 Hi, I'm John Palusso and I'm James Regear and April's 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 April 2020. I'm your host Ken Patterson and this month we've got a really good show. First of all, we look at John Palusso's beautiful 8-Show Scale layout. This is a double deck layout with a lot of track. It's designed for operation, but the scenery is absolutely magnificent. Plus there's a really cool system that John has created to get into the layout. It's sort of a doorway folding section of the layout. It's quite amazing to share with you on What's Neat this month. Also we talked to Tony Pellegrino. Now Tony, you'll remember his father Joe showed us the layout that they had built last month on What's Neat. But this month Tony talks about how he designs operation for layouts. Not only has he done it for his father's layout, he's done it for K-10 and a few other layouts here in St. Louis, and he's quite an expert of coming up with operating concepts, the paperwork. It's quite a whole other science of model railroading, which Tony shares with us this month on What's Neat. Also this month I design a photograph using this wonderful Bachman locomotive from Bachman Trains in Philadelphia. This is a charger made by Siemens. This is the latest that Amtrak is starting to use throughout the United States. And for this project I was to create the cover of their 2020 catalog. You've seen me do that in the past, here's a 2019 shot that we did last year. But this year it's all about creating a scene, layers of scenery, and the prototype super elevated roadbed and design of that. So I take you through the steps of that process and all these steps are the same steps I use when I design a layout. Also I'd like to thank very much Caboose out in Lakewood, Colorado for supporting the What's Neat show now for going on three years. Thank you very much for that and just remember all of the products seen in this episode of What's Neat are available at Caboose in Lakewood, Colorado. And so with that let's continue on with the rest of this month's April 2020 What's Neat. For this segment of What's Neat I'm standing in the most beautiful operational layout here with John Paluso, the builder and designer of this amazing layout that represents so many parts of the St. Louis, Missouri area that we're familiar with all the way through to Springfield, Missouri. John, this is an absolutely beautiful work of art, two levels. Tell me about your passion for this hobby. I love this hobby because a little bit of everything, you know, modeling, carpentry, scenery, electrical, painting, just strictly modeling. And you've been doing this for quite a long time, haven't you? Yes I have. 50 years. 50 years of being a model rarider. Is this the best hobby in the world or what? And you've built this dynamic-looking double-deck layout that is absolutely designed for operation. So about how many people do you have come to one of your operating sessions and how long do they last? I have seven operators. Operators are one dispatcher, two-yard crew, four-yard crews. And it takes about three, three-and-a-half hours to do a session. And the session is an A and B session, kind of overlap. So when A session is done, the next session is a B session, and that pretty much gets all the trains around, all the cars moved. So you allow them to break it up there into groups so that one group gets a break, the other group takes over? Correct. That's a really neat philosophy on how to do that. And about how many hours does it take? Well an operating session takes about three hours, three-and-a-half hours. And you've got a lot of paperwork down here to fill that up. I also noticed that you were sharing with us outside on the bar top out there this dispatcher's magnet board for keeping track of trains. Tell me about that. Yeah, his job is to move the train from point A to point B and without having a cornfield meet. And he's in constant communication with each road crew by a two-way radio, and all the road crews have a two-way radio on them too. So not only that, everybody is listening in on everybody's conversation. So they kind of know where everything's at and what's going on to the whole operating sequence. That's fantastic. Now you've chosen to model the areas around St. Louis. I recognize so many of them. Did you grow up out here? Yes, I did. I rode my bike down there at Sublet and Macklin Avenue, which is right around here. And the Mopac had their main line down there also. So me and my friend were riding our bikes, and we'd have a ball. I mean, we stayed there all day watching Mopac and Frisco trains running through doing the switching. There was a lot of industrial areas down there. So it was fun. It was fun. That's cool, man. So you're modeling your childhood, and so many people do do that. But what you've done here that we can see is you've modeled it so accurately. When I can walk around your layout in absolutely recognized locations, I mean, it's, it's, why did you do that? I want people to know where they were at. They've been there. They can recognize that. And that's a fulfillment of I like personally, because