 Hi, I'm James Rieher and the March 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 March 2020. I'm your host Ken Patterson, and this month we've got a really good show. First of all, we take a look at Campbell Rice's beautiful layout that he has just started. He just moved into a new house. The basement room is custom built for exactly what he wanted, and he shared with us this month the beautiful layout that he has started, and he's literally only worked on it for 36 hours up to the point where we shot this video. It's amazing how quick Campbell Rice works. Also this month we have a look at Joe and Tony Pellegrino's beautiful operational layout. This is a layout that is absolutely designed with one purpose in mind, and that is operating, turning a profit, and having car loads come and go with paperwork that goes with it. It's absolutely an amazing layout segment to see this month. Also this month I built an end scale layout, something simple, something that can fit in under a bed or in a closet. It makes for a very easy basis point to start with, and we do that in end scale this month on What's Neat. Now it's been raining and snowing and awfully loud outside, so I've been working on a lot of maintenance around here on the layout. There's a lot of things that needed to be done. For example, I had a broken toggle switch on my control panel that runs the yard here. It's really neat the way I designed the control panel for functionality and for maintenance, whereas you can get into it easily get to all of the wire rings because it's simply a piece of plexiglass fascia that's got the track plan painted on it held in place with Velcro. So I can get to the wires, replace the switch easily, and then just Velcro the switch yard plate right back into position and have a working fully control panel ready to go. I've also been cleaning a lot of the switch points. There's nothing more frustrating than to have a trained stop or the sound system either to go on or go off as it goes across the top of the turnout simply because your switch points are dirty. I like to use a small, very fine diamond scale file just to simply clean on the inside between the rail and the switch points on both sides on each rail, and this usually alleviates the problem of having conductivity issues on turnouts. I also have been vacuuming the layout a lot. And over all of it, it's gone from gray to colors. And I like to use a very soft vacuum brush when I do this. It ensures the fact that I can just brush the top of the rails. It doesn't suck up any of the static grass or the ballast, and it works out really beautiful. Another thing that I've been doing, I've been rewiring some of the lights on the Warf section. Now you've seen the video that I made for What's Neat some years ago where we installed the Woodland Scenic's Just Plug Lighting System on my Warf. Well, a couple of the lights through folks reaching in and touching the models have kind of gotten broken off, and I took the time this week to actually unthread the old lights and install some brand new ones in place, and it worked out really good. I've also been working on the new diorama trying to figure out where I might put some roads to make it visually interesting for videography, and at the same time be able to run those remote control RC cars that we keep talking about on the What's Neat This Week podcast. That's right, be sure to check out that show, the What's Neat This Week podcast at Ken Patterson YouTube site. We're past over 100 shows, a lot of special guests, and it's a lot of fun every Saturday night to sit with us and just talk model trains. And so with that, I want to say let's continue on with the rest of this March 2020 What's Neat. For this segment of What's Neat, I'm building an end scale trade show display layout for one of the manufacturers. It's got to be done in about five days, but I wanted to videotape this and illustrate to you how simple it is to build, and this is going to be end scale, an end scale layout that would fit under a bed, fit in a closet, and it's only going to be a size of about four feet by three feet. And with something simple like this, you're going to be in a layout where you can test run your equipment all day long for under $50. That's the price of a sheet of foam cut stacked on top of itself, and then I laid a piece of eighth inch plywood on top of that. Now what I'm preparing to do as I show you this a little up close here is I'm getting ready to take this diorama and wrap it in oak so that it'll be have nice, beautiful sides on it painted black. And in order to do that, I'm going to take these small little blocks of wood that I've pre-cut and I'm simply going to lay them into the groove that I routed out into the edge of the foam that is three quarters of an inch deep, three quarters of an inch wide, and it fits our blocks of wood perfectly so that when I attach the plywood, I'll have a base in order to staple the plywood into. That way it'll wrap around and be very nice. This is something very simple. It could be built in literally a weekend and it'll add hours of enjoyment of simply test running your locomotives. I've got some Kato snap track here, this track that they make with its road bed already on it laid out just to make sure everything fits into place. So follow me on this as I add sides to it, run the power feed wires through the bottom so you can hook up a transformer and have hours and hours of pleasurable