LA Warehouse or LoDo - Sanborn Maps

I printed off and carefully cut and pasted together a map of the area that I'm considering could be the location for D&RGW or for that matter it could be the C&S (I'll have to check and see when the  Burlington Northern acquired the C&S) I haven't really read the maps closely enough to see what tracks, in 1903, belong to which railroad. But for now its something to look at and contemplate.

As you can see most of the action is on Wewatta Street on the west side and not as much on Wynkoop. Unfortunately the more interesting buildings are on Wynkoop while the more interesting trackage is on Wewatta. Ultimately with not wanting to disturb the track plan to much it doesn't really matter, it would be more about giving it the feel of LoDo and not something accurate.

Here is the general area that makes up LoDo. The right side is to the NE (Denver has not aligned directly north/south by any means). Off to the right of Wewatta is Union station and its yards. Wewatta Street serves as one of the primary access points to Union Station. I have oriented the map in reverse of how I described it in the last post. From the layout standpoint you would essentially be standing on Wewatta street with the 16th Street Viaduct to the left and the 14th Street Viaduct to the right and Wynkoop would be in the back.

Just a closer look at the potential modeling area. Lots of compression would need to take place.

LA Warehouse District - Or?

As I mentioned before I have been toying with the concept of moving the "location" of the layout from LA to Denver. I spent some time over the weekend doing a little research and downloading Sanborn Insurance Maps from the Library of Congress. These maps are from 1903 so they aren't going to have some of the information that I would need to model the 1960 - 1970 period, for that I will need to go to the Denver Public Library, but my library card has lapsed so that will have to wait for a bit. A little poking around shows that DPL likely has digital Sanborn maps up through 1929 with notes attached with changes from 1951 and may have non-digital maps from the 60s and up through 1974 according to the card catalog. So I need to work in a day at the library at some point.

Moving the location to Denver means that I can legitimately drop trying to shoehorn in the curved brick canyon scene that I like from LA that scene just does not exist in Denver. I have already added an extra foot to the length of the layout to accommodate it and I think I will keep that extra length for now. I don't need to change the track plan itself, so that's a good thing although there is another tweak that I'm contemplating that would require another redraw to make sure it aligns.

"Moving" to Denver means easier access to research materials and immediate access to the area of lower downtown (LoDo). Granted much has changed since the railroads worked that area but there is enough left to be able to replicate some of the major buildings. The viaducts that carried 16th and 15th street over the tracks would still be in place and would serve as very natural dividers for scenes on what would now be the north and south ends of the layout. Cherry creek and the 14th Street Viaduct would form the southern boundary, with 16th street being the northern boundary.

The two major streets north south streets would be Wynkoop and Wewatta. Tracks ran right down the streets in this area of Denver sharing the streets with regular traffic. All of the tracks in the area seem to have gone in by 1903. The railroads that owned those tracks is likely to have changed over the years as mergers and other fun things took place in LoDo and what I need to determine is when those tracks where actually pulled up as the rail traffic in the area dropped off. 

The big changes would be the change from AT&SF to D&RGW. So new motive power and probably a slight shift in the freight car fleet. Currently that is heavily biased towards Santa Fe but that is easy to change and it certainly doesn't eliminate the use of the Santa Fe fleet. The other potential change would be adding back in the 40' cars depending on what the time frame really ends up being and reducing the number of 50' cars. Just thoughts to mull on at this point.

LA Warehouse District - Building a FreightCrate from Fast Tracks

I'm still waiting for the ends for the interior box of the one of my FreightCrates but I figured I could build the one that I have everything for and see how it goes together.

I followed the directions and started with the top. As suspected with hardboard tops and bottoms of this size there is a it of a warp to those big pieces. Nothing out of the ordinary and it was fairly easily dealt with. I did have problems with the top, mostly because I tried to glue the whole thing up at once rather than work my way around. Certainly no fault on Fast Tracks part. The only thing I would call out here, and it is certainly obvious, is that anything white facing (and I'm not sure what its coated with) will be on the outside and any "unpainted" bits are going to be on the inside.

