 Hi, I'm Brad Sloan and the May's What's Neat episode 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 May 2018. I'm your host Ken Patterson and this month we do have a great show. First of all, Michael Buddy stops by and he shares with us his scratch built stack packs in HO scale. He builds the containers and the flat cars and shares with us his techniques for doing that. We also take a look at Patrick Lana's beautiful end scale layout. This is an operational layout and end scale is something we don't get to see much on The What's Neat Show, so it's a real treat this month to see that layout. We also look at Ron Kaiser's gorgeous FN3 layout. This is an indoor large scale layout and I'm telling you it's absolutely detailed to the max. What a beautiful layout. Ron's layout is this month to look at. Stephen M. Conroy shares with us some fantastic drone footage. When you watch this footage, modeling tips from above, pay attention to the color of water, the wire trees, the color subtlety of automobiles and the rust on the girder bridge. It's a real treat to see this month's aerial footage that we have from the drone. And lastly, we take a look at layout construction this month where I take out a corner of my layout, completely transform it into a different type of a scene simply by changing out the topography and all of the scenery that goes along with that. So with that, that's the lineup for this May 2018 What's Neat video. The last thing I want to say before I go is that check out the podcast. The What's Neat This Week podcast is really taken off. We're getting some tremendous numbers and a lot of great feedback for that show. We do it every week just to keep you updated on what's new in the industry of model rarity. That's the What's Neat This Week podcast on YouTube. And there's also a direct link at Model Railroad Hobbyist magazine to find the podcast. Joe's got it all lined up and at this point, you can watch 31 shows that we've produced so far for the What's Neat This Week podcast. And with that, let's continue on with the rest of this month's show. What's Neat? I want to illustrate the wonderful beauty of working with foam and that is the simplicity that it gives us when we want to make changes to our layout. Now this corner of the layout is better than six years old and I designed it so that as the train went around the curve, there would be this hill here that would obstruct the view of the train so that it would kind of take it into the scene and then back out of the scene again. Well I'm really tired of this hill and that's because when I try to do a jib crane shot, filming the train coming through the corner, this hill has always been in the way. And I kind of thought I wanted to change the scenery on this, maybe put in a nice little dirt road for driving those RC cars and lower this down. And because of the fact that it's made of foam, I can do this right now by simply pulling out my trim lumber that holds us in place and I've got this piece of wood here which is quarter inch oak plywood and this should pull right off the layout which exposes my foam. Now when I reattach this, I'm not going to use liquid nail anymore, I don't do that. Now I like to use polyurethane gorilla glue because it doesn't eat away with the foam, it's much cleaner. And this piece of wood will get cut down to where the topography will end up. Now the scenery that I use is all made of fake fur. So all I've got to do is simply peel off this fake fur, get in here with the saw and start cutting this scene down right where I want it to be to provide the clearance for the jib crane and overall change the characteristics of this corner of the layout. So let's see what happens next on this layout construction segment for what's need. I started the project by peeling back the fake fur. This was glued into place with liquid nails about six years ago. It's strong and will not tear as it has dirt and woodland scenic scenic cement holding everything together even while peeling it and pulling it off of the layout. Starting at one end, I carved down the diorama using the pruning saw, working my way across the scene and pulling out large chunks of foam as I went along. I used an oscillating saw to trim the quarter inch oak plywood still attached to the module down to where the new topography will meet the sides of the layout. I trimmed this so the new dirt road will meet the existing road with a gradual slope. I finally broke down and used the electric chainsaw to speed up the process of carving the hills and the dirt and the roads incline throughout the scene. The chainsaw saved me about 30 minutes of handsaw carving. I did touch things up a little with the pruning saw, final carving the road and then followed this up with the Stanley shore farm planer. Carefully carving the topography along the new dirt road all the way throughout the scene. I marked where the road would go with a black magic marker. Then trimmed and cut the fake fur on the layout clearing an area in the vegetation for the road. I placed a drainage pipe in the scene, a brass tube painted grey and then proceeded to build up the topography with the foam pro covering up the ditch where our new road will connect to the existing road in the scene. This expanded and