testing and running and when you're finished with it, it'll fit in a closet or fit snugly easily underneath a single bed. So let's see how this project turns out. I used gorilla glue to glue the blocks of wood into the groove. The blocks are all pre-cut, three-quarter inch square, and they're all soaking right now in a bowl of water. The glue itself is activated by the water, starting the curing process. I wet the groove and applied glue to each side of all the blocks of wood one at a time. This process takes a very long time and it's actually quite messy. I strongly encourage you to wear rubber gloves during this process as I spend hours removing the glue from my fingers afterwards. I proceeded to glue each block one at a time around the curve. In an effort to speed up the process, I placed the gorilla glue directly onto a paper plate and I started dipping each block of wood on each side into the glue and then pressing these into place into our router three-quarter inch groove. This was definitely faster than applying the glue directly from the bottle to each block of wood one at a time. I still wanted to find a way to streamline the process further. So at this point, I simply tried to make things faster by applying the glue directly from the bottle and into the groove, holding the diorama up at an angle so that the glue would settle down into our channel. Then, adding the blocks of wet wood directly from the bowl of water into the groove one at a time, working much faster this time as I worked my way around the sides of our new layout. This was definitely much faster and the glues curing process started almost immediately. I used a 10 inch block of wood on the straight side of the layout because this part wasn't curved and it would save time simply to put a larger piece of wood in this place. I found this to do on many different diorama layouts at this point and we'll always do it this way, applying the glue directly to the wood and then pressing the assembly into the groove in place. Now, the expansion process, as I mentioned, starts immediately and you do not want to let this get away from you because if your blocks of wood start pushing out as the glue expands and if it would cure this way, there would be no way to save the diorama. You would have a mess on your hands and you would literally have to start over and I let these blocks of wood expand. As you can see, they're pressing out a little bit. I did this on purpose to illustrate how fast and how much the blocks of wood would be pressed out but as you see, I'm pressing each one back in, working my way around the diorama very quickly for the full 30 minutes that it takes for this glue to cure and I was working rapidly all the way around the entire diorama of the whole layout that we're building which was better than, gosh, 15 feet all the way around. It was a lot of blocks of wood to deal with but it worked out. I've never seen them push out that far before. That's a lot. Can you imagine if you wouldn't have stayed on top of this? Or it would be, it'd be a nightmare. After the glue has cured and everything is hard, I take my Stanley Shureform planer and I run it around the outside edge of the diorama removing all of the excess hard gorilla glue. This Shureform planer is sharp. It's also very good for cutting down some of the sides of the wood in the event that they do expand and stick out just a little bit too far than what you want. I was able to smooth these down with the planer until I had a perfect flat surface ready to accept our new plywood. Now it was time to apply our plywood to the side of the diorama creating a finished frame-like product. Now, the piece of plywood was already pre-cut. I run it through my bandsaw at a four inch width wide piece that would fit the same height as the two sheets of foam stacked up together. And I wet this plywood with the garden hose inside soaking it on both sides so that it would bend around the diorama without splitting or cracking. I put gorilla glue onto the plywood running beads back and forth for a total of about four beads of gorilla glue. And then I took a block of wood as I lined up the plywood to the side of the diorama. And on this block of wood I had measured and marked the center point where I wanted to be able to staple in the staples. I then proceeded to slowly work my way all the way around this diorama. The first piece of plywood being almost eight feet long. Now, if you'll notice I'm using a Ryobi electric staple gun to do this and I'm shooting half inch staples into the plywood which then goes through and into our blocks of one by fours that are recessed into the foam. The wonderful thing about this stapler is it doesn't have a cord on it. I don't have to deal with hoses or air hoses. It's rechargeable with a battery. And you can also set the depth of how far it shoots staples through the wood so that you don't actually overshoot the staple completely through the plywood. You actually want it to stop with the plywood. The head of the staple then easily being able to be covered up, maybe hammered in with a set nail and then go ahead and cover it up. Watch as I do this as I work my way all the way around. No hoses, no fuss, no muss. Everything just went smooth wrapping this brand new layout that we're building in plywood. Once I had covered the diorama with two sheets of plywood wrapping all the way around I followed this up with plastic wood. The plastic wood easily fills