The bottom is a bit trickier because of the locks that hold the lid in place. Really you just have to make sure that you keep that area free of glue and it goes together quite nicely. Figure about an hour to build your first Crate and 30-40 minutes to build the second and any subsequent ones you might have.

I have been continuing to mull over a change in location for the LA Warehouse district. The more I delve into the Denver LoDo district the more intrigued I have become. A big plus is that its easily accessible and most of the major buildings are still there although they have been renovated and converted into other things. Changing to Denver would allow me to anchor one end on Cherry Creek so I could build a couple of bridges and of course use the infamous Denver viaducts as scenic dividers. The trackage I'm focusing on at this point lies south of the Denver Union station on Wynkoop and Wewatta streets. In these areas vehicles and the railroads shared the street so there are some quite chaotic looking pictures out there. Pictures of the area do seem few and far between so I'll need to do some serious digging for photos from the 60's and 70's. I'm trying to dig up the Sanborn Insurance Maps for the area as well, but but DPL doesn't have them in digital form yet so it looks like a trip to the main library is in order.

With the bubble wrap in place this is a seriously tight fit. These freight cars aren't moving.

Locked and loaded, ready to be moved and stored. The only thing missing at this point is the two little tabs that glue on the top. You can just make out one of the locations just to the left of the FreightCrate name on the box top.

LA Warehouse District - Freight Car Storage

Something that I have been intrigued with for a long time are some freight car storageboxes that I saw Tim Warris, of Fast Tracks, make for his CNJ Bronx Terminal layout. These were eventually added to the Fast Tracks catalog and with the Warehouse District seemingly coming closer to reality I decided to spring for a pair. The freight cars I have "finished" all seem to be suffering vary bits of damage and they need to be properly stored. So I made an initial order of 2 FreightCrates (the HO ones apparently are only sold in pairs).

And so another birthday "present" has arrived:

I don't know why but for some reason I thought these were already assembled. I was a bit dismayed to be confronted with another box of parts. Now I just need to find some time to assemble them.

On a side note I'm still contemplating shifting the local of the layout from LA to Denver. While that would mean I would need to change out my two CF-7s for something else, the rolling stock wouldn't have to change much. It gives me immediate access to the area and a lot of material than trying to recreate the patch. I would lose the curved urban canyon which has proven to be hard to work into the layout anyway and gain the very familiar elevated viaducts that go over the railyards. The emphasis would change a bit, the three Denver streets involved would be Wewatta, Wynkoop and Wazee. Seriously how could you pass those streets up?

LA Warehouse District - Building a Freight Car

A long time ago when I was first envisioning this layout I had decided that I would populate it solely with Blueprint Series Freight Cars from Branchline trains and I started a bit of a stockpile. At some point after that the line was discontinued (although has since been picked up by Atlas, nothing has been done with it). While I have a number of Accurrail kits in various stages of completion I have never actually built one of the Blueprint series cars. It was time to rectify this and see what I might be getting into.

First thing I noticed just pulling out the parts is that these cars are likely to be pretty fragile, something that was borne out during the construction of this first kit. The instructions are okay at best, but the one in this kit looked like a photocopy and not a good photocopy and it some places was pretty useless because the grainy picture no longer showed any detail. That's what reference books are for.

It went together pretty well in the end. Just required careful cutting from the sprues. There was a lot more flash than I expected to see, especially on the grab irons which was difficult to remove at times. As I was finishing the car up though I came across the single biggest problem. My kit has the wrong doors. Without measuring these are the doors for a 40' car, not the doors for a 50' car. Since they aren't manufactured anymore I will have to figure out away to acquire new doors for this one. Due to the fragile nature of the brake lines I managed to break one of those during the construction. I'll probably just replace it with wire at this point. Lord knows I have access to wire. Between getting the wrong doors and breaking pieces during construction that puts a damper on my enthusiasm for building the rest of them.

