 Hey there, I'm Charlie Comstock the model railroad hobbyist magazine. I'm here with Nick Muff Nick has got this Kansas City Southern layout downstairs in his house, and it's a very unusual layout In fact, we have to take quite a walk to get through it. He's got a Passenger car down there and we're gonna hike through that and he's got a bit of a station down here You can hear some of the sound effects in the background Nick, where did you you live in Northwestern Washington? How did you get started the Kansas City Southern? Well short story is my grandparents lived in Northwest Arkansas So we travel from Southern, California where we live to Kansas City and down to Arkansas each summer Visit my grandparents. Of course it allowed me to see trains that I didn't see in Southern, California Particularly the Kansas City Southern Okay So you want to show us what you got here? Sure. I'd be glad to. Okay. Let's go. All right Well, my real love is a passenger trains and passenger train travel So here in the basement I've recreated in full scale and in an HO scale an experience in passenger train travel the lobby here simulates the Midway at Kansas City Union Station and To the left is the entrance to the Pullman car so the right here is what looks like part of the side of an F unit and the Numenate new the enigmatic door Operates and this represents the mock-up of a Pullman car People ask where I got it. I built it. I tell them that everything that's in this car I carried down those stairs. So come on in So there's a roomette and museum restroom Come on in here and see the museum With Miss Southern Bell standing on the left and like all passenger trains, it's cramped around the corner here and down the hall is Vafe Lounge and again, this is all a mock-up Probably about one-third the length of a real passenger car And like all model railroaders do it's been selectively compressed So that it creates a feeling of being in a passenger car Even only it's only one-third as long as one And the table setting here. That's Kansas City Southern's Roxbury pattern China and Kansas City Southern flatware and hollowware on the table and Come on through this way through the door is the layout room Hobos jokingly referred to box cars as side door Pullmans This is a real side door Pullman and out here. We're in the layout room To the left here is the passenger car And then the locomotive As opposed to the passenger car the locomotive is not a mock-up. It's the real thing and then Across the room from right to left is Kansas City downtown In the late 40s early 50s Nick, uh, would you tell me about this station here? So well, this is the centerpiece of the layout charlie It's kansas city union station again as it might have appeared in the late 40s or early 50s And it's a monument By model railroad standards. It's six feet wide four feet deep and all put together it weighs 80 pounds So that weight is in the castings the two-part resin castings that are in there and What people don't generally realize unless I tell them it's not full scale I realized right at the start that within the confines of a 30 by 40 foot basement I couldn't make it full scale. There just isn't enough room. What would full scale have been? Well, you know, it would be 20 larger than it is now So I put it the other way around I built it at 80 scale Even at that it dwarfs trains and buses and people and so it's it's effective and it looks right And manage fit as it is the throat One end of the layout to the other 40 feet in this room is just long enough to go throat to throat for the union station You've got more than one or two lights in here Yes, there's almost a thousand leds in it. I haven't really counted them all but in the in the main chandeliers in the waiting room There's 82 leds in each of the three chandeliers So there's over 200 leds just in the three chandeliers. It's pretty bright in there. It's bright. It's nice You know, I see the original architect did a good job with lighting that interior Now there's wall sconces around the edge So there's lighting in the center lighting around the edge which provides a very even lighting. I like to Tell people that the great majority of little railroad station modelers bill would fit in the grand lobby In fact, our pomeranian will fit in the grand lobby. Have you tried that? I've tried that. Yes And how did uh, how did the palmie take it? Oh, he's fine. He never knows what's going on anyway. Yeah Okay, so Yeah, how did you get the lights in the cars? Well, you know Those are micro leds. I think they call them surface mount leds They're 0.3 by 0.2 millimeters and you can buy them with leads attached or you can put your own leads on I've done that it's a little tedious the main thing is I would not have attempted to put all the lights in the cars and the trucks were it not for the availability of leds Incadescent bulbs are going to burn out eventually even if only 10 of them burned out that would be a disaster And so they're tiny little leds on a tiny little I call them gnats whiskers wires And drill a hole bring them out the bottom put resistors under there Getting back to the station Did you get plans for this from somewhere? Well, that would be nice. In fact, I actually know where the plans are now I didn't know then But so I called I wrote the Kansas city terminal railway and asked if they had plans that was kind of bold this is a long time ago and They said yeah, they did so I went back there and I