they know that I modeled that area. I mean, they've been there. That's amazing. So many things. The Merrimack River Bridge, that beautiful layout, where the O-scale layouts in St. Louis, that O-scale layout is in this beautiful Webster Groves train station that you built here on your layout. You did a magnificent job on that. And also something else that's really stuck out with me are your backdrops. Tell me about those. The backdrop is a commercial company that's no longer in business. But the name of the company was Scenic King, and I made copies of all the originals. So I still have the originals. So if I ever build another layout or revise a scene, I can always refer back to my originals and make more copies. They're beautiful. Now, I noticed you said this. We talked about the double deck. Tell me about the height of each level. Well, the lower level is 43 inches, and the upper level is 62 inches. And I made that height because I like high-level operations to see the train at high level. It looks so neat just to see a train go by at high level, and it looks real. It does, and it looks so great when you can see it. Now, I noticed you used some very fine detail track. What code track are you using here? This is all code 83 track by Atlas. And I also noticed you like ground throws, where you walk up to the location you can throw to switch yourself. Yes, they're all caboose industries, ground throws. They have contacts in them in case I want to signal the turnout. Okay. Now, the super trees are absolutely beautiful, and they look just like the backdrops. Did you flock these with a ground thumb? How did you do your trees? Well, when you get them from Scenic Express. Right. They're, you know, the basic brown looking color. So I actually painted them, spray painted them in gray color, and then black over that to give it a oak, Missouri oak type looking tree. And then I sprayed it with adhesive, sprinkled a ground thumb on it, and then spray it with air spray to secure. There's a lot of those on this layout. Now, I noticed you've also used beautiful ballast. What type of ballast have you used on your track work? The ballast is from Woodland Scenics. So it looks like medium to fine ballast, and it looks like you mix the colors a little bit? It's a color that they have. It's a gray and a white. Right. And a light gray and a white combination. And it's a medium ballast, it's not fine. What is about your minimum radius on this layout? Minimum radius is 30 inches, and it goes up to 36 some spots. And you built this beautiful working helix that gets you from one level to the next. I shot some video of that. Tell me about how that works. How many minutes does it take? It takes two minutes and 20 seconds to travel from the lowest level to the upper level. And two minutes, 20 seconds is a long time to some people. So I end up putting a portal to view the train while it's going up there so guys can look at their train while it's going through the helix, and they don't panic of where is my train. It's right there, and they can see it. That's fantastic. Now one thing I noticed when I originally walked into the room was, and I know you're an engineer by trade, you pay attention to detail, and you've built the most magnificent folding gate system. And I've seen some in the last few months, actually years. You by far have built the most detailed folding gate section I've ever seen. Tell us about this. Well, it was a dilemma because I had to figure out how to get into the layout room. And it had to be a gate. So most gates I've seen are either a bridge type gate, un-senic, or a lift out gate, or a lift out bridge. But I wanted to incorporate a swinging gate and be scenic. I didn't want it to be a plain Jane Gates. It'll disrupt the flow of scenery. Right. But right now, as you can see, the scenery flows right through the gate. You can't tell us there sometimes. It's just fantastic. I know the math involved in lining up the track, making it on a curve. It's on a curve. It's not a straight. We're all looking at the video of this because I did shoot that a couple different clips. I'm closing it. I am so impressed with that. Now you are going to be on an open house. Is that right? Or just operation for the MRA 2020 show convention coming up here in St. Louis. Tell me, is it the open house or operation? It'll be an operating special interest group and a layout design special interest group. Great. And members of the SIG, they are allowed to come to this layout and operate on it. Is that something also that they would find on the website? Yes. Okay. So guys, check out the NMRA website, NMRA Gateway 2020. It's called gateway2020.org if I'm right on that, James. Thank you, James, for running camera for us tonight. But we are so impressed with what you've done. One other thing I've noticed as we walked around this layout is how absolutely well you've thought out the lighting on this, the lower level, the upper level. There's different types of lighting, but everything is well lit. Tell me about that. Well, the upper level has our fluorescent fixtures behind the valance and the lower level, I had the old C9 Christmas tree lights that I ran underneath the open grid work. I was thinking about fluorescence on a lower level, but cost effective that would have been very costly. It's absolutely beautiful. 