 Hi, I'm Kevin Rubel, and this is Diesel, the Wonder Dog. And June's What's Neat starts now. The What's Neat show is sponsored by Caboose, sharing our passion for trains since 1938. This is What's Neat for June 2018. I'm your host, Ken Patterson, and this month we've got a really good show. First of all, we take a look at David Stewart's O-Scale layout. It's a very large layout with an operating hump yard with retarders that actually slow the freight cars down. We also take a look at Paul Brenneke's N-Scale layout. It's called the Grand Layout, and I know you've seen it in the model industry in the past, and it's a real treat as this one fits into a bedroom. Campbell Rice. He shares with us this month a way to make really cool pine trees, very quick, and it's something that I would have never tried, so it's pretty neat to see that on this month's video. The Walthers Paper Mill Project is a structure that I've been working on for a few weeks. I wanted to build something as a background prop for some of my outdoor photo shoots, and this building fit that just perfectly. Also, Steven M. Conroy supplies us with some beautiful drone footage this month and modeling ideas from above. It's a military train consist that's absolutely fascinating to watch. And with that, let's continue on with the rest of the June 2018 What's Neat. After this layout construction segment of What's Neat, I wanted to build the Walthers Paper Mill kit as I need fresh and new looking buildings all the time to use for background props for some of my outdoor photography assignments, and I thought this building being large would be just perfect for that. I started by laying out all the parts on a table and understanding the basic assembly process by simply reviewing the kit's instructions. I like to use masking tape to assemble the main structure parts just to better understand the size of the building and to visualize any modifications I may want to make to the structure in the future. And in this build, I wanted to build interior floors, something that would add strength to the overall kit which will ensure stability during rough handling while out on photo shoots during the setup process. I started building the base of the structure using quarter inch oak plywood cut to the size and fitting inside the main walls of the building as they're assembled. I then used one half inch square blocks for supports to hold the second floor into place. Then the building's main walls would simply fit down and snug around the wood interior floors and then hooking itself and gluing it at the base. I cut a space in the base to accept railroad tracks and I also cut holes in the bottom of the wood so I'd have access for my hands up inside of the building and for carrying the building. Now I put six support columns into place and set the second floor on top of this. Now if you look the second floor has an edge or a lip on one side and this will support the second story set of walls of the building kit. I added a second sheet of plywood as a sub base for the building, gluing our first floor plywood on top of this, providing us with a stronger base that the outside walls will then sit on top of. I put weights on this until the wood glue set up and dried. Turning my attention to the windows, I painted these with Rust-Oleum camouflage brown paint. I also used can spray paint, Rust-Oleum redwood color which makes great brick color. I painted the outside walls of the entire building with the plastic safe Rust-Oleum redwood color and I allowed this, I applied this actually in multiple coats, spraying on just a little, letting this dry and then spraying a little bit more on again just simply to avoid paint runs. The plywood base did warp while the gray primer dried outside in the sun. This was a problem, so I fixed this by breaking out the half inch square blocks and replacing them with one by six lumber cut to size which then the second floor would fit on top of. I also scored the base with a radial arm saw to straighten it and flatten it and allow the wood to lay flat when glued together. I also put heavy weights on top of this as it was drying and this pretty much solved the problem of the quarter inch base warping, thereby the building would then sit square on perfect onto this base when it's dry. I screwed and glued the interior floors together with one and a quarter inch wood screws. This made for a very strong assembly. Using a can of spray paint, I sprayed Rust-Oleum textured sandstone color, a sand finish paint along the building's foundation, masking this with blue tape to protect the red brick areas. Using an airbrush set to less than 10 pounds of air and filling the cup with a little bit of floccal cement gray color, I carefully painted the building's cement top cap trim around the top of the entire building. This color detail will bring out the lines of the structure and make it look very prototypical. I assembled the brick inserts into the window sections as per the building's instructions, gluing this with tester's plastic glue. I then glued all the windows into the building with liberal amounts of tester's glue and setting weights on top of this until the glue finally cured. For window glass, I cut 1 32 inch clear acetate or plexiglass, cutting each piece to fit over all the windows on all four sides of the building's interior walls. Now this was attached in place with a little bit of clear silicone glue here and there dabbed around the areas around the windows. With the outside walls of the building painted and assembled and the completed structured plywood interior painted and dry, it was now time to glue the walls to the plywood interior structure. Now I used clear silicone glue to attach this together, gluing the base all the way around the structure along with the second floor edges and attachment points. I then set the building over the interior section, setting the walls into the bead of glue and setting this aside to dry overnight. I ran a bead of tester's plastic glue around the inside walls to glue the roof sections into place. There