Model Railroading on the Cheap

Hillton gets a new industry and the Y&H gets additional shipping.

   I found new inspiration after discovering a dozen each of what I considered to be bargain priced HO scale sports car/camper trailer combination in boxed sets consisting of a sports car with matching small camper trailer. Here was an interesting combination of very neatly done HO scale European sport cars with a small camping trailer hitched and painted to match. This was detail fodder just waiting to be developed.  

   I doubt if those sporty little cars ever pulled any camping trailer, but with what I felt was a bargain price I could use the cars on the streets of town and use the camper trailers as flat car loads and still have enough trailers left to set some around the factory. So it was with newfound enthusiasm that urban renewal had come to Hillton. I removed the former Leming Compressed Gas facility, (a Walthers paper building flat) and junk yard (with not much room for junk) and used the space against the sky drop wall as a new factory site on this side of the wood board fence with a car height loading dock carved from the rock terrain.

   There was a narrow sliver of land located between the engine house, the un-named railroad passenger station and the wall. That location, behind the engine house, would make the new factory rather difficult to see. So I mounted it upon a 1 1/2 inch tall pedestal (2 layers of the broken ceiling tile ‘rocks’) for better visibility. That gave me an automatic car height-loading ramp used for loading travel trailers on railroad flatcars. Up upon this raised elevation was built the Crest Mount Manufacturing Company, producers of lightweight camper trailers.  I made the factory as a building flat against the sky board back wall with an attachment to the building, which would be the shipping department. The building was drawn with the computer paint program, printed on card stock paper and glued to corrugated cardboard backing. This all was built mostly on the workbench then set into place on the layout.

   The finished factory-loading ramp combination left me with an unsightly gap in the background that I filled by making a half sized copy on the printer-scanner of the original Lemming facility (compressing the compressed gas facility) with the computer graphic scanner/printer and used it as a distant background industry with no rail service. Lemming never did generate much traffic for the Y&H maybe because we didn’t have enough high pressure tank cars.

    The addition of people doing something in these scenes adds so much to the photos of these efforts. I must say that it is quite tedious to paint them, but they add a new dimension of life to these photos. I thought I would ‘open’ the door on one of my many trailers at the factory for display purposes. I was surprised to discover that the trailer had an interior of seats, table, refrigerator etc. So here was a lot more fun to be had.  Of course the company salesman, with clipboard in hand, is showing the one with the open door to a family of prospective buyers.     

This was another opportunity for the camera to capture action in the story. The opening of the door was done by disassembling the trailer and using a fine tooth stiff back saw to carefully cut on the vertical marks where the door was and cutting across the top with an Exacto knife, filing a chamfered edge on both pieces along the hinge line and gluing the door back on, now permanently open. The open door failed to show the interior for the camera, things were just too small, so I cut the top off one of the tiny trailers for better visibility of its now painted interior! I eventually removed the wheels and axel and placed one of those trailers leaning against the building for better display of the spacious interior. The seated tractor driver at the trailer factory had his raised arm cut off, rotated about 90 degrees and glued back on to look like he was steering the tractor pulling a newly finished trailer down the ramp to storage prior to shipping.

   These recent changes here at the upper end of Hillton make me happy; this new factory and loading ramp, the now expanded junkyard with its own spur track on this side of the wood board fence offer lots more operation. The discarded passenger station won’t be missed on this freight railroad. I originally envisioned it as residing on a pass through track, heading over the big bridge, of another (unnamed) railroad. The Y&H used that track and half of the passing siding as our ‘Y’ track. What a weak idea, a passenger station on a track with stub ends in both directions!