The Kit

The Tools

That's a lot of stuff

The weights

Brakes

Underframe finished

Ready to work on the top

Roof, note the doors, just a tad to small for this car.

"A" end

"B" end

LA Warehouse District - Track Plan Revision

A few ideas managed to emerge from the depths of my mind and I pulled out some more graph paper to make a couple of revisions to the track plan. The one thing that I have decided is that I'm going to invest in one of the track plan CAD just to be able to tinker with things a little easier. Something that will also allow me to design buildings, potentially to export to a laser cutter.

The first concept was how to include that signature scene of the curved buildings that I was losing. I reevaluated the room and decided that I could add another foot to one end of the layout if the cassette curved into the room rather than along the wall. The radius will be tight, down to 18" but the prototype is pretty tight too. So I'm good with that. I don't really need to model much of the building to get the affect but it is still a pretty small area to work with. What I might do is build something that will extend on to the cassette as well, something along the lines of Rice's jigsaw puzzle scenery pieces.

Adding a foot of space to the left was going to allow additional trackage to be installed as well. Industry Siding C will extend all the way back behind the freight building although I'm keeping the capacity at three cars. That, in turn, opened up space for a tad bit more track on the right side. I'm currently envisioning a freight house served from both sides  (now Industry Sidings B1 and B2) and still maintain and, in effect, lengthen Industry siding D to 4 cars. I have toyed with adding one more siding (tentatively Industry Siding E) that would sit more or less in the center of the backdrop. The issue here is that no matter what I do I would end up using another Industry Siding as a switching lead. For now I'll leave that siding off.

I'm a little stuck on scenery treatments as well. My first step was to create a scenery zone on the edges and the back. No track into this 3" zone along the backdrop but I might allow a some track to penetrate this zone on the left and right side as needed. I then sketched in a couple of the other building zones that would be working industries. A number of the sidings will end up behind other industries and thus "hidden" from view. I'm thinking removable structures with rare earth magnets for actually operating the layout. I'm considering three elevated roads, one on each end and one in the center to help break things up into separate scenes. Unfortunately elevated roads are not prototypical for LA it is, however, for Denver. Will have to mull that over since the Santa Fe didn't have any switching traffic in Denver.

Anyway just thoughts to mull over at this point.

I made some paper rulers representing 50' freight cars just to quickly see if I was leaving enough room. Here you can see two of the rulers and a portion of the South Yard Track, the North Yard Track and Industry Siding A.

Will it all fit? According to the rulers and the model it should.

And the whole reason for this version of the plan. Can I work in a curve and get my signature scene, or at least a portion of it, back?

LA Warehouse District - Setting the Scene - Practice Bujilding

I went ahead and ordered the DV Ros & Co. Building from ITLA Scale Models. Its basically a smaller practice building flat with a blank backwall. Just to explore their kitbashing possibilities I added in two Bricked Modular Wall Kits, one for the side and one to replace the kit's blank wall. Just taking a quick look at everything I'm pleased with the purchase and the delivery out of Canada was pretty quick as well. Here is a quick look at the components:

As it comes in all sealed up in plastic

Instructions are pretty straight forward

I have read through the instructions on how the brick is painted and I'm not sure I'm a fan. I liked the latest ones from Monster Modelworks but until the sale finishes off I can't get to those anymore. I'll have to see if I wrote down the steps in the blog the last time I worked on the brick factory.

The DV Ross building components. Again pretty straight forward and it looks good. It doesn't have quite the detail that Monster has on their brickwork but I'm not convinced that its really necessary in HO scale either.

The modular kit to replace the back wall

Certainly looks like it comes with everything you need.

And the modular kit for the sides. I could either swap these out with the existing walls or add them and get a square building. Still mulling the possibilities on that.

LA Warehouse District - Setting the Scene - Starting off

I have the track plan pretty much complete at this point. I did a variation that added a couple of more sidings but decided against it in the end. I'm not sure how well the original is going to work and I figured there really isn't a reason to make it more complicated, so I discarded that. I'll show off the trackplan when I finish making it pretty.

