The City Starts Here: Building West Harbor from a Secondhand Haul

[Music] So the area you see behind me is the future home of my version of the West Harbor Station as well as a city in Hamilton. This end of the layout is defined by um a double track mainline that comes along the front of the layout, a two platform passenger station which will become West Harbor and in the back a three-siding um yard which represents a very small condensed version of the Steuart yard in the same area. One of my greater goals is that I want to get the structure of the layout established. And what I mean by that is all the elevations in place, all the basic scenery contours in place, bridges, some roadways, and specifically um the elevations for the cities. And when I was designing the layout, I just defined this area as just a collection of buildings and I said, "That's your city." But now that I'm into trying to work out what that area looks like, it's a bit more challenging because I'm not sure how I want to actually design a city or site planning, if you will. I have the space, but I don't have a place. Geographically, I know I want to model um a small part of Hamilton. I want some residential houses, some buildings, a city hall, maybe a church, those sorts of things. But I have no idea what I'm going to put there. And so I'm struggling to design the roads and the bridges. And so I'm caught in a bit of a cycle. However, I've decided that what I'm going to do is I'm going to try to mock up some of the bridges. I'm going to try to build some retaining walls. And most importantly, I'm going to divide this back area here um into a series of individual modules. In the same way that the retaining wall over by Toronto Union Station I've built so that I can take things off the layout back to the workbench, I'm going to do the exact same thing over here. So, you could say that I've been laying the groundwork for a city and I don't even know what that's going to be. And so, sometimes structure has to come before vision. This definitely is a lot of [Music] structure. So I used like a cookie cutter benchwork style and the descending mainline was all that existed along the back of the wall. So, I have since gone back in and I have put uh a joist and a top in so that the tabletop of the layout is level with the back. And that way I can set the styrofoam for the city level across this. And the styrofoam is elevated on 3-in blocks which passes right over top of the mainline track. [Music] So, this is the city platform that I built. Uh, it's about 6 ft long and at its narrowest it's about 12 in and at its deepest it's about 20 in. And what I'm going to do is that I laser cut a bunch of these retaining walls. Um, and they're loosely based on the walls that I photographed around the West Harbor Station area. And I'm going to attach these to the face of this elevation. And then I'm also going to split this into uh four equal pieces. And so that'll be about 18 in wide um* 4. [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] So, I've got the first section cut away um from the upper area, and it is two panels wide. And I cut it back about an 1/8 to 1/4 of an inch. So that when this mates back up with this, the edge of the retaining wall will overlap some of the foam so you don't have a crack that goes all the way through the front. It's hopefully going to camouflage that crack. So I let these sit overnight. The glue is completely dry. Now I have to peel off all the tape clamps and I'll reassemble all of these uh back on the layout and see how it turned out. But last night I was looking at some uh online listings and I found a gentleman who was selling off some nscale structures. He has a lot of residential and small town stuff. Um, he's got some unbuilt kits that he's asking $10 for and he's got some built structures and he's in general asking for $5 a piece. Um, here I'll let me show you what I've got going on. So, I sent him a message um asked him if anything's left and maybe I could visit him and see if he's got some that I can start using to planning my little town here. Yeah, pretty cool. Okay, so I just met with Tom and he was an amazing guy. Um, he invited me into his house. He was showing me all the different collections of things that he has. Um, and he's definitely a collector. The story is pretty straightforward. Tom had an HO scale layout and he also wanted to build an endscale layout and so he's been collecting stuff for years. Anyway, he downsized and now he doesn't really have the space and so he just decided it's time to sell everything off. So, I was going through his stuff. He had some buildings that I think are going to be great. He had some unopened kits. And so, I was gathering up a few things that I wanted. And I think I got to about $70 or $80 worth of things. And he just looked at me and he said, "Listen, if you double that, you can have everything here." And everything here is about four boxes worth of structures and a little bit of rolling stock. Anyway, thank you very much, Tom. I promise you that when I'm done picking out all the things that I want to use, I will definitely be passing along the leftovers to anyone that could use them. So, let's get back to the house and uh I'll show you what I got. [Music] [Music] This is everything that was in those four boxes. Um, I didn't realize there was so much. We were just talking and he was loading things into the