cured hard and firm. I then cut this down with a handsaw creating a rough foundation for our new road crossing the ditch. I also carefully cut the topography around the drainage pipe, feathering the land down to the edge of the plywood. I used a Stanley shore farm planer to further trim the road along with carving the top of the plywood to match the scenery to the fascia. I took this opportunity to lift up the scene off of the tabletop shelf and clean the module underneath in all the area with a vacuum before I proceeded with the scenery. I used premixed dap flexible drywall joint compound and a painter's knife to fill the exposed bubble craters in the foam pro making the road smooth. I did this to the length of the entire road throughout the scene. I sealed the exposed pink foam with brown latex paint to prevent foam shrinkage and give the scene a nice earth tone color. After the paint dried, I glued the fake fur back into place with a great stuff foam pro applying an even layer and pressing the fake fur sections into the foam. I used many steel weights to hold the ground foam into place as the foam expanded and cured. I spread a new even coat of backyard dirt onto the scene covering the road and feathering the dirt along the edges of the fake fur. Just to make everything blend smooth, I also used artist paint brushes to help facilitate this and I also used my fingers to make the fake fur stand up in between the dirt. I applied woodland scenic's ground foam to the scene using two colors light green and medium green and I used medium turf to do this. This helps further blend the fake fur in and along the edge of the road. I then soaked the dirt road and the surrounding scenery with woodland scenic scenic cement using a spray bottle to apply this. After the glue dried, I sanded the road smooth with 150 grit sandpaper further creating dust which would then fill in the road making it smooth. I applied more scenic cement to the road pouring this directly out of the bottle and soaking the road letting everything dry for about 12 hours. While this was drying, I turned my attention back to the plywood sides of the layout whereas I wanted to test fit the plywood into position and then I took and I drew a line on the backside of the plywood with a magic marker tracing and following our new topography where this is where the wood would then be cut to match the new topography. After I cut the wood, I then test fit the plywood sides into place just to make sure everything looked right and it did. I then proceeded to glue the new wood sides back onto the module this time using Gorilla glue instead of liquid nails and the Gorilla glue of course required water to activate it so I wet this and then pressed the wood up into the foam. I used tripods and paint roller poles and broom sticks and just about anything I could get my hands on quickly to firmly press against the sides holding the plywood flat onto the modules until the Gorilla glue fully cured which took about 20 minutes time. I added sill floor weed tufts to the scene along the edge of the road further blending the dirt road into the fake fur grass areas. I love this sill floor grass it just makes the scene pop. I then covered the scene with small bushes and trees. Now these were made from bent wires. Bent wires covered up with poly fiber and ground foam. This added a finished type of vegetation that looks very similar to the summertime growth that you see all throughout the Midwest and I added these bushes and small trees to the entire scene along both sides of the road. I covered the background hill with a lot of trees made from sagebrush armatures. These were then covered with poly and then covered up with ground foam. This made for a great forest just along the back edge of the telephone wires around the scene. And with that the old corner of the layout has a fresh and interesting new look to it with all new topography that gives a clear view of the right of way with just enough different types of vegetation to give the scene some depth and realism. Check it out fast easy and thorough. And with that that ends this layout construction segment on What's Neat. For this segment of What's Neat I've always heard on the show that we never have end scale. Well today we're going to get a lot of it. Now I'm standing in Pat Lana's layout. It's known as the Crandik and I want to talk to Pat and ask him what does that acronym mean. Welcome to the What's Neat show. Thank you Ken. The Crandik stands for the Cedar River and Iowa Central Railroad. It's built off of a railroad that's in eastern Iowa called the Cedar River and Iowa Central. I'm sorry Cedar River and Iowa City. Since I didn't want to be constrained by that inner urban railroad I freelance and the layout is basically set in 1968, August 10th 1968 to be exact because that's my wedding anniversary and that way I can remember it. Oh boy good for you because I still can't. So you've got a lot of years in this. You chose end scale for a reason because I know the demographics tell me and from the presentations that we've had in 71 shows already we haven't had any end scales layouts except for products from manufacturers but no actual beautifully built scenes like we're going to look at your cornfields in a minute