Model Railroads as Art?

 I recently came across this video essay by Robert Florczak on "Why Modern Art is So Bad." He eloquently summarizes exactly how I feel on the subject.

Potomac Creek on my ACW layout

But are model railroads art? Yes, I believe they can be. According to Florczak art should, "demand the highest standards of excellence, improve upon the work of previous masters, and aspire to the highest quality of work attainable."  These are goals that I and many other model railroaders try to attain.

Quinnimont in N Scale

Furthermore, Florczak says that the work should be, "profound, inspiring, and beautiful."

Profound - means showing great emotion, insight, and knowledge. Model railroads that use prototype scenes to tell a story about a space and time can easily attain that.


Inspiring - I know I am inspired when I visit a great model railroad.

A module from the FCSME club

Beautiful - some layouts are beautiful, even if they depict gritty urban or industrial subjects.

Here some examples of art in model railroads.

Rob Spangler's backdrop

A antiqued image from my WWI layout

Paul Dolkos's Baltimore Harbor layout

Another view of Pioneer Mills

I was looking at the J.B. Clough collection of photos at the Huntington Digital Library. I came across a link to this image. I have a copy of this image that I got from a trip to the National Archives. In my version, the background is hard to see clearly.

My copy from NARA

Close up of the Huntington copy with some Photoshop processing to
enhance the background

In the Huntington copy, a clearer and wider view of the background can be seen. One can see the south and south east facades of the Pioneer Mills. Alas, the resolution is insufficient to provide any good details except that the wharves near the mill were chock full of sailing vessels. The US Army used the Pioneer Mills and the former loco works as storage houses. They must have also utilized the wharves for unloading ships.




It also appears the the barrel to the left of the leftmost tiller operator is smoking. That seems odd to me.

It's always fun to find new detail in these images.

Entering the home stretch

All the major pieces of the diorama are complete except for the canal coal boat.

I added the first coat of scenery and gave the water surface a second coat of gloss polyurethane.
Next step is to make the barge. Then I will add figures, barrels, wagons and assorted details. The final step will be to pour the two part resin water.

Matt and Jeff McGuirk

We also had visitors today from Richmond. Mike Garber, Mike Pulaski and Joshua Blay stopped by to check on the various projects. I was the third layout stop for them today as they first visited Marty McGuirk and then Paul Dolkos.

Speaking of Marty, last weekend he and two of this sons stopped by to visit the layout.

Mike Garber, Mike Pulaski and Josua Blay all with throttles inter hands. Look like a logjam at Falmouth

Locomotive Works and Wharves

  I made lots of progress on the diorama since the last post.

I finished the locomotive works structure. It is glued to the scenery base and is awaiting final details.

A look at the front of the loco works before
 installing in position

Next I made a large number of lumber stacks in various sizes. I laser cut the wood parts in layers and the assembled them to create the look of lumber that has not been stacked with machine precision.

I also made two smaller sheds that flank each side of Pioneer mills. One is brick and the other has wood siding.  Installing the brick shed made me realize that the backdrop on that side needed some adjustments. I scaled down the some of the backdrop buildings in Photoshop. Then I cut away the part of the backdrop that had to be redone and added the new artwork. The replacement worked very well. 

Loco works glued in place.

Painting the water bottom

At long last, I was ready to cut the terrain base and shape it. I cut the foam with a knife and then used a Surform rasp to shape it. Then I gave the surface a coat of Durhams Water Putty to fill in cracks. Once that was set I painted the base ground cover and the water surface. I also gave the water surface a coat of polyurethane clear gloss to seal the surface and any cracks for the planned two part resin pour. I still need to add the bulkheads along the waterfront.

Wharves are taking shape

This angle view will not be possible when the diorama is installed in the final position at the Lyceum.

The view up Duke Street. This is the view children will have when viewing the diorama. The stick coming from
the mill to the ship is a mock-up of the marine leg.I have not made it yet.

Wood Yard at Pioneer Mills

I have just about finished all the structures for the Pioneer Mills diorama. The last structures are the wharves and small two sheds that were adjacent to the mill. There are only two images that show this area and neither one shows the entire area. The first shows the rear walls of a wood shed and part of a low brick wall to the south of the mill building.