boxes and I lost track. It's very tempting to keep everything, but there is definitely things that I need um and want, and there's definitely things that I don't need. For instance, like these row houses and single dwellings. Those are things that I want, but I certainly don't need barns and maybe a fire. Well, no, I do need a fire station. So, what I think I'm going to do is I'm going to divide this pile up into things that I might keep and things that I don't need. So, this is after the first round of edits. Um, none of these things here um have any place on my layout. I mean, there's some great kits in here. I appreciate that, but this isn't for me. I'm looking for residential stuff. I did a quick edit and I've reduced this by at least a third or a half. And all that I'm left with here are residential and urban buildings. And so, I'm going to go through these now and do another round of edits because not all of these are going to be appropriate. There are some Scandinavian style buildings and like ranch bungalows and such that that's not for me. I want to get the look of a downtown busy 100-year-old street and so structures like that are more appropriate. These are all the buildings that I've decided to keep. Um, I have seven unopened kits and I've got about 20 buildings that are going to make up the majority of a downtown small southwestern Ontario town. So, I think what I need to do now is get the rough ending of the retaining wall done and I will get some bridges and then maybe I'll set up a city. So, back to the original project. I've got all the tape off. I've slid in the four modules and they fit really really well. Uh the gaps between them are very minimal. Uh it looks like a retaining wall. And I was originally going to stop there with the project, but now that I have all of these new structures, I think what I'm going to do is I'm just going to really quickly um rough up a pair of bridges uh in this area. There's two bridges that uh are going to be proto inspired and they are John Street and James Street and they pass over top of the railroad tracks. There's a third bridge, but I'm not going to include it. So, I'm going to take a look at Google Maps. Uh I'm going to get some rough dimensions for the prototype bridges. I'm just going to set something up with some foam core and then maybe I'll take the structures and start arranging them up on that platform. Uh and I'll have an instant city. [Music] [Music] So, very simple mockups. I've added uh the two streets that pass over the passenger yard. This represents James Street. This represents John Street. John Street is two lanes of traffic and sidewalks and James Street is four lanes of traffic and sidewalks, which makes this about 110 mm wide. And this one is about 80 mm wide. I have set up those two blocks to represent the width of two lanes of traffic with sidewalks uh and some parking spaces. And so now what I'll do is on the either side of those two blocks, I'll just quickly rough in some buildings to create um a main street. So, I've mocked up some bridges. I put them in place. I figured out where the downtown street probably would be. And I set up about 15 or 20 buildings. And this space is not near as big as I thought it was. When I was trying to plan this city, I just very half-hazardly stuffed some buildings into a space and I drastically overestimated how big that space was. Yes, it's 6 ft long. It's 18 in deep. And that's not near as big as my mind's eye thought it was. Now, I'm not upset about that at all. I don't mind uh guard rails, limits, and restrictions. This is great. Um I just simply hadn't given this part of the layout much consideration. And now that I see the restraints, um it makes it a lot easier to know what I'm going to do with it. And I'm still just really surprised. This is not a big area. The other thing I've realized is that those 20 buildings are probably only getting me about 60% of the way there. So, I'm going to have to see what else I can do to back fill. I've got some old outland scale models. There's some kits I can still build. But, you know, I went from four boxes of structures down to a curated list, which I thought was tons. I put them on a space that's not as big as I thought it was, and I still don't have enough to fill it. So many learnings in this. That all said, I know exactly what's next. First of all, I need to build some bridges. I have them roughly laid out. I know what their general dimensions are going to be. I will enjoy doing that. The second thing I need to do, and I'm going to do a deep dive on this one, is the idea of site planning. I need to figure out the size of sidewalks and roadways, backyards, fences, retaining walls, all those sorts of things. I'm actually really interested in figuring out how I can set up um a city in a confined space and to do my best to make it as realistic and plausible as possible. Um it doesn't have to be realistic. I just need the structure to be accurate. The third project um that I'm looking most forward to is to completely disassemble all of these buildings and repaint them in an appropriate paint scheme. So, this has been a great and unexpected turn of events. I'm excited. I now have a path forward for how I'm going to deal with my new city. Let's be clear, this isn't necessarily a plan. It's a response, and this is how things get done. As always, thanks for tuning in, and I'll see you next time. [Music]