Layout Update: New Station Ideas & Vintage Passenger Cars!

in this video I'm going to be discussing some of the ongoing projects that I've been working on first I'm going to take a look at the start stop progress I've been having with Union Station and how I've made some changes to the station design as well as some changes I'm making to the passenger platforms I'm also working on changing the West End return loop on the layout into a Midway um inspired by the Canadian national exhibition and finally I'll do a brief review of it totally unplaned but exciting addition to my passenger Fleet a combination of new and old stock representing the Canadian Pacific Canadian so welcome to the July 2024 layout update video let's get [Music] [Music] [Applause] started so this month I completed a small building project which was my zombie Garage in that video I mentioned that I didn't know where the kit came from and one of the people in the comments mentioned that it's actually an Outland Scale Models kit the response of that project was very very positive and I appreciate all the comments and everything else that came out of it and a lot of people were really intrigued by the technique I used to make the corrugated steel panels now it's not the first time I've used that technique to make corrugated steel um I completed a project a few years ago which was to build a 10 cm x 10 cm diarama um and I chose to do a water slide I use that corrugated steel technique to create fencing around the pool area uh I will put a link in the description if you want to check out how I put together that little diarama progress on Union Station and the passenger platforms has basically been at a standstill for a couple months there's a lot going on in this area um designing a station first of all designing a station second designing a St that looks somewhat like Union Station maybe now using kit Parts um it is a strange shape so it's a little more challenging to build trying to line up passenger platforms I need to disguise uh the way that the road technically travels under the tracks but I need to um cover it there's a lot here and the more and more I've been thinking about it the less I've been working on it the number one thing I need to be able to do to work on this station is to have its baseboard or platform at my workbench so I have glued in the passenger platform styrene and then I have put the adjacent sidewalk in as well so the platforms will be glued in place permanently onto the Train table and the sidewalk and the platform the plywood platforms are removable so that I can take these away from the layout and work as for Union Station itself I originally had designed a station and I was going to scratch build the entire thing however I do want to be able to move along a little more quickly so after a bit of research I've invested in a whole number of these Outland model scale kits and I think the combinations of the backs and the fronts will give me a pretty reasonable fact simile of Union Station so I've just really quickly stuck some up here and I'm starting to get a better sense of how large the station's going to be I'll have to sort out a few things with how I transition to the backdrop buildings but now I'm starting to get a little bit of momentum because I've made some decisions so I'm hoping things will start to pick up one last little detail is I had originally rounded the ends of these passenger platforms and I've decided I don't like it what I would rather do is have the platform angle down directly into the ground so I'm going to remove the last little bit of each of these platforms and then create an angled platform uh into the road bit when I originally designed this layout the two reverse Loops at either end of the Shelf were necessary evils and because of space considerations I had to make these fairly small so my original plan was to maybe build up some really big structures and completely uh disguise this tight radius Loop and just sort of forget about this sort of back in a previous video I had mentioned about having visited the Banky Art Exhibit and one of bank's installation pieces where he had a full-size Midway Carnival seeing that work and seeing the show was really inspirational and so I started to wonder what I could do with this space that was less than just sort of a building camouflage area and so I'm very seriously considering turning this into an elevated platform with a Midway on it and one of my thoughts is to take a few cues from one of the actual stations along the Lakeshore West line called exhibition now one of the significant challenges about this entire area is that I have a 12 and 1/4 in radius for the small Loop so I'm considering creating a curved passenger platform um on the inside radius that would terminate wherever the view block is probably somewhere in that area a retaining wall boxing it in and then stairs moving up to the upper platform the upper platform might be camouflaged around the exterior with some large buildings and then I would try to build in some sort of Midway in the center so one of my unplanned uh purchases and collections is actually this new to me Canadian Pacific Canadian passenger conest I happened upon an outstanding deal on this funit online and I bought it um mostly because it was so inexpensive I got it home I quickly ran it it ran great and it wasn't until not but a few months ago that I was taking a closer look at it that I discovered that one of the number plates on the nose of the engine had been knocked off so it makes sense as to why it was so deeply discounted since that time um I've always been looking for stainless butd Passenger cars and I'm agnostic about the name because I have some ideas of maybe doing a custom Livery or repainting them for a more specific consist that I might want to design so through just a bit of persistence and an awful lot of luck I've come up with small collections of these cars so I have unintentionally now got one of the original Canadians on my layout all of these cars are manufactured by concore and some of these units are 30 or 40 years old they have a whole series of different couplers on them different colored trucks some of them move freely some of them don't the weights are all inconsistent so despite not wanting this train I now love having it as you can see progress is slow but when you've got complicated things to build sometimes it takes quite a bit of time to sort the ideas out I'm very excited to add a Midway to one portion of the layout because I do like circus themed an amusement park equipment and I think it would be really interesting to either collect or build a series of games and rides your feedback and suggestions are always welcome so please make sure to leave them in the comment section as always thank you for stopping by and I'll see you next time