400 feet of track, all code 83, just runs around the room up the center. It's quite an island type layout. If you follow it, you can almost get lost in here, but it's not that big of a space. Tell me about the size. The layout size is 16 feet wide by 30 feet long. 30 by 16 double deck. I can see where all 400 feet of track are and a lot of scenery. You've truly done a magnificent job on this. You are an artist. Is there anything else that you'd want to say to close this out? Model railroading is fun. The best hobby in the world, and that is this segment of What's Neat. For this segment of What's Neat, I've got this beautiful Siemens Charger locomotive from Bachmann Industries in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and they've asked me to create their 2020 catalog cover using this locomotive. When I see this model, it looks so streamlined. It looks like power, and I want to see this engine just coming out of the cover of the book. I want it leaning. There's only four different things you can do with trains. Trains come at you in a straight line, left to right, or in a curved, left to right, and that's the way it would be set up on any type of photograph that you see in real railfanning situations. And for this, I think I want to do this on a curve. They've supplied me with two passenger cars to go along with the locomotive, and I think I'm going to put it on a super elevated curve, enough to see just the cars, and then balance in scenery behind it. I've had really good luck in the past with this end scale simple diorama that I built. It doesn't look like very much, but it gives you all the foreground scenery necessary to see a product, and then I can stack up the scenery behind that, whether it's city buildings, a desert scene, or pine trees with mountains. So I'm not sure exactly what the final result's going to be for the shot. I know it'll be stacked up with four different layers of scenery, probably to go behind this diorama. Again, this is end scale. We need to build this in HO scale. So for this video, I'm going to show you how to build a main line on your layout, how to carve the topography for the ballast, how to lay out some scenery on the sides, and get that super elevation in the HO scale track that we're going to use for the shot. So let's see how this turns out. I actually don't know what the final result's going to be. I've got three days to pull this off and make a really dynamic shot that Bachman Industries will get to look at for the next 12 months on their catalog cover. So let's see what happens next. So I set up a sheet of foam on the top of the table to which I will design this cover photo on top of. I leaned the locomotive and also the passenger cars behind the locomotive while I was looking through the camera in order to visualize the photograph, how it would fit onto the sheet of foam. It only matters what the camera sees. Everything else on the outsides doesn't have to be built. So I took a Sharpie magic marker and I drew the initial line that the train would be sitting on. In this case, this is the outside main line of the curve. And once I had that established, then it was just a matter of looking through the camera again and discovering what would actually be seen in this photograph. So I drew a line showing exactly what the camera saw through the lens. So you can see this corner of the foam would get cut off. And then I went ahead and drew the inside main line and also the inside of what the camera would see. Once I had these factors in place, I knew essentially where I needed to cut the overall size of the diorama to make for a very balanced photograph. With all of our parameters designed, I took my caulking gun and a tube of DAP quick seal bathroom caulk, which actually goes on white, but it dries completely clear. And I took my Ross painter's knife. I applied, of course, all of the caulking onto a tile as my work surface or my palette and proceeded to take the painter's knife and spread the glue evenly, whereas it will cause the track to stay adhered to the foam. This is exactly how I would design a section or a module on my layout. The only difference is, of course, this is a static prop for a photograph. We don't have to worry about trains running on it. But all the steps and procedures are exactly the same. So upon putting down the caulk, I then laid the track into the bed of caulk and took my styrene, my evergreen styrene segments, sections that I wanted, which would create the super elevation in the curve. This is what's going to cause the main line to lean and cause all of the track to have that speed effect feeling that goes into it. So I took four strips of evergreen styrene. And actually, what I did was I wanted this curve to be quite accentuated in the curve, the lean. So I used about 80,000 of an inch to raise up the outside of the main line. The track that we were using was only code 70. So