new product that we've come out with in the last six months. And they are now for sale out there. Now I saw yesterday when you were talking to me you said we were talking about bridges and I was telling you how I wanted to build a concrete bridge. You're coming out with segmental. Yes. We've got a segmental modular concrete bridge that we're gonna be bringing out at the national train show here in a week and a half. I originally started with it as parts for flat car loads. And then all of a sudden I had the decks. I had the abutments. I had the bends and it was like, okay I've got all the pieces for an actual bridge kit. So we're coming out with that brand new bridge kit and we're gonna sell this. It'll come like you see it here. And then we'll have extension kits on it where you get an extra deck and an extra bend. So you can make this as long as you'd like to make it. One last thing I remember in Kansas City about you was you had some fantastic duck work and air conditioners. Another detail that is on top. That's one of our signature items is all of our industrial HVAC for rooftop units and that. Cause a lot of what we have commercially available out there is small air conditioners and things that are more suited to office buildings or small retail establishments. The true industrial HVAC and being a former engineer I've worked with this stuff a lot in the food industry. I know that fairly well. So I've made a whole line of that stuff and we keep expanding it all the time. This year we've come out with some new rooftop exhaust fans that you can see on the top of restaurants or fast food places. So we've added that to our line and I'll have some more different types of exhaust fans and ventilators and things that I'm gonna be working on in the coming months. Sounds like another flatbed trailer load for Mike Buddy. Now tell us what website do we need to go to to find these wonderful products? You wanna go to dimensional modeling concepts.com. Actually the.com is DMCRRProducts.com. Awesome. So that's where we're, that's where you can find us. Everything is available on the website. You can order it direct from me. If I don't have it in stock, I'll print it up for you and have it out in a few days. Mike, that's awesome. Thank you for sharing this with our viewers of What's Neat. All right, Ken, appreciate it. Thank you. For this segment of What's Neat, I'm standing by Dave Scharnhorst in front of this magnificent HO scale modular layout that you built. This is beautiful in that the modules are a foot wide, but it appears that you follow prototype freelance standards. Would you say? That's pretty close. And if it's got Norfolk and Western on it, I'm interested in doing it. Norfolk and Western. How old is this layout, Dave? Basically we started showing it about 27 years ago and so this is probably in the 83rd or 84th show that I've been at in that amount of time. The scenery is exquisite. Describe to us that beautiful bridge I was photographing a little while ago. That's basically a scratch built bridge. It's made with card stock, basswood, hardware cloth, Legos, and whatever else. I think there's, I don't remember what kind of motor that powers it. The bridge actually lifts with lead counter balances. This is amazing. Look at that there. I'm rolling B-roll right now. We're watching it because it's so amazing that you've animated that. And a lot of this layout is animated. I've seen the welder welding on the fray car over there. And how about that magnet? Mike and I were both just admiring your electric magnet. So you're more of a mechanical modeler as well. It's a prototype modeler. I, yeah, I enjoy that a whole lot. And then I call it clockwork animation. And basically it's basic something so that no matter when you come in the show, you can see it because it loads the gondola for a little while and then it turns around and unloads it automatically. And so it runs all weekend long and I don't have to create the operator much. What is the name of the railroad, Dave? The MZND. That's for Matt, Zach, and Dad. Matt, Zach, and Dad. So this is a family deal. It was a family deal. Do you have a website, a Facebook page, or some sort of internet presence to show this off? I really don't. That's a downfall. I could do better there. Okay. No, that's all good. It's absolutely awesome. I bet the crowd really loved to just stand there mesmerized by some of the special events features you've got. It is. I think it helps out a lot. And the fact that it's at 36 inches rail height makes it a real crowd favorite for the kids. Right. I just love looking at this. The buildings, the prototype grain elevators. In one foot wide space, you've really captured, Mike and I both said everything you need within those few inches of the main line. But yet how long is this layout? Right now I'm at 55 foot. This is as long as I've ever had it. I've got another five foot that I do. By the time I get to Milwaukee this fall, it'll be 60 foot. This is all fit in a trailer? This all fits in the back of my pickup truck. Pickup truck. Okay. Wow. Boy, this is a real treat, Dave. I want to thank you so much for sharing this with all the viewers on what's neat. Well, it's a pleasure talking