In the meantime I decided that I needed to set the scene a bit so I'll be constructing a few buildings to get a feel for how everything is going to look. Since I have the dimensions on the Monster Modelworks factory I started with that. I'm rather pleased with this quick little effort so I'll continue on with that as I try to break through my block on the Sledgehammer diorama.

Make a fold together model. Had to think about the little two story section on the left to keep it as simple as possible.

All folded up, not to bad.

And my initial thoughts on location  for this building.

Dressed up with a little brick paper from Clever Models.

LA Warehouse District - More Potential Warehouse Buildings

I spent a little bit of time working on the Sledgehammer project but not enough to really record at this point. Right now I'm just trying to get back in the zone on that particular project. But in the meantime I could distract myself some more with the LA Warehouse District.

I flipped through the entire selection of Walther's Cornerstone series buildings and I found a few more that will probably work well, but I really wanted something with more character. Quite frankly I'm really missing Monster Modelworks at this point. Hopefully someone bought that business and it will be coming back soon. But in the meantime I found another company with a similar product in the pages of Model Railroad Hobbyist, ITLA Scale Models. They manufacture lasercut MDF buildings with all the brick character of those produced by Monster. On top of that they are very configurable so a single building can be built in multiple configurations. They are a bit on the expensive side and they don't have the plethora of extra bits yet but I'm intrigued enough to order their "starter" building and give them a try.

Here are a few photos off their website ITLA

This is one of their modular panels.

Could be built as a 4 walled structure or as a low relief flat.

The Allstate Manufacturing Company. Shown here as long low relief flat or configurable to be build in either a left or right hand "L". The long side would still be low relief.

Extension D, can stand along or be added to the All State Manufacturing building for extra length

A set of three low relief buildings, that allows you to swap the locations of the buildings within the group on the integral foundation.

LA Warehouse District - Potential Warehouse Buildings

I was browsing through the few HO kits that I have and deciding if they fit the "look" that I would like to achieve with the LA Warehouse District. What I have are two kits from Monster Modelworks (if you know who bought this company and when they will re-open let me know).  Those are both in, they have the brick detail that I like and is at least reminiscent of the brick buildings that make up the "Patch". The other four background kits I have are from Walthers and I'm on the fence about those. I would probably be better off utilizing the Woodland Scenics modular brick panels (or is that DPM, one of those guys anyway). I want that older turn of the century brick era brick work that has survived into the 70's. Maybe what I need to try is Mindheim's photo building technique.

I think the only real issue here is that door locations. Those aren't even set for 40' freight cars, let alone 50 footers. Going back to Lance Mindheim philosophy what is important is the number of spots available on a siding. Ideally doors would be set at a distance apart that would allow a freight car to be spotted directly in front of it. Now based on age you could see doors set for freight cars running from 30' up to more modern lengths. My thought would be that doors could be set for 40' freight cars at a minimum as there was still a good mix of both 40' and 50' lengths in the 1970s.

I love this building, now I have the incentive to actually finish it. The only flaw is that a viewer will not be able to see the back side of the building. That could be corrected by setting it at an angle rather than parallel which would probably be a good thing in the long run. I'll have to explore that possibility next, especially since the back section will be dead straight.

I have this one, but I'm not thrilled with it, the look is a bit to modern and there is not nearly enough brick. And for its length it only has two car spots. This seems to be pretty common with these Walther background kits. At least this one has 3 options for the length.

This one is better, and with the height it would make a nice view block, extending well above the eye level of the layout. Again it suffers from only have two car spots when it could easily have accommodated three.

I really like this one, for some reason the covered unloading area really appeals to me although there is nothing like it in the original "Patch" area. But style wise it would fit and there were covered areas like this in the area that were rail served. Has two spots and its about the right length for that.

This is a nice little building but it is long enough for two spots and only has one. Most of the Walther kits seemed to be designed for truck traffic than rail traffic sometimes.