this would be the height of the rail, essentially. That's the lean that I was creating. And I shoved all these strips of styrene underneath the outside of the outside main line, which would then cause the track to lean exactly the way I wanted it to, to create the effect of speed in the photograph. I did this on the outside main line, and I also did this on the inside main line. And as you see, I took my painter's knife and I simply, it looks like a mess. I realized that. I simply spread the caulk underneath the inside main line, just as I do when I design modules for my layout. And I stuffed the 80,000th styrene underneath the outside rail of this, making sure that it would adhere to the foam between the track and the foam, causing our super elevation. And so now we have both main lines in place. And as I mentioned, this caulk will dry absolutely clear. And it's a paintable caulk, so I can get ballast to stick to it. It's very simple. Now I needed to cut the diorama into a manageable size. And I used a hot wire foam cutter. This is available in the Waters catalog. This is an absolutely amazing cutter. It works on very low voltage with a transformer, but upon sinking it into the foam, it cuts the foam like hot butter. Now, yes, it does create a lot of smoke. It's smelled up the studio pretty bad, but I've got a ventilation system in the room that allowed me to ventilate the smoke out so it wouldn't affect the fire alarms upstairs in the house or otherwise have my family asking me what it is I'm burning in the basement as I cut this foam to the right size to become a diorama that's absolutely manageable. As you see, I had to work the foam a little bit. It didn't cut immediately fast, but upon cutting out just the last few little sections of foam with the knife, I was then able to get the foam to absolutely break clean, showing the final result of the size of what this initial foreground part of the scenery would look like as you see the foam hit the floor. This is it. That's all I needed for my foreground scene. We'll stack up the scenery behind this when we do the photograph. Now, you've seen me do this so many times in the past. I take my Stanley shore form planer and I simply just go through it and I start carving out the topography that creates that mainline look that we all want. That's where you think in your mind when it rains, where is the water going to go? The water is going to run away from the track, away from the ties, and off to the sides of where the balance line would be. That's exactly what it was I was trying to do when I used the Stanley shore form planer to carve out my topography. I do this on every module, on every section of layout that I ever build. It's exactly the same process. Once I had both sides of the mainline carved exactly the way I wanted it to be to give that effect of the water runoff, the super elevation, I then took the vacuum cleaner, vacuumed up all of the loose particles off of the diorama, and here's what you end up with. You get to see how it looks as everything's cleaned off and now we're ready to seal this diorama with latex paint. Before I sealed the diorama with latex paint, I took a can of Rustoleum Earth Brown and I painted the rails and the ties on the track to eliminate the silver shiny sides of the rail and just give an overall darkened effect to the trackwork. Because the trackwork in this photograph, while it's important, I don't want it to stick out. I want it to just go away and by painting the surfaces dark, which is what I do to every scene I build, it just makes the track look great. You could follow up this by painting every individual ties, various shades of white and gray and blend it all. But for this diorama, I just used Earth Brown paint and it worked great. Now it was time to seal the foam and paint the diorama with the dark. I like to use latex house paint. I generally just pick an overall dark shade of brown. A lot of times you go to the hardware store and you find the oops paint or the paint that was mixed wrong. If you find a dark shade of brown, buy it. Because a gallon of that for, you know, ten cents on the dollar, it's exactly what us modelers want just to give a base coat to the scenery. Sure, you might cover this up with fake fur or static grass or ground foam and dirt, which we are going to use dirt on this scene to cover this up. But then again, it gives a great darkened background effect. So the dirt as it goes on doesn't exactly show any pink at all. And that's why I like to use this latex house paint on all of my dioramas. So here you see me finishing up the latex house paint. The flat paint is generally what I choose to use for this for this scene. I used regular backyard dirt sifted through a simple kitchen, you know, calendar or screen. I like to use these because they filter out the larger particles of dirt and just give me a nice fine dirt texture. We could airbrush this any color we want, but the dirt in Missouri gives me a great color, which is generic for so many different parts of the country that this is what I chose to use for this scene, electing to sprinkle the dirt on both