This next shot shows the area much later in the 1880s. It is cited in the Alexandria City study on page 22 of the Robinson Terminal Redevelopment document here.  Their caption says, "Backyard of Pioneer Mills, n.d. This circa 1880 photograph shows the houses at 310-306 South Union Street (on the left), James Green’s wood yard (center), the rear of the coopers shop with the kitchen addition removed, and a portion of the brick sheds (on right) southeast of the Pioneer Mills’ main building. (Photographer Unknown, Alexandria Library, Special Collections Branch)." It is not clear to me which building had the brick wall with the vertical slots.


The center house on the far left may be the only building in this image still
standing. Here is the current Google Street View of that house on the south side of Wolfe Street.


Alas, this is not a lot of information on which to base a model. So I plan to add small wooden and brick sheds south of the mill. Their designs will be based on other period buildings. The rest of the area will be open for wood and coal storage.

Alkem Shipping Lines

Work continues on the museum diorama. I'll post some photos soon.

In the meantime, planning for the new fleet of Alkem Shipping Lines is underway. As part of that process, we need to select a livery for our ships. The first in the fleet in the MV Danica Marie, named after the owner's beautiful daughter. Here are several paint schemes to consider. Which do you like best, blue, black, gray, light blue or red?

Chitagong ship breaking diorama at Peabody Essex Museum

Incredible model by Nader Taheri. Photo by Nader Taheri from his FB Gallery

Model builder Nader Taheri did an awesome job on this diorama for the Peabody Essex Museum. The link below takes you to a Facebook gallery showing his step by step work. Note how he used thin copper foil to replicate the dented steel panels of the ship hull.

Posted by Nader Taheri on Monday, December 21, 2015

Smith and Perkins Locomotive and Car Works

I am working on laying out the Virginia Locomotive and Car Works (VL&CW), also known as Smith and Perkins. The Railroad Gazette article in the link below gives a description of some of the engines that they produced.

Railroad Gazette article on Smith and Perkins Engines


There is sufficient information  in that article to build a model of a one of their locomotives. However, at this time I am focused more on their physical plant that existed in Alexandria in 1855.  And herein lies the problem. The information I have is incomplete and has discrepancies that are hard to reconcile.

Professor Caroline Quenzel, a librarian and professor of Mary Washington College of the UVA system, wrote in 1954 a detailed description of the factory in an article in the Virginia Historical Society Journal. She based her article largely on period era information reported in the Alexandria Gazette. She writes,

Locomotive manufacturing on the scale carried on by Smith and Perkins could not be confined to cramped quarters. In 1854 their locomotive plant on Wolfe Street covered 51,500 square feet of ground and fronted 177 feet on the Potomac River. The principal machine shop was a three-story building 130 x 35 feet. On the first floor were three tracks for setting up engines. 

The same floor housed the tool shop with its facing and other lathes, drilling machines, bolt cutting machines, a slotting machine, and large planer and boring machine for ''turning" car wheels.
The second floor contained the office, drafting room, and an 81 x 35
machine shop. The third floor was used for another machine shop and as a pattern loft. The "fitting up and finishing shop" on the site of the old foundry was 81 x 60 feet. Two locomotive engines could be "fitted up" at one time upon its tracks. 

The 100 x 36-foot blacksmith shop had 15 fires and one of "Nasmytherspowerful steam" hammers. The boiler shop was 100 x 40, and the four-track car shop 150 x 40. The plant had circular and upright saws, tools for punching and shearing iron, and the equipment required for planing, mortising, and tenoning wood. The 100 x 60-foot foundry on Wilkes Street held two furnaces for melting pig iron and a 27-horsepower engine for driving the fan. In 1854 it produced two and a half to four tons of castings daily, but it was capable of a maximum production of &om ten to twelve tons.

The plant consumed annually 1 ,200 tons of Cumberland coal, 250 tons of anthracite, 900 to 1 ,200 tons of pig iron, and 650 tons of bar and boiler iron. It employed approximately 225 workers. The general superintendent was Thomas Denmead, who had been superintendent of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad shops at Martinsburg. 

This description implies a facility with five structures with a sixth on Wilkes Street, one block away.  They are:

1. Principal machine shop  - 130 by 35 feet  3 story with three tracks for erecting engines.
2. Fitting up and finishing shop - 81 by 60 feet with two tracks. 
3. Blacksmith Shop - 100 by 36 with 15 fires and a Nasmyther steam hammer.
4. Boiler shop - 100 by 40 feet.
5. Car Shop - 150 by 40 with four tracks.