all the staple holes covering up the heads of the staples making for a very smooth finish as I then come along with this sander. And I simply use the oscillating sander to sand out the sides of the wood making everything smooth, getting ready for our beautiful black finish that we're about to apply to this. I usually use Minwax products but the Home Depot this month wasn't selling Minwax so I had to use a different brand of polyurethane slash paint. I like the stuff that's where it's mixed both into the same can so I don't have to do separate processes of black and then go ahead and coat it with three coats of clear polyurethane. This is all in one. Polyurethane and black paint all in one. You still gotta put two or three coats onto the wood and on the very final coat I find that it's best to sand with very fine 1500 grit sandpaper and then go ahead and wet sand it all the way around before putting on the finished final last coat of black. This made the diorama look very nice. It's a lot different than the stain that I use in my shop on normal dioramas but again, this was going to be a trade show display and I wanted to look absolutely fantastic once set up. This polyurethane took about two hours to dry. The whole process took a total of eight hours to put three coats onto the diorama. So now you see that I'm starting to paint the plywood top of the diorama with a simple latex house paint. Couple of reasons for this. First of all, this is a trade show display so it needed to be very durable. It has a survive transportation and a simple plywood top made a very thin eighth inch plywood was a cure for this because it kept everything extremely lightweight but yet at the same time it was very durable to hold our track into place. So I took my time applying this latex brown house paint to the top of the diorama working my way around the edges until all of it was completely dry. Now it was time to figure out how to attach the Kato track to the top of our newly painted surface. I didn't want to glue it down because I figured the glue would probably use out the sides and mess something up and not look so great. So I elected to use very fine drill bits in my Dremel cordless drill and I drilled holes to which I then placed very small brad nails with a head on top of this. I hammered the nails into place and then drove them finally to home with a punch, a center punch tool, which wouldn't affect or damage the track in any way as I drove the nails into their home spot. I simply use the Dremel again to drill holes through the railroad ties and then applied the very small nails into the track work using a very lightweight hammer, not hitting the rail and simply driving it home with a center punch and this worked out really well. Once all of the track was attached permanently, I wanted to speed up the process. So I drilled all of the holes all the way around, hammered in a few nails all the way around and then came through with the center punch, simply driving each nail home. This really sped up the process working my way all the way around the simple loop of track. Now I painted the top of the nails with a black Sharpie to match the ties. This was a simple way to make the nails simply disappear. I needed to run the power wires through the foam and through the plywood. To do this, I drilled a quarter inch hole with a simple drill bit and then shoved a piece of brass tube through the foam, through the plywood and then proceeded to thread the Cotto two color wires through the pipe. This went all the way through four inches to the bottom of the diorama until the point of which I could pull out the tube and then thread the wire straight through. This worked out great and now we're ready to run some trains. And just so like that in just a couple of days we've built this simple end scale test layout that's great for demonstrating and running your rolling stock in locomotives and yet it also fits into a closet or fits simply under a bed when you're finished working with it and you can store it away. You can of course add any type of switches and track that you want to increase the size of it or make operation a little bit more interesting. Plus you can also add hills and scenery anytime you want. This is a basic platform just to get you started without using one by fours or any of the conventional building techniques that we've seen in the past. Very simple foam wrapped in oak ready to go. And that's this segment for What's Neat. For this segment of What's Neat I'm standing in the most magnificent operational layout here with Joe Pellegrino. He's a gentleman that built this beautiful magnificent layout and there are a lot of gentlemen down here tonight. I count about eight operating this layout currently. This is work Joe. This is something that a lot of people have passion for and that is the operational ability of HO scale trains. You essentially take what I like to do and run in circles and turn it into a chessboard. Would you say? Tell us about your passion for operation. It all started years ago. My son and I started building railroads. This is actually our fifth railroad we built. And we just kind of grew as we came along and when we built this one we decided it was going to be total operations. And we chose an area in Alton, Illinois that we modeled this railroad after. So if you're familiar with Alton and Broadway all the industry that was along that area the steel mill, the box board, the glassworks this