sides of the main line, giving even coverage and simply covering up the latex house paint. I then took black ballast. This is Woodland Scenic's pecan ballast for all intentional purposes. This is fine. I don't like medium. I like fine in a scale. It just looks right. And I sprinkle it on right out of the bag on both sides of the main line, just simply kind of covering up the track with the final surface prep to be done with a paintbrush. But initially, it was just important to fill the center of the ties and make sure that I put on enough ballast to just cover the main line ties and the outside edges of them. Again, this is what I do on every single diorama that I build. If we were building a running layout, we would do it exactly the same way. I then take an artist paintbrush and I start to brush it out. I generally start at the center of the track and I brush all the ballast out between the two main lines. And then I like to follow up with my fingers. My fingers are the best thing that helps smooth the ballast on the outside edges of the ties and also on the center of the ties. Again, using my fingers to spread the ballast and give a nice even flow to the scene. Now, to give a final topography to my ballast, I always like to use an artist fan brush. And I don't apply any pressure to the brush. I simply lay the brush on top of the main track and just draw it across the entire scene very slowly. The fan brush itself spreads the ballast and just makes everything work out just right for clearing the ballast off the side of the rails and also for giving you that nice smooth effect, cleaning off the top of the ties, allowing all the ballast to fall in between the ties, a fan brush, the weight of the brush by itself, just dragging it along the scene, gives me my best effect for doing ballast. Once all the ballast is spread smooth exactly the way I wanted it, I follow this up with coarse turf, light green and medium green Woodland Scenic's coarse ground foam. I love this product. I know some people think it's antiquated when you compare it to static grass, but this gives you an even color tone to the entire scene, which then static grass would have absolutely compliment, but I'm not going to use static grass on this scene. I'm simply going to use coarse turf again, light green and medium green from Woodland Scenic's spread on the inside of the main line and the outside of the main line the best that I can. Once I've got all the ballast, all the dirt, all the ground foam in place, the way I want it to be, I then take a couple of bottles of Woodland Scenic Cement and I put them into this handy spray bottle. You can buy these spray bottles from any hardware store. As long as they give you a fine spray because that's important. I spray the Woodland Scenic Scenic Cement onto the diorama and I actually soak it quite literally. This glue dries clear, this glue dries absolutely invisible, but this glue also holds everything cement tight. It doesn't crack like Elmer's white glue would do any type of white glue in general. This allows the scene to just remain solid without any cracking in the future, which is also what I use on every one of the layouts that I design, any of the modules I design, every single scene that I do where I've got a glue down dirt, ballast and ground foam. I use this Woodland Scenic Scenic Cement and one thing it does do is on the ground foam after this dries, the ground foam still remains relatively soft, but yet very attached to the module and that's essentially it. Once I've got all of this completed, everything soaked. I let it dry for about 12 hours and now it's time to go outside and stack up our scenes and do a photo shoot. So here we are after that quick layout construction of building the small track section and layering out all the parts with pine trees and mountains and that super elevated curve that we built. This is shoot day and I've got the locomotive sitting on the track here and all of its glory and the super elevated position on the curve. And here let me show you the setup about where I set the camera up, the mountains, the trees. Again, I have one, two, three, four layers of scenery. The main line being one, a small hill in the background behind the main line. And then a couple of rows of pine trees and the foam carved out mountains. And now I can show you everything put together the way this shot came out. I did a couple of photographs with a lot of bleed on some of them. I'm shooting at a quarter of a second. I've got a good sunny day. It's actually not too cold out here today, but rock and roll. This is what it looks like. This beautiful locomotive coming around the curve with the lean to it just adds atmosphere, it adds the element of speed and power. I mean, it's just it's a great shot. So this is the 2020 Bachman catalog cover. And that's how I essentially do that. Black ballast code 83 rail and just a lot of fun. So that's this quick photography segments and construction build for What's Neat. For this segment of What's Neat, we're going to discuss operation. Now, that's something that I run away from because personally, as