met with a gentleman in this room right here Where's that right here? Unfortunately when I came in he was asleep at his desk So I had to kind of wait there and him and haw for a while and finally he woke up And what he provided me was a very nice um Front elevation in eighth inch scale And an elevation of the waiting room only the side view in 16th inch scale And one other piece of paper that I didn't realize the value of at first it was just It listed the elevation of the roof the ceiling the mezzanine everything From top to bottom, of course that turned out to be very valuable in scaling the model And that is one I realized I was going to have to learn how to do CAD drawings And so I used a CAD program To use what I did have and then slides and photographs to create what I didn't have to produce all the interior and exterior plans for the station Now what's the station made from? Uh in real life or the model well the model the model is made from you know I tell people all the flat surfaces you see that's eighth inch sheet styrene Eighth inch eighth inch. Yes. That's pretty thick. Well, it is but I need stability and strength if you For instance the floor of the union station is eighth inch all these heavy castings, you know They have they're actually screwed to that with little screws from the bottom Really has to be pretty stable, you know tiny recess screws I went down to Cadillac plastics and I buy it by the four by eight sheet So that's the only way to buy For this it is for the union station At the driveway and the railway express building consume three four by eight Sheets of eighth inch styrene plastic Send all the other pieces here The complex pieces The masters were built primarily out of styrene plastic Then I made our tv rubber molds and used two-part casting resin to pour the copies One one mold for one column and then that turned out to be a total of 12 columns and so forth Okay What about the built parts of building here on the side? Is anything you had to do there for well actually? Yes, and I learned something Which was very helpful This was the issue right here These corners are highly visible So if I made castings and tried to mitre those with a saw and sandpaper And try to get it right I can imagine that being a real nightmare and it's got to look good It's right here where it's very visible. So what I did is I Created the u-shaped master And I used high density blue Styrofoam to make a block that filled that Just a block that fit in the back of the u and made it a solid piece And then I made the rtv rubber mold And pull the whole thing out Then I pour resin in the mold and put the styrofoam block back in Now I checked with joel bragden who's my expert on this To make sure that the resin would not attack the styrofoam, which it doesn't So then it was set I pull everything out of the mold I pull the styrofoam block out of the back and I have a u-shaped casting And so the joints I don't have to mitre the joints. They're all they're already made And that led me to be bold enough that on these corner pieces here I cast All four sides at once in one piece the roof and all four sides are cast in one piece There's a styrofoam block in the center that you pull out And so that meant that I didn't have to mitre any of these corners after the model was After the molds were poured This is a separate piece. It's hollow. You can actually see light through the little windows It had a styrofoam block in it And then the only other trick is these columns are separately cast and applied Now to get that out of the mold you have to split one side of the mold So they take a scalpel and split one side of the mold so it can open up You can take the casting out Then you tape it back together for the next casting that turned out to be an immense help and save me all the fussy Trying to mitre those corners now What you see isn't what all what you get here like an iceberg You're seeing the top part of the building. That's true. So you actually modeled some of the basement areas, too I did, you know, and when you're crazy, you're just crazy. And so I thought well, you know Show us how crazy Yeah, I wanted people to appreciate number one that there was more of the station underground and above ground And and how efficiently it was built so that all of the baggage handling went On underground where you weren't aware of it And so this panel on the front has a little description of the station How much it cost when it was built then when you open this panel You're seeing now the the plaza or street level The basement level which is where local baggage in express was handled And the sub basement were through baggage in express were handled So that here is a little baggage lighted baggage truck with the Parcels in it also down at this level is where the mail was delivered It came from across the street down the length of the express building under here all on a conveyor belt And a conveyor belt had automated Flappers that would divert the mail where it was supposed to go So there's little carts under atlanta denver los angeles And then those carts went out underground through a tunnel to the end of the platform And there was an elevator at each platform So that there was no trucking of baggage at platform level at all all went down Everything happened underground and you never saw it of course by separating through baggage in express From local baggage in express it made sure that they didn't get mixed up That