those things rock. Thank you. I mean what a concept to create a cornfield that when you stand there and look at it the subliminal effect works. And the soybean fields is the same way. It's beautiful. It's set in Iowa in 1968 as I mentioned the all the structures or most of the structures are scratch built as well as the crops. You use a lot of card stock don't you? I do. I love card stock. In fact my son always sends out any punch cards that he gets from computers because they're great they don't have frayed edges or anything like that. How about that? So that's what that's what the Rock Island Depot here is built out of. Now you've how many about mainline feet of trackage do you have here? Oh I can't tell you mainline feet it's probably over what's definitely over 33 because the room size the layout goes from that end to this one is about 30 feet. I want to get into operation in a minute but first I want to talk about the scenery you chose this scale because you could model large scenes is that correct? That's correct. That's correct. And actually when I got in Dan's scale in 1968 I didn't have a lot of space and I was still in college so I had to basically make do with what I had. I found a little end scale set at an Ardan store which is like a home depot today. And we just went from there. I built it on the side of a TV set to begin with that I tore apart and used the wiring out of. Now part of the fun of the hobby is the board game effect and that is the game of operation it's been written about in so many magazines we all know little bits and pieces of it but judging from what you've got with your system you are a serious operator tell us about that. Well I never was a serious operator to start about 1988 or so I met a bunch of Kansas City guys that were into operation and I was working on my MMR so I went to their layouts to get my certificate and congratulations on the MMR. Oh thank you thank you and it ended up that I really kind of liked operations. I personally don't like to operate but I love to have guys over that bring my railroad to life and that's that's what happens in operations. So basically we have a crew of about 12 every time we meet once a month if we can sometimes work on the layout sometimes we operate. We use JMRI Ops and we use Rodney Black's cat system for centralized traffic control. Both work very well he used this layout as a testbed to start. I see Digitrax throttles here what what throttle system do you all use. I use Digitrax they were the only radio control that I could get at the time I started which was about 2000 or so right and now when I say you all use I see you got a whole lot of your friends here with us. Oh yeah part of my crew came today to run trains and see what see what this was all about. I think this is so beautiful let's go find out what they think. Oh no. So Pat now we're standing with a lot of the guys that operate with you and now what nights do you operate. Well actually we operate on Saturdays and we go from about 9 30 in the morning to 4 30 in the afternoon with about an hour and a half lunch break and that's really a great time where we sit down and talk trains. I might have asked you this but how many people does it take to run this layout? About 12. And how long does the session last? About six hours maybe. Would you guys agree this keeps you all out of bars? Yeah. Tell me what it's like. I want to start with you guys over here and you talk together. What is it like to play with this layout to run trains on this beautiful end scale. Can you get lost on this layout? This is a fabulous layout. I've probably run every position on this layout from yard master to dispatch to running trains. It's a great layout to run on. That's nice. It runs extremely smooth and I find the yard work to be exciting. I'll bet you appreciate the bench height. Definitely. Because you can see it right from a good vantage point. Exactly. What's your favorite operating position? I do the train master. I dish out the trains to the operators when they need them. This layout has been an inspiration for me to start my own. And that's awesome. And I see you have the designer wear for the crandic around here. How about that shirt? Yeah. Pat got us some shirts at the 100th anniversary, which is 2004. And so we kind of celebrated with that. That's awesome. I got to tell you what, Pat, this is a great group of guys. This absolutely exemplifies the fact of what a great hobby this is. Not only to build the models, but the awesome camaraderie and spirits that you get to hang out with. So with that, that's this segment of What's Neat. Thank you very much, Pat. Oh, thank you. Thank you, Ken. Hi. I'm Mike Buddy. For this episode of What's Neat This Week, we're going to talk about stack packs. I've had a lot of interest in this project since I've been talking about it on the podcast. All the information from this article came, and for this episode came from Lee Gautreau's article in the SB Train Line about the stack pack, the research and development. It's a great read for anybody who's really interested in the project. It was another attempt at combat vandalism and theft by Southern Pacific. They were pretty instrumental in collaboration with the automotive industry and several other