lead smelter all those are represented on this railroad. So did you drive along in photograph and look at all these locations to come up with this concept? We actually picked it up when we were in La Crosse, Wisconsin. We went to a guy's railroad that was modeling a portion of Alton which was not correct. Now on the way home, my son and I decided we were going to do a correct version of the industries in Alton. So that's how we arrived at this. And when you say correct, you're talking about you've got to include all the switching leads the holding tracks and everything else necessary in order for these freight trains to drop off their consist in a believable manner, right? Correct, we didn't model every track. We only, you know, we're limited to buy the space in the railroad but we picked all the correct ones that were pretty primary on each industry and tried to do those as best we could. Now I see double deck and triple deck. Tell me about what is the size of this layout? The footprint is 18 by 30 and the lower deck is about 32 inches the upper deck is about 56 inches. I forget how low the third deck is, that's just our staging yard so it doesn't matter much anyway. But it actually starts in Chicago and runs all the way to Venezuela. That's amazing. Now I shot pictures of your dispatcher over there working very hard. What is the gentleman's name? The dispatcher or the yard master? The guy said the desk? That was me, Joe Pellegrino. That was you filling out the paperwork and I shot you sitting there working the radio just like the prototype and filling out the paperwork. To me, this looks like work. No, once you've done it a few times it's not too hard. You just have to make sure you don't crash trains. Wish we almost had one tonight. But we fixed that. Now I was admiring this beautiful helix. This is a very long elongated circular helix and it looks like it's many levels. How long and tell me about that? The footprint of that is six by 10. It's an oblong and most people do circles. This one's an oblong. We had the space when we moved to this house there was just a little alcove room out there where we picked and we built our railroad so that the helix would fit in there. It's five levels high so it goes from the lowest level all the way to the top and it's a 2% grade all the way up. That's smooth. I noticed you use architectural drawing drawers to hold freight cars. Yeah, we got that from K-10s. He kind of had those and we saw them and I actually got those from the place that I used to work and they were gonna throw them in the dumpster while they ended up in the back of my pickup truck. Rock and roll. Now I understand it looks like I said triple layers because while I was looking back there I saw three different layers of track but primarily for operation it's a double deck layout. Would you say? Yes, it is double deck layout. The third deck is just staging tracks. Okay. And what type of track do you like to use on this? We have Atlas code 83. Okay. And what is about the height of the bench work? The top one is about 58 inches and the lower one is about 36 inches. Okay. And what is your minimum radius on this? 30 inches. 30 inches. You know these numbers. Is this code 100 track or is this 83? Code 83. It's beautiful track. At some point I guess I envision you ballasting and continuing on with the scenery on a project. How long do you envision this layout taking to completion? Forever. scenery is not one of our mainstays. We've been operating for about five years now and we've already, we made another track change recently. So scenery is kind of on the back burner until we make all our track changes. Dude, this is awesome. One other thing I wanna talk about and I've built a few of these myself is your gate on the entry to the layout here. I see you got three main lines and a bridge on your folding out gate. Tell me about that. So I wanted to build something that was easy to get through for visitors to come, but I wanted to be able to power it without running wires or any kind of thing like that. So I just kind of sat there and I took door hinges and I took the pins out of door hinges and created a mechanism to where when the gate closes, they touch and it put power to the gate and it works flawlessly. I saw that. I saw the screws on top to hold the rails in stability, the place of placement. Everything looks like you've designed it. You're quite an amazing designer. After this interview, I'm gonna ask you what you do for a living, but I know it's got something to do with design. And you can see this beautiful layout at the 2020 Annamarie National Train Show in St. Louis, that's right. You're on the layout tour. I don't know what day you're on, but you can check out the website at NMRA.org. That's NMRA 2019, or 20, I'm sorry, 2020.org. The website is very well-developed. It's got all the layout tours and all of the clinics on it. And people are gonna love coming to your layout. I envision a couple busloads of people pulling into this cul-de-sac, so. Same thing, we're gonna be on the tour every day that we're available and we're also gonna have four obsessions during the week. This is a really beautiful layout. It's a real treat. Operation to me scares me, because it's more like work. But, oh, thank you so much for sharing this beautiful work of art with the viewers of What's Neat. Thank you. For this special segment of What's Neat, I'm standing with Campbell Rice. Now, you'll know Campbell