if you were headed for kansas city your bag didn't accidentally go on to new york What year are you modeling here? I I had to pick a year 1951 1951. Yes. So this is pretty much what would have been going on in 1951. It is. Yes. That's correct. That's correct. Yes Okay, so I like to have animations on the layout Okay visitors really are interested in those things And but I want real realistic animations So a kite on the end of a piece of music while it goes around on around isn't going to work for me Okay, and so first animation on this end of the layout is this little Rock Island switcher number one. Aren't you afraid it's going to come off the end of the trestle? Well, we've arranged so it doesn't actually there is a diode In here that blocks this section of track so it can only run so far and it will stop automatically The same on the other end when it gets in behind the buildings where it's hidden And the other thing is this simulates the rock island crossing Simulates another railroad. Actually, there isn't any rock island railroad except for three feet of it right here Okay, but every once in a while in fact every three minutes that little switcher comes In and out with that a load of coal for kansas city power and light And of course, it's fun to see how many people think it actually is going to run off the end of the trestle I said it as close as I could and be on the safe side People make diving grabs. Yeah. Hey, you're trains running. Yeah, and they're trying to get over there to catch it Of course, it stops about three quarters of an inch from the end of the trestle So next animation here is a hobo campsite Actually, the model was built by a friend of mine when he was just a teenager I've replaced the fireplace electronics with something a little more modern. So it gives a very nice effect One of the things that's easy to do is just little wisp of cotton here that simulates smoke There isn't very much of it surprising what an effect it creates One nice thing is to have Buttons that visitors can operate on the edge of the layout and so there's a button here that says here the lonesome hobo call So you push that and And although you can buy circuits, it'll do that Some of them are relatively expensive What drives this particular circuit is the insides of a greeting card The greeting cards that you open and they play a song Well, somebody gave me one that played the wall bash cannonball So I took the little electronics out of it put it under the layout hooked a push button up But it was too soft And so went down to the thrift store got a speaker set for a computer with a little amplifier in it Hooked that up and and that's what makes that work Next effect is this blast furnace inside sheffield steel And the interesting thing about that is that it's created using a transistor radio You just connect the speaker leads connect them to a red light bulb And the advantage of that is it provides a random effect Creating a random effect with electronics is a little bit of a challenge, but you tune the am radio to a Static and it's the static that drives the flickering light This is kansas city iron and scrap metal animation here is this little pillar crane That's an alexander scale models kit and although those have been around for a long time Detailed and weathered it looks really nice on the layout Again, it's a realistic animation. It's something that would happen in real life The visitors are always surprised when the crane starts to move these scrap piles I wanted them realistic So I think the only way to get this to look like individual pieces is to use individual pieces And so underneath this is crumpled tinfoil I use Rustolium's ruddy iron ready red primer. I think that's the correct name For this iron color. I sprayed the tin foil that color I kept all these scrap pieces from projects put them in a box sprayed them iron color Shook them up till they were all coated And then glued them on starting with the largest Least detail pieces first and working up to these medium sized pieces And then saving the finest detailed tiny pieces to put on top Then I went around with a little grimy black here and there A little silver paint here and there and then came back with a black and Rust powdered chalk colors to create that effect So on the left side of union station here is powerhouse number one And in that I stole and stole a sooth smoke generator The power plant was originally coal burning hence the tall smokestack And so to animate that I put a smoke generator in This roof lifts off And you can see there's a plug in socket that connect that to the Power plant. So if anything goes wrong with it, you can just simply lift it off and replace a little smoke generator inside So where I grew up in california deer knots berry farm There was one of the famous copper tone signs And it was an animated sign So no one I know of makes this sign in ho scale Or any scale So I thought wouldn't it be fun to recreate the sign? And considering it's only one of eighth of an inch thick Wouldn't it be neat if I could find a way to animate it like the one that I grew up with And so there's a little motor down inside the building which animates the sign The sign is on sheet brass The dog in the swimsuit are on thin sheet brass And at the pivot points where her hand are And the dog's backside is our tiny pieces of brass tubing And there is a hairpin shaped piece of brass that bends across the front of the sign and the