with you and it's been great. Super, man. Thanks, Dave. Thank you. Hi, my name's James Regear. For this segment of What's Neat, I'd like to talk about this model of the Gretna Manitoba pool elevator that I've built using the Walther's Country Co-op elevators as the starting material. Now, when I was 10, I built this tower about here and did my own paint scheme and sort of did its own design. I wasn't real satisfied with it. And I'd always hauled, or I'd always gone to visit my grandfather in Canada, near the town of Gretna and we'd hauled pretty into this elevator. And I thought, I want it to make it look like that. And so I looked at this elevator and it was pretty unique. It had two major elevator towers as well as an annex to the side. And so I thought that's visually interesting. So I decided that I would build this model. And so I got another Walther's kit. I stripped the paint down on this one. I added a little bit of extra height to it because I noticed there was a height difference between the two towers. And I smoothed out the backside to represent an elevator that had been abandoned through a merger and then merged on to this one. I added an extra door and that tower was complete. Then I looked at the middle tower. Now this middle tower had a longer dumping bay than your typical elevator. And what I did, I took the two dumping bays from the original two elevators. I spliced them together as best as I could so that the seam lines between the roofs would be indetectable. And the way I did this, I laid it flat out on a sheet of glass, pushed them together using plastic and made the seam. Next, I made the anodex. Now this anodex was Evergreen styrene that I cut to size, measuring very carefully so that the width would equal the elevator. Now all through this time, I was looking at satellite photos of the elevator complex that so exists today. And I used a little ruler that the Google Maps have to actually get the dimensions so that it would look right. So I made this out of the Evergreen styrene. I looked at Google Street View photos as well as any photos I could find by Googling the Gretna pool elevator. And I added windows as appropriate. Now the windows I drew from the Walters Red Wing Mill Kit that I had ordered to eBay and actually somebody had sent the entire kit. It had only the windows and none of the walls. So this was a nice free source of scrap windows and scrap doors that I could draw from for this project. I also looked at dust collectors, looked at where the piping was going on the side of the building. And I used extras of sprues and of pipes that I had from a Walters tank car loader that I had assembled. So next, I also observed the office in front of this building which I also built. Evergreen styrene putting the windows as appropriate. I painted the whole thing sky gray from Tamaya Paint. And then I painted the roof a field green also from Tamaya Paint, a nice dull coat color. The dust collectors of course were also from the Red Wing Mill Scrap Kit that I received. And then I used a sprue to create the augers that you see here running between the two buildings. These are all extra sprue parts that you cut off and you can file them down to the right angle to create the truck loader here. Now this little support tower, I noticed looking at photos of the prototype I actually used brass wires to create that that I bent shape and soldered together. And there you have this elevator. Now the nice thing is I made it so that it could be completely modular because I don't currently have a permanent layout. So I knew that I'd have to take this apart, put it in storage and do all these things. So everything comes apart, reconnects fairly quickly so that it looks like it's supposed to in a couple of minutes. This is the lettering here on the sides. I actually used the graphics program to design the lettering and which I then printed out on cardstock. I cut out the cardstock using a very sharp exacto knife and painted it the same shade of green as the roof and then glued it on using micro crystal clear. Now all of these little details, it was simply a matter of looking at the photographs considering how I could remake them and then going and doing that using my exacto knife, using a straight edge like this one to find exact angles and using the correct adhesives to put it all together. So I'll give you a track side view here. Much of this is stock, although again, because the Gretna elevator actually had a much longer auger, the spout coming down from the top of the building was much longer on the Gretna elevator than on the Walters original, so I used sprue to add additional length and of course brass rod to reinforce. And that's the Gretna Manitoba pool elevator. This will be the beginning of a diorama that I intend to create based off of the town of Gretna, circa 1985, during which time this elevator was active and there were several others along the line looking at the aerial photos, it will make an excellent diorama. So this is James Regere and that's this segment of What's Need. All of the model railroad products seen in this episode of What's Need are available through Caboose in Lakewood, Colorado or order online at mycaboose.com.