Rice is being a regular on the What's Neat this week podcast, but today we're standing in its brand new layout room. And Campbell, you've been talking about this house for about two months, and now you're in it. I am finally in it, and I finally get to do the important thing, which is work on the train. Now that all the boxes are unpacked, all the furniture's in place, now comes the important part. And you wasted no time. You said you've done all the construction I've literally showed on B-roll literally in the last 24 hours. Pretty much. I got the bench work somewhat semi-done, and then I finished up everything that I have down here yesterday, basically. And what I did is when I tore my old layout down, I took it down in modular sections. And so it's gonna be the same size, which is 24 inches wide, which is a four by sheet of two inch star foam cut in half. So I rebuilt the bench work to that width, and then just took my existing module and then laid it in up here, and I'm just kind of key in the track. Now, of course, this is a lot bigger than my last model, so I'm gonna have to add in some newer sections. We did a Daniel Coombs interview, and he's doing the same thing you're starting a brand new layout. But the fact is you seem like you had your ducks in a row to be able to have it set up so quickly. The layout room was pre-planned literally, and you're using parts of your old layout. Is that right? That's right. I've had enough practice. I don't know, this'll probably make about my 15th to 20th layout. I've lost track, but you just get better and better, and that's the greatest thing about it is I get to keep improving my techniques and with new things coming out on the market, static grass and DCC and all this other new technology, I get to just keep improving. I'm looking at this module here, Campbell, and it's one of the old modules from your layout. Tell me about this section. Well, this was where I used to live in Nashville. There was a curve similar to this on the CSX, and I always liked it and photographed that area, and I decided that when I built my newest layout, I will kind of want to incorporate something similar to this in it. Basically, just foamed it out of Styrofoam and put the plaster cloth over the top of it and then carved in the rock forming so it looks like that. This is great. Now, because it's a new house, I've noticed that the lighting in here is basic basement lighting. Tell me what your plans are for the lighting on this layout? Well, basically I'm gonna put the balance up at the top and it will actually shine off the walls. You notice when I had the room built, I had the walls, the color of the sky, which is a Sherwin-Williams atmospheric blue color. And so I'll put LED lighting up in the balance that hangs down, probably strip lighting. And my goal there is to be able to have it to where I can change the color. So at nighttime it'll go blue or orange or amber as the sun starts to set and then hopefully find some fiber optic lighting in there to kind of put it, look like stars up above it. It's amazing how technology of recent years in lighting itself is changing the way we design our layouts. It's gonna be a magnificent moonrise on its layout. I hope so, and we're gonna see what it turns out. It's nighttime running too, right? It will probably not happen in a week or two, but it's been amazing. It's amazing what you've done just in the last 24 to 48 hours down here. I mean, because it was so easy for you to set this up. Now, I noticed another thing. Your layout height is about what? It is 43 inches. So that's a good viewing height, not only for you, but younger people that come to visit with you. Do you think someday down the road you're gonna be into operation? I'd love to be. I've never done an operation, but it is my goal. And I'd love to get out and do some operations with some, hopefully with some area layout so I can see how it works. But it is my goal to be able to do that, yes. That's really cool. I'll have two layouts, two railroads here, typically model Union Pacific, but then I'll also model CN or IC and probably have both lines kind of separate so that you can actually run two different railroads at the same time. Now, I noticed in the other room, you've got this beautiful module with this bridge on it and it looks like that characteristic water made from texture paint, which is a really cool trick. Are you gonna do that on this bridge module where I see the Central Valley Bridge? Probably so, yes. I took that back before I met you from kinpatterson.com and applied it to that bridge in there and I'm gonna do something similar to this too in here as well. I love this because it's not all finished. We can see what a layout looks like as it's being built. So many how-tos and so many layout interviews we've done. They're completely finished, master model railroaders already done, but it's great and refreshing to see this and you're using some pretty good techniques. Well, this is the fun part right here. Getting to design where your track is gonna go, how your scenery is gonna go and things like that. That's what I really enjoy the most. This is awesome. I can't wait to get updates. You only live 25 minutes away in this beautiful place and we will do updates on this railroad as you progress. Well, fantastic. So thank you very much, Campbell, for sharing a few minutes of your time with What's Neat. 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.