back of the sign on the front of the sign it supports The swimsuit and the dog and on the back side of the sign There's a little wire with a loop in it that moves those wires up and down and creates the animation When I grew up I always enjoyed the animated industrial signs And so I've incorporated a number of them on the layout One of this one of them is this commercially available sign for arctic refrigeration As the sign Changes the words come on The thermometer goes down the ice forms and then it says we take the heat out Nick we're standing in front of an f7 cab that's correct actually the you know the whole front end of an f7 That's it. So what on earth were you thinking of to have this thing, but how did you do it? How did you get this into your basement? Well, what I was thinking of a long time ago in model railroad or there was an article on building sort of a half scale throttle And brake stand which I as a kid. I thought that was really cool and so Then a friend asked me if I wanted to buy a kansas city southern nw2 control stand he said I know usually collect paper. That's a little big I said sure So I bought that and restored it and then I wanted a road unit throttle, you know switcher throttle. They It's just like your car the accelerator goes from zero to a hundred percent just by moving it Whereas on a road locomotive. They have those eight discrete notches which allows The prime movers to come up together so I Got ahold of the scrap yard in dakoma and asked them if I could buy a throttle and a brake stand and a dash and a chair and I said sure so I went down there and went around the scrap yard and while the throttle was 75 dollars and the Brake stand was 25 dollars and the chair was 25 dollars and the dash was 15 dollars and Then he said well, what are you trying to do mock up the cab of a diesel locomotive? And I said yes, he says well, we're going to cut up the 682 bn 682 Um, I'll sell that to you for the same total that I just quoted you which was a few hundreds of dollars Plus 35 dollars an hour for the torch cutting since they couldn't just blow it away like they usually did And the honest truth is inside my head a little thing said you're crazy Really? Yeah. No, I mean, what would you do with it? How would you get it home? Where would you put it? And then I got the thinking well, you know So if you cut off the nose and cut the cab in half, so I just have the engineer's side Which is what I was trying to do to begin with Um, that's let's see eight feet by five feet put a giant mirror there That'd be weird. You'd see yourself. But anyway, that's doable So I went back and I told him I'll take the engineer's side He said oh man the fireman's side. We just cut it up for scrap make toyotas out of it I'll just give it to you. I mean, there's nothing in it of value. You can just have it I thought oh, okay Now we're talking 10 by eight feet And then bless my dear supportive wife's heart on the way home. She said well, what will happen to the nose I said don't cut it up make toyotas out of it. She said well, can you stand to see that happening? That's the nicest part of the whole locomotive So that's how we ended up with the cab but from Tacoma to Up here north of seattle. That's a bit of a trip and I don't think you just I don't think you just took this and walked down the stairs in the basement with it. No, uh, you know and so there are there lies a tale because Yes, I still had to cut into three pieces had the nose cut off I had the cab cut in two halves that allow us to haul it on a U haul trailer that we could rent for $19 a day for two days Versus a commercial trucker since it's an over-width load at at 10 feet I didn't know how much that cost. I didn't want to find out how much that cost And so it came home in three pieces just like I'd originally intended And uh, I bolted it together Would you fill the seams with squat? Well, I didn't fill them right away It's set in the backyard and in the backyard we sandblasted it Filthy job and we repainted it and restored it and of course then when it came time to dig the basement It was sitting right on top of where we would dig the basement So you didn't already have a basement? No had to move it alongside the garage so we could dig the hole for the basement So we dug the basement. They laid up the concrete block poured the cement And then uh, well, it's we have a church member who owns a trust company And he was very gracious to come out all three times with his trust crane and move the cab around And so the final time we set it in the basement Uh, there's a tube steel frame under it which allows it to rock back and forth and ultimately I had it welded back together that was a command decision I was going to just bolt it body putty it But if you're going to rock it back and forth seams are going to open up fiberglass is going to be popping out That's not good. So I call my friendly welder and they welded it back together down here in the basement and then I Body putted it and sanded it and repainted it down here in the basement Now this cab is Operational isn't obviously you don't have to prime movers behind it anymore. Yeah, but the headlight here works Yes, the defroster fans the heater fans. In fact one engineer Used to run a few and it said wow, this is a lot different than the ones I used to work in and I'm thinking Well, you know, I try to be really accurate and I said how so he said the things in it work Well, there you have it