were four of these. Now it was time to weather the building's exterior with a wash of burnt oil paint, thinned with turpentine. Now I dipped the 1 inch wide artist brush into this mixture of paint on a flat tile, mixing it, and then I applied this to the outside walls, applying a grime wash, pulling this down with the brush until the entire building had a wash of this weathering, careful to avoid the windows. This cuts down the red tone of the fresh brick color and makes the building look more realistic in outdoor sunlight during photo shoots. And that pretty much finishes this new outdoor photo prop for photo shoots. Check it out. This is the Walthers Paper Mill building, which in all honesty, it really could fit any type of large factory structure. You could even cut out the end walls and make a dynamite locomotive facility out of it. But it's a really great prop. I plan to use it a lot in the future. And that ends pretty much this layout construction segment on What's Neat. For this segment of What's Neat, I'm with Paul Brennicki. And Paul has shown us one thing. And that is small things don't necessarily have to come in big packages. He has got the most magnificent end scale layout. You'll all recognize it as being published in more than, I don't know how many articles, but I know he's got six plus covers in the industry with the Grand Railroad in end scale. Now this is a prototype layout designed exactly the way you've seen us design layouts in St. Louis where we always shoot video. And that is for the run by effect. That's how I like to shoot my trains and build my layouts. And that's exactly what Paul has done here following absolute prototype standards. So Paul, so I don't keep talking. Tell me about this awesome layout you built. It's a proto-free lance and a modern contemporary, which is today. And I get old engines, you know, they come off the layout and we run nothing but modern stuff. This is basically two miles of mainline on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains. And going uphill is toward Denver and I just do railfanning on it. I don't do any switching or any passing. I can't even, if you had to pass you would have to have double track tunnels and I can't do it in this model room. I love the heif. It's got it so that you can reach things right away. Another thing I've noticed in looking at your models is you super detail your locomotives. You put on absolute scale handrails in end scale. Well, you need a lot of magnification for sure. But if you put them, you know, my parameter on a plastic handrail that's 80s in diameter, which doesn't make any sense, you know, makes the models look goofy. So by cutting them off and using brass wire and a rectangular verticals for the stanchions, you can make it look pretty good. Plus I cut all the grab irons off and use 8,000 brass wire for those too. Even your stack trains tricked out with handrails, all the stirrups, very fine little parts. Well, thank you. Some of those are scratch built so you can do. Now this grand, how did you come up with this paint scheme for your layout? Well, the paint scheme is my college colors. How about that? Blue and silver. And I looked at the Burlington Northern and in the old days, they used to have big numbers on the back end. And I thought, well, I just want to put the grand. And I just thought that if I could put a sweep back behind the engine, that would make those look pretty sharp. And it comes out pretty good. I like light silver, in other words, silver or gray trucks and tanks. I think if this layout illustrates anything, it is exactly the fact that you can put a super detailed run by effect layout in a bedroom. Because we're essentially in a normal standard room, which possibly anybody has to work with. Right. Actually, I have a 56 car cold train, which I run in here. You even fit a helix in here, I saw. Which is a pretty good sized train. And I try to use DPU equipment wherever it makes sense. Well, I got to tell you, Paul, I am so honored to be standing here. Because honestly, I am a fomer as well. And I have seen your modeling in previous articles. I've seen the very fine rail and all the signals and the details. And it has always inspired me that you can do a run by effect like this in end scale. Well, thank you. I really enjoy it. It's just a lot of fun to run trains. I do a lot of photography work down here. And that's another just an amazing hobby of all the things you can do and learn to do. I just enjoy doing it. It's awesome. And thank you so much for sharing this with the viewers of What's Neat. And that ends this end scale segment of What's Neat. For this segment of What's Neat, we're going to do something a little different. We're going to make some trees. We've never made trees in all of the shows so far from all 70 something shows. And today I've got Campbell Rice with me. And he is going to show us how to make a really easy and cool pine tree. So Campbell, it's all yours. Thank you, Ken. What I do is I make trees fairly cheap and anybody can do it no matter what budget you're on using simple stuff that you can find from your ordinary dollar store. Use 16 gauge wire, a paint brush, a little bit of Rust-Oleum camouflage paint, and some Melmer's glue. And so that's about it. So let's get busy. Let's get started here. So I'm going to pull out some wire and this is going to basically determine the length of your tree. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to pull it out for time sake here. It should take about five or six minutes to do this. So I'm going to turn it like that and I'm going to give it a cut with the wire cutters. So I got something that looks like this. Let's whip it back around. All right, then take you some vise grips and clamp on and then I'm trying to get it as straight as possible and level both of them. I use, you'll need to use a tacky glue, something that has a pretty good hold to it. Elmer's glue is just not good enough so I get this at the hobby store. And I'm going to just put a little tab right here on this. All right, that's probably plenty. And I use a Q-tip and I'm just going to kind of take this and I'm going to run it down one side of the wire just like that. You don't need a whole lot, just enough to get it to, just enough to cover the wire there. So that's that. Now you're going to take your paintbrush and your scissors and I'm basically going to cut the bristles off and fan them in my fingers like this. And then you want to go under one and then lay it on top of the other, just like that on top. It doesn't have to be perfect, really simple. We're already starting to look like a tree, all right? Okay, so when we get to this point and we've got them all lined up, we take our drill with an ordinary hook inside of it and I take that and I'm just going to simply put on there and give it a spin. So that's what this creates here. Now I'll take my scissors and I'm going to kind of trim it up and you want to kind of give it that, let's see what we're going to do, a pine tree here. So we're going to kind of give it that point somewhat of a pine tree and it doesn't take, you don't have to be perfect with it, just kind of cut some of the straight branches off. All right, so I'll take my wire cutters and I'm going to cut the little loop off the top, just like that. And then I'll take my paint, I'm going to skid it over this bucket here, I'm just going to kind of give it a quick spray, be sure to rotate it around and get it from the top, so that way it covers it. So basically what we have here is we have the look of branches. Once you do that you may have to kind of touch it up a little bit because you can kind of see where we're at. All right, I'll get to that point. Then I'm going to come in with the Elmer's Glue, I'm going to give it a spray all around, just take some of your regular ground foam cover and I'm going to just sprinkle it around here real good. Be sure to get the top, the bottom, just all over real good, just heavy coat it. You can recycle this, that's why I'm doing it over the bucket. It's also what you can do is you can take this trunk and spray it some more if you want and you can put sawdust in it and then give it another coat of brown to kind of give it the look of bark and you can use your imagination, you can do different things, you can put, I've done plaster over the top to kind of give it the snow effect and just pinch it off and you have a tree. Campbell, that looks fantastic, that looks just like this other one that you did a little while ago and on this other one we've got sort of a pine needle effect in addition to the undergrowth coverage that you've just shown us make here. Let's show them how to do the pine needles. Sure. So your tree is still wet and we're going to hook up this knock static grass gun to this wire that you just spun with the drill and that'll give us the conductivity to create the static charge. So when I turn this on and you rotate that and if you look, you can't really see this on video, but with my eyes I can see that it's being attracted to the pine tree as we do this and that it stands up. I can see the silhouette. Yep. It's going to be very difficult to show this on film, but essentially it creates the effect of pine needles and you can further experiment with that. But Campbell, I got to tell you what, what you've just done is really cool, simple and expensive and it works. It works. It works great. And for five minutes and for probably about two cents a piece, you have trees. That's awesome, Campbell. Thank you very much for sharing that with the What's Neat folks. And that's this segment of What's Neat. For this segment of What's Neat, I'm at David Stewart's O-Scale layout here in Colorado. It appears to me, David, you've put a lot of thought into this maze of a layout. This is very large. It seems to occupy almost your entire basement. It's double deck, hand laid track. It's just beautiful. Tell us about all of your layout. Well, you are right. It encompasses all my basement and then some because we are standing under the garage. Okay. You didn't know that, did you? No, I didn't. I know your valences are beautiful. The ceiling is black. Your boards are lit. Yes. Yeah. I have an extra 800 square feet because I put in two 20 by 40 foot long concrete precast beams for my garage floor. They put in a topping and then they give me my garage floor. I have a 3,000 square foot basement and a 2,300 square foot house. Wow. I know where your priorities are now. Yes. Yes. Yes. We've been working on the layout 10 years. Okay. All the track is hand laid, O-Scale, about 260 some odd turnouts of all varieties. I see you've got tortoise switch machines on them. You're using the electric switch machines? Yep. Pretty much. And several thousand feet of track. Now, when we walked in, you were holding up a piece of paper representing the new bridge that you're fixing to build out as you walk into the layout. That's a pretty impressive project and you said that bridge is made out of what? It's your thing. Your thing. Yeah. And I'm not making it. Vince Griesmer, one of the crew members on the panel. I'm very fortunate to have many guys who share time, talent and treasure with me to bring this thing to completion. When we first walked in, you showed us your rain room where you have the lightning effect and thunder. And as we walk through the aisles of your layout, it almost feels like I'm walking through a theme park, whereas you are trying to direct our attention to the models and at the same time create an atmosphere where we feel like we're in one spot and we can't see the rest of the layout where we're at. I've heard of people talk about doing that, but I've never actually seen it done. And with your curtains between, I think you've accomplished that effect really, really good. Well, that was why I changed O-Scale. I was in HO for 27 years. And I really wanted to get up by the track in the scene feel. And O-Scale, I saw it at a train show and I thought, wow, this is so big, eight times the mass of HO. Yes. And I thought I could create a series of sausage-linked scenes discreetly designed so