projects, most notably the High Cube. They worked with ACF and Ford Motor Company to develop the 86-foot High Cubes, which are still used today. Another project collaboration between Southern Pacific and GEM was the Vertipack. I'm sure pretty many of you know about that project. This stack pack was used to transport high-end GM vehicles like Buick's, Allsmobiles, and Cadillacs, and it required a piggypacker type device to pick up the containers and rotate them into the proper position, load them on the flat car. Each one of the containers had an open end, and they were placed with the open ends facing each other, so there was only four inches of clearance between each one, and nobody could get in to do anything. So the system required a lot of specialized equipment. The deck slid in and out of the containers. They needed special forklifts to raise the containers and swivel them around on the flat cars. But I always found the system interesting anyway, even though it's not really in my era. But I decided to tackle modeling these, because no models had ever been available other than train works in scale model of the containers a few years ago, but still no flat cars. So the way I started my models was, the main thing I did was make a master for the roof, and then I cast a bunch of copies for the roof. So I had the roofs ready to go, and the rest of the containers just went together pretty out of simple shapes, very simple to build. And so I kind of went crazy. I built over 40 containers, so I have enough to fill 10 flat cars. So once I got all these containers done, then it came to doing the flat cars. And that was a challenge too, because no model has ever been available in HO of a low-level flat car, 89-foot low-level flat car. So the Pacific used two types for this StackPack project. The first one they used was the PLH-10, which was a standard low-level flat car with 28-inch wheels that had been in use since 1968. It had the couplers above the deck, which all low-level flat cars did. Then in 1975 they had some other flush deck cars from Trailer Train that they leased for this service. Those are PLH-21s, and they also had the couplers above the deck. So some of these cars I'm building now are going to be used for auto rack service. You can see since the coupler was mounted above the deck, the auto rack cars had to have risers at each end to allow the vehicles to drive up and over the draft gear in the deck. That necessitated the addition of the hinged second deck that would raise up enough to allow clearance to drive the vehicles out. So that's a feature that's still used on today's auto racks. So anyway, to build the PLH-10 cars, I started with the weight from an Accurail auto rack or flat car. Then I just added styrene shapes along the sides, made a center frame, added all the ribs and everything. Just a little bit at a time until I ended up with something that looked good. I built all 10 of them at a time, but I think it's easier to work in doing an assembly line project. You can get a lot more done that way. So I built, like I said, 10 of these PLH-10 flat cars, and then I built four of these PLH-21 cars, which they're a flush deck car with the side sill real low to the ground and inspection holes in the side. So I added a styrene underframe to these. I'm still working on these, but that's also just basically the weight of the center of the car and of the Accurail flat car. And then there were some 3D printed parts I ordered from Shapeways to convert that side sill to the PLH-21A style with the inspection holes. It's kind of a funky looking flat car, but you can still see them around today under regular auto racks because since this system was so cumbersome and they used it from 1971 to 76, and as soon as the 1977 GM downsized car models came out, this system was obsolete. So the stack pack containers soon became storage sheds and the flat cars became re-racked with other standard auto racks and like I said, you can still see those low level cars running around today. So let's see. Again, these cars really weren't in my era, but I've settled on 1977 through 1979 as my era and they just always intrigued me, so I had to go ahead and try it. Like I said, I got 40 containers and 10 cars. I had these decals specially made by William Brillinger from Precision Design Company, so I'd like to thank him for that. I'd like to thank Lee Gautreaux again for this great article that told everything I needed to know. He had the plans for the stack packs and I'd also like to thank Seth Wetzel for his Facebook group Open Auto Rack Memories on Facebook. It's a treasure trove of auto rack photos. So one last thing I'd like to beg some manufacturers to make a low level flat car. You know, it's not that hard to do. We've got a G-89 coming out but this is one thing that's never been done in HO scale, so I hope Accurail or Athern or somebody will step up and eventually offer us a flat car like that. So anyway, that's my project and I hope you enjoyed looking at it. We'll post some pictures on the internet and I'll talk to you next time on What's Neat this week. For this segment of What's Neat, I'm with Ron Kaiser and I'm looking at his beautiful FN3 layout and I've got to tell you, I've built a large scale layout in my