A Nasmyther Hammer in 1856

6. Foundry - 100 by 60 feet  with two furnaces on Wilkes Street.

Bird's Eye View during the War

Close up of the Quarter Master's map

I have not found any good drawings of the VL&CW facility in 1855. The two drawings I do have date from the Civil War, from 3-8 years after the works closed down. These are the  Bird's Eye View and the Quartermaster map.  It is interesting that the Bird's Eye View and the QM map do somewhat agree in depicting the buildings on Wolfe Street. 

The QM map gives dimensions of the buildings that they used in the war. It shows three interconnected buildings and  a few smaller buildings used for Contraband quarters. Note that the QM map does not show buildings that Army did not use during the war. 

So it is possible there were other structures present that the draftsman left out. More importantly, the QM map shows one railroad siding, while the Bird's Eye shows none. Quentzal describes three buildings with tracks for erecting cars and locos. 

The early 19th century drawing of the Harlan and Hollingsworth works gives some  clues. Note how the car works building on the right shows two tracks entering the end of a long wooden building. But,  note that a single siding runs parallel to the machine shop and no tracks enter the shop. Workers are using push carts and wooden wagons to move boilers and other objects around. Some people are working in the open air on boiler parts.

The second view showing  Schenectady Locomotive Works depicts similar activity. I suspect it wasn't until locomotives became too heavy to move around on carts and trolleys that the factories started building the engines directly on the rails. 

Harlan and Hollingsworth works in the mid 19th century

I assume that similar construction procedures were used at Virginia Locomotive and Car Works. I think that the erecting tracks were not connected to the railroad directly. Once the engines were assembled, they used carts to move the finished products to the departure tracks. 

There is a photo of the foundry on Wilkes Street as the building survived until late in the 20th century. 

The attached drawing shows my best guess at mapping the buildings described in Quentzel's article to the QM map using a lot of educated guess work. Everything is drawn to scale. The large yellow box shows an area of 51,500 square feet if one side of the box is 177 feet.

 There was no way to reasonably connect tracks to the Old Foundry to the siding shown on the QM map without 30 ft or less radius curves (see curve A). That would equate to a 2.26 inch radius in N scale. That is impossibly tight. So I suspect the erecting tracks were not directly connected to the Wolfe Street Siding. 

I replicated the car works from H&H to the VL&CW facility. I made it a separate building as there was no way the five buildings Quentzel describes would fit in the outline of the buildings on the QM map.

I have a photo of a large blacksmith shop in Washington DC. It is a wood building. If such a building was in Alexandria, it is possible it did not survive for ten years after closing.

Blacksmith shop in Washington DC during the Civil War.

If anyone has any additional information, I would love to see it.

Night Photo - Battle of Cambrai

This shot is one of my all time favorites model railroad photos. I shot it for my book, "Model Railroads Go to War." Alas, the printed version really does not do it justice since a CMYK print doesn't have the dynamic range to render the dark clouds and shadows properly. But on screen, the image pops.

The loco is a ROD Robinson 2-8-0 that Chris Williams let me borrow for the shoot. The flat cars are Macaw bogey wagons that I scratch built.

To learn more about the story behind the scene, please see my book, "Model Railroads Go to War," available on Amazon  Model Railroads Go to War (Layout Design and Planning) or

 at www.AlkemScaleModels.com for a signed copy.

Diorama backdrop - Wolfe Street

Wolfe Street on backdrop

I finished the second portion of the backdrop tonight. This part of the backdrop depicts Wolfe Street.  I didn't have any good prototype images showing what buildings look like in this area, so I relied on the Bird's Eye view.  I drew the structures in Adobe Illustrator and composited the scene in Photoshop. I added the slight hill that leads to  Lee Street. Once it was printed and cut out, I added finer texture such as grass, weed, ruts using pencils, water colors, and acrylic paint.

Using a piece of flex track to mock up the loco works siding.
The actual siding will be hand land on wood ties.