that you are totally in that scene. Sausage-linked. That's a good description. Yeah, just like one after the next. And we have several right here in this room. We have sausage-linked one here, over here, the classification yard, another one down here, the staging yard. And this is the only part of the layout that's double decked, just for the staging. There's a giant one-loop helix that brings it up to this level. Now you really operate this layout, and I see you've got car cards here. And these car cards appear to have the actual freight cars on them. Can you get that, Jess? So his car cards have got pictures of all the freight cars to help eliminate any confusion. And also when we walked in, I noticed you had a very realistic CTC switching system. Is that actually a real one? No, we built that. I did the cabinetry. Bob Sobel, who you met when you came in, he did all the electronics on it. And it's all run off of a little Arduino. It's got to be really enjoyable to sit in that room and have control of the layout. I don't know if you noticed in that room, if you took a picture, but there's a window right next to it. Yes. That window sash was in the construction area, so we wound up with it left over, and I thought, what can I do with that? So that wall actually folds out by furnaces behind there, and the sash is there. But now in the age of cheap big screen TVs, there's going to be a live video feed into a big screen TV from where that room sits on this layout, which is over in Rexburg. That's a cozy little room. This is absolutely amazing. I don't know what to say. Hand-laid track. That takes forever. Code what rail are you using? We use 100 on the secondary and 125 on the main. Code 100, and this is an HO scale, folks. This is, so think about that. That'd be equivalent to Code 55 in HO scale, which looks absolutely fantastic when you look at the overall effect. You've got a multitude of freight cars, brass engines. Well, we move a lot of coal. We load it, actually loads. We use live loads, and we move the coal from the various loaders on the coal branch, and they run over the layout. You haven't seen the rotary work yet. We'll watch that thing, because on the last layout, we would, over the course of an afternoon session, we would load and move by rail and dump for barge loading, eight plus real gallons. That's a model of the Whiting Gluticide Dumper. You can look at them up online and watch them work. And I built mine from Plexiglass, styrene, brass, and after it dumps, I'll show you what powers the thing. That's cool. And it appears it comes back into position and you're ready for your next car. So all of your cars on the layout are loose coal. Does that mean I think you're going to be loading these somewhere? Yes. Okay. Operational loaders. We'll have four of them on the layout, just like we did on the last layout. That's neat. Thank you. And that rolls on down in the receiving yard, where the engine puts it up onto the train to load again. And these are what works. DCR gear, SD24HO gear, all the different pieces and parts to make it work. That's neat. Here's an operating hump yard. So we actually classify. And I noticed you had a mirror above that. I filmed the mirror that you had so that you can look down and see the couplers when you separate the cars. Yes. Now Dave, I see you've got an operating hump yard here and it appears you've put a lot of thought into it to make it operate exactly like the prototype. For most of us, building a hump yard is about getting the grade correct and trying to get our models, be it HO or O-scale, to roll at the correct speed. But you've built retarders. Explain this to us. Well as the train comes over, the hump, press the hump, the magnets will automatically release the KDs. However, as the tracks fill up, you'll need to retard the cars. So the magnets on top here are going to disconnect the cars. Disconnect automatically, yes. And then as the car rolls down, you've got a button that you push that makes these foam retarders through servos on airplanes move a little outward and pinch the flanges. That's good. And it slows it down just like the prototype. That's the answer so many people have been looking for on how to do, including myself. I have thought about this for years and gave up on how to create a retarder system that actually a manufacturer could produce, but let alone just model for your own self. So how ingenious of you to do this. Thank you. I puzzled about it for quite a while. But yet it's operationally fun at the same time. It is function and form all tied together. And what we've discovered is just with the prototype already new, you can classify trains in a hurry, as opposed to a modern road being the bottleneck on the yard. We classify trains faster than they can keep up with them. Now the idea is you want to get all your cars to roll as freely as you can, but not too freely. So some of them just rolled too freely. I'll show you what we did to slow them down. See the phosphor bronze? Yes. You put some bronze on there as if it's a track pickup to slow down the axles. It's just a hard wiper and that will slow the car down. So I can tweak these just by pulling on them to get just the right amount of speed. Do you think people could apply this technique to H.O. scale? I don't know. I think it's worth trying. And that's something we should check out. But this is definitely something that's neat. Yes. This is mass that we're working with. So that's about two pounds right there. That's cool. There's a lot of thought. You are very creative and you said you've got help on this. And that's awesome. You've got fellow friends that enjoy your hobby, isn't it? It is my number one passion in the hobby, is the people. People would say your arrows are hot passion. I say no. Meaningful relationships. That's my passion. I'll tell you what, Dave, I appreciate you showing all the folks on what's neat. Your awesome, awesome artistry. Thank you very much, Dave. You're most welcome. And that ends this segment of 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.