everybody knows, I like to run in circles. I'm blonde. I like to keep it simple. But Tony, you've designed operation on your father's layout that we're standing in here and also on the K 10 layout over there in Marysville, Illinois, which has got to be about a 5000 square foot layout. Tell me your philosophy. How do you turn a circle layout that I like into work? You just emulate the prototype trains don't run in circles on a real one. They run to make money. So I figure out first how they make money, how they deliver goods and receive goods. And you simulate that once you get into that mindset, it lays itself out. So where do you come up with the expertise, the ability to be able to do this? Has has your passion always been operation? Since I've had a particular amount of writer since I was three years old and always went through the switching puzzles in there. And that's really how I started. I would, you know, draw them out on paper or use wooden trains back then. And I always love that part of the hobby, just the problem solving, the operating, you know, pro-typically, figuring out how the railroad would do it. If the railroad has the tracks there, you know, they're there for a reason. Use your job to figure out what the tracks are there for, how they're used. That's amazing. I just envision you making your Brio wooden trains operate because once you've got a turnout, now you've got a you've got a game, right? Yep. As soon as you've got a place to sell the car, your railroad has a reason for being. Until then, like you said, you're just running in circles. But even with a circle layout, you have one siting and you turn that into an industry that you can bring cars in and out, you know, have different spots on this same siting for a tank car, box car or whatever and go from there. You make it sound so easy. So what would be the basic advice that you would give somebody like me who likes to run trains in circles? If I ever wanted to experiment with operation without getting intimidated or wanting to work, what is the basics? Just you know, anticipate how the railroad would do it and envision yourself as an engineer rather than separate from the train. You're you're now the crew of the train. So you pull up to a siding, you know, the business, you know, let's say Owens, Illinois needs three covered hoppers of sand on the sand track. Yes. So you pull those three cars, put them on the sand track, you pull whatever was there out and you take it to wherever we go to get sand, you know, the sand filling facility. And all of these moves require paperwork and tags for each freight car, right? You can do it that way. You can also do it much more simple way. Just swap one car for one car to get started, to get the feel for it. You make it as complicated as you want by routing individual cars with car numbers to real or non-existent industries. God, this is amazing because you really bring out the fact that there are so many variables in this hobby. There are the gentlemen like myself that like the model for the run by effect. We focus on scenery, prototype locations, da, da, da, da, but you focus on profitability, how many turnouts you got. I mean, it's like a prototype. And we we draw our inspiration from the prototype. We'll go out and look for a switch list from the prototype and see that, you know, on this date, you know, in 1984, you know, we picked up three cars and sent them to Chicago and sent two cars to Wood River. You know, we'll try and grab all that information and try and incorporate into our system. We use it for destinations for cars that are off the railroad. They're simulated by staging. And it'll give you an idea of how frequently the trains ran to that industry. Now, where do you find those switch lists? A lot of research has been done by historical societies. Depending on which railroad you're modeling or just any railroad in general, it's in your area. Email them, talk to whoever's in charge of their documents. And you can find a wealth of information of how the railroad actually operated from these sorts of societies. That's absolutely amazing. There are so many different facets to this hobby. And you've pointed out another one to us that is different from running circles, but yet at the same time, once you learn this trick, you could actually get a job for a real railroad. Wouldn't you say if you wanted to? I don't like the rain and the weather. I like to stay inside. God, this is the best hobby in the world. And it's because of what you do and your dedication to what you do. You're teaching us a whole another way to explore model routing beyond scenery and into operation, which I'm sure is mentally very stimulating, wouldn't you say? It is. And if you look at everything as a model, including how you operate the trains, it's no different than building a structure, building a prize winning car. You're trying to achieve that level of approach to the Cali. Wow. That's amazing. Thank you so much for sharing this information with the viewers on what's neat, it's deep, but it's great. So rock and roll. 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.