An earlier attempt at painting a track extension on  a backdrop

The last remaining backdrop task is to paint the loco works railroad siding on the backdrop as it heads to Union Street. The test image below shows approximately where it will be. The final placement will wait until I get the actual track installed.

This is a very tricky backdrop interface to paint. I've done this once before and it works well, but only from one viewpoint- straight in. So one needs to use view blocks to prevent looking at the interface from oblique angles.

Laser Cut Pieces - No Mistakes!

I also started building the loco works. Again, there are no good photos except the Bird's Eye view. The ACW era QM Map shows the dimensions of the building's footprint, but no other data. Using those dimensions and the Bird's Eye view, I drew up this plan.


In a laser cutting first for me, the first draft of the building had no mistakes. Maybe I should buy a lottery ticket!


I quickly glued the parts together to see how it fits. I plan to use texture paper to add the bricks to this building. We'll see how that goes.

Diorama Backdrop - Duke Street.

Photo panorama made by Wally Owen, former Asst Dir/Curator Ft Ward Museum.

The backdrop for the Alexandria Antebellum diorama presents several challenges. First is that there are only a couple of photos showing the area we are representing. The best image we have is a view to the northwest from the top of Pioneer Mills. It only shows about a third of the area we need to show in the backdrop. Also, there are no views closer to ground level. I want the backdrop to have a ground level versus aerial perspective as I find that works better in model scenes, especially when taking photos.

The last major challenge is that there are two streets that intersect at 90 degrees to the backdrop. These are some the most challenging backdrop-3D terrain interfaces to have to deal with.

The following are step-by-step photos showing the backdrop process.

The backdrop is 1/8th inch masonite.  Here it is
being measure against the diorama base

The backdrop received 3 coats f Gesso primer applied with a roller.
I sanded it smooth in-between coats.

The cut and primed backdrop screwed to the diorama.

 Although I primed the backdrop front and rear with three coats of gesso, it still warped when I added the blue color latex paint. So I had to add a support frame. I was hoping too avoid using a backdrop frame as it might make the diorama deeper.  But I had no choice. I don't think it will cause problems in the final installation (My fingers are crossed. Yes, I did measure alcove and test fit the diorama base in it, but Murphy has a way of showing up,)

Base coat of bright blue and ground cloud. I used my airbrush to
paint the clouds.

The blue latex paint caused the backdrop to warp slightly. So I added
a 1x2 frame to the rear. Since I didn't want to drive screws through the
front of the backdrop, I used glue and lots of clamps,

Duke Street flanked by the mill's  coopering House and sheds

I tried a couple different ideas to depict Duke Street and the buildings behind the mill. In the end, I decided to draw the scene in Adobe Illustrator. I use AI perspective grid feature to create the vanishing point and help draw the buildings receding into the distance. I spent more time than necessary detailing these distant buildings, when in the end they are very tiny on the backdrop.

The two main buildings in the front of the backdrop came out really nice.  The large brick building is the coopering house where they made the barrels to ship out the flour. The three sheds on the right are for an unknown purpose, but we had a decent view of them in prototype photo. So I was able to represent them pretty well.

Test photo looks good.

I used actual brick and siding textures to embellish them. That worked surprisingly well. One the backdrop was printed on 11x19 inch paper, I added two sided tape film to the rear. Then I trimmed the image using a X Acto knife. I touched up the edges with a dark green marker.
I used watercolor pencils to add some texture and shadows to the structures and street. Then I installed it on the back drop.
That is 19 of of 43 inches total need. Just a little less than half way.

Snowzilla Schooner Success

Finished model schooner in Alicia's hand.

The schooner will be positioned by the (almost finished) mill.

The N scale schooner on an O scale schooner hull. With this N scale ship completed, I am really I am looking
 forward to working on the O Scale ships for the Aquia Line.

Scratch built anchor with a chain.

Carved skiff from a small block of basswood

It's been snowing for the past 27 hours and more is expected - a perfect opportunity to get some modeling done.

I finished up the rigging. Added the skiff and davits to the rear and an anchor. 

I hit the model with dullcote to hide shiny glue spots. I used my airbrush to apply the dullcote instead of a can as, I didn't want to get lacquer on the lines for fear that they may loosen. I noticed that acrylic matte varnish on the lines did cause them to become slack.

Now, on to the rest of the diorama.

Oh yeah, it has been snowing here.