backyard but what you have done, the degree of detail that I see, just absolutely is eye candy. Tell us about this work of art. Well, first of all, I have a degree in commercial art which I haven't used much until I started doing this but what I've tried to replicate here is the scenery of the Animus Canyon that the Granville sobering goes through. It's very vertical and a lot of layouts are vertical to it. So I like the vertical all the way to the ceiling including the trees and everything but as you see, because I'm in a basement I don't have much room for a horizontal so I want vertical. So the trees are not even full-scale size. These are beautiful. Is this Caspia? This is Caspia. And the Aspen are, they're a special... It's very nice. Super trees on here? Yeah, super trees. Thank you. Candy-tuffed. Yes. Accurate dimensional trees. A girl from Colorado named Debra Huddleston used to sell those about 15 years ago. That's where we got that from her. Yeah, God bless her. I don't know where she is. I'd like to know where Debra is. If she's still selling trees. Let's go over here and talk about the scale of the track now. You said this is FN3 and I see switch stands and all the prototypical stuff that you would expect to find. Yes, and when I first laid this layout out in the basement the track I used is called 332. It's a brass rail but it's really oversized for what I'm modeling. So what I did, I did a little trick and ballasted the ballast up to the rail head. So you don't see how big the rail is because it's prototypical way too large for the prototype. What code rail do you have here? That's 332. But if you scale it out in prototype it's about a hundred and forty pound rail way too big for an air gauge or most. But over my yard over here Let's go over there and look at that. This is just amazing. The yard over here I replaced this with code 250 which is around 85 pound rail which is a lot more scale for what I'm doing here. I left the perimeter rail because I didn't want to mess up the operation but I relayed my entire yard in the more scale size rail and ballasted up and covered some of the ties like you see real narrow gauge rail. They don't preify the ballast. Now it looks like I see AccuCraft boxcars and Bachman equipment and tell us what else your equipment is here. It's beautiful work. Some of this is three foot models which is Berlin made for a three foot model. So we've got a couple things from Phil's narrow gauge who used to make beautiful kits. The boxcar we here with the two gentlemen the hobos is a Bachman. The Conoco tank car is a Bachman. I love Bachman. Oh they're gorgeous. Of course I've re-lettered that Conoco but it's a stock Bachman tank car. I have two of their C19s which are gorgeously beautiful smooth running locomotives. That's the last one that came out with metal gears. It runs beautifully. The sound is synchronized. I have the outside frame 280 and I've replaced the gear in that but it's a beautiful engine. The other locomotives are AccuCraft. I have four AccuCraft and four Those are the nice brass metal models. Very nice. And every piece of rolling stock is roller buried. I love how your buildings are flat including your coiling tower. Yes. And some creativity on saving space. Right. But at the same time it seems like a well sized layout where you got plenty of operational potential. Yeah. Let's look back here at these buildings and the snow plow and the flanger. My goodness on all the people at the train station how many hours have you spent working on this? Well the layout's been built for about ten years has taken me out. I've had it really done to this point for about eight years. And now I just tweak little things like bushes and people but the layout itself's been done for about two years ago. But I find something that I want to add like a better figure or a better vehicle or a better bush or tree and I upgrade to the better stuff. But there's the thing about your buildings you're talking about structures. Some of these are actually paper overlays. The best one is this loose screw company. It's actually a brick printed paper. The tef spur is printed paper. It looks three-dimensional but it's flat paper printed off with a printer. In some of the buildings this is Pyko. But there's a mixture of scratch build, some paper overlays. This seriously makes me want to change scales. And I want to run some roll footage right now. You're also seeing you've got a nighttime mode so that when you shut off all the lights it's this nice blueish hue but yet the engines and the buildings and it all just comes out as if you're in the woods. The neatest thing when I run at night is over in that corner because the locomotive or the headlight shines off the rock work which is if you ran a night train you would see the locomotive headlight on the rock work which I think is cool. I did this. This is a poor man's lighting because it's just strips of LED strips but when you turn off the room lights and you have the street lights and the locomotive lights it's pretty neat because you can see the headlight reflecting off the rock work. This is awesome man. Thank you so much for sharing this with What's Neat because this is neat. Thank you. 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