7th Street Shops Pre-History, Part 3

After discharge from the U.S. Navy I picked up Model Railroading again. I'd dabbled a bit and even visited the club in Pearl City, HI but I didn't have the focus during time in the service. I built a couple of the  Kemtron kits (C-16 & 0-6-0t) and still had one or two other items from pre- service years. A few years after the Navy, a buddy and I rented a house with suddenly more room. So I began planning a new layout. 

At that point I obtained a Keystone Shay Kit with the NWSL Power Kit. I decided to build a small 4'x6' layout in standard gauge for the shay. I kept it simple; a loop around point to point mainline and I decided to try my hand at hand laying the track.I had already experimented with hand laying track on a shelf layout in my bedroom before I left home years earlier. That only progressed to bench work with a small portion of "roadbed". On to that I glued match sticks with the heads cut off as ties. There wasn't any rail and it was collectively a pitiful thing.

I laid track in place and got some of it running but I don't recall if I had any switches. If I did it is likely they were not operational as I was still pretty green about all of that. I built the shay and succeeded in getting it to run very nicely. Then I made a discovery; I don't care for shays and other job specific locomotives. I am more a common carrier enthusiast. I soon traded the Keystone shay for a C&S mogul. I had also acquired a Far East Distributor "Spartan Series" mogul and I built an MDC HOn3 outside frame consolidation.

I became involved with the local model railroad club and then encountered a group that built portable modules to connect into a layout. It was HO 3 foot gauge and they called themselves Slim Rail. For a year or so I participated with the set up and showing, but I didn't have a module of my own.

I moved out of the house to an apartment with another roommate. I stayed there until I went to Denver for an Associate Degree in Engineering Drafting.  Naturally the 4'x6' layout did not survive either move.                 

My involvement with Slim Rail naturally became more detached but I kept the friends and finally decided I had enough room in my Denver apartment to build a module.That is what I share with you  for this post.

I design the module within the given parameters of 2'x4' with track entrance and exits at the prescribed places. In between I built 4 switches or turn-outs and all track was hand laid. The scenery was plaster soaked paper towels laid over wads of newspaper and then a coat of plaster over that for strength and refinement. All of the buildings and bridges were scratch built from magazine articles or of my own design. I provided back and face panels from a sheet of Masonite I'd used for another interest a few years earlier.. And I painted the back drop scene.

But the module was never finished by me as my interests were still in the Colorado & Southern narrow gauge and the models I was building in HOn3 were sadly unsatisfying to me.

I sold or traded all of my accumulated HO models for an Iron Horse Models C&S No. 60 brass kit in O scale. 

It was a set of On3 trucks that did it. Out of curiosity and intrigue I bought a set from Caboose Hobbies and that turned my track into a new direction. I sold this module to the Group as club property - along with the MDC 2-8-0 - and they finished it. It may yet be part of layout for all I know.

Next time we'll see what I did with the On3 2-8-0 kit.

 

My First Layout

 Several years ago one of my brothers handed me an envelope and inside was a strip of 110 negatives. He said, I think these are yours. I examined the frames and said I think these are photos of my old layout that I built when we lived on Pearl Drive. But there were no prints and by then most photo shops were digital. Until recently I was not sure what they were. Then I found a place that could scan negatives and create positive images. And so they were and now I share them with you as a continuation to my previous post about where 7th Street Shops came from.

It was a simple plan I believe I designed myself; very crudely, based upon what little I knew of E.L. Moore's Elizabeth Valley layout. I had previously laid a loop of track onto a 4'x8' sheet of plywood. That was set up in the garage of the new home our family had moved into The door was left open one day and when I went out to play with the trains the few plastic diesels and cars I had were stolen. But I had the plywood and managed to scrape together scrap lumber to build this 4'x6' layout. I was 16 by then.

The track was brass sectional, The plywood was used to make the roadbed and the plaster terrain was laid over wire screen - pretty standard stuff for those days. I learned quite a bit from that layout. I don't remember much about building the structures. Some of them may have been scratch built, but I'm sure just as many were commercial plastic kits. I do vaguely remember building the trestle from perhaps an E.L.Moore article. I also learned about practices I didn't care for; like plaster on screen (and as it turned out using plaster at all). I used oil paints and turpentine to color the plaster. Not recommended either.

 All the while I was using my hands to build models out of a variety of materials and the basic skills that were important for developing more advanced skills later.

But I had greater aspirations. Growing up in Colorado I was enamored with Colorado Standard Gauge (36"). It wasn't too long before the Alpine Tunnel and the Denver South Park & Pacific R.R. captured my imagination. I've been a Colorado & Southern modeler and Historian ever since. 

I sold the layout to a friends brother a few years later. 

Narrow gauge locomotives were scarce in those days and my first brass locomotive was actually a Nevada County Narrow Gauge No. 9. I don't remember who the importer was. I painted it with a brush. It was awful. And that was it's lesson to me -buy an airbrush! I sold it before I went in the Navy. No photos of that.

There were a few more false starts over the next decade that didn't go anywhere. I'll brief over them next time.

 

Welcome to 7th Street Shops - Rail Flanges & Gears; the official Blog for 7thStreet Shops It is here that we will share bits and pieces about our business and related topics and we welcome our clients to interact with us here. Naturally we are most interested in performing our purpose as a customizing and repair service for the Model Railroader community where we expect to spend most of our time but we want a fluid place where we can interact with others having the same interests to "Build Thangs", Run Trains and Have Fun." I am a model railroader myself with an accumulated knowledge of several decades on how to do this, that and everything else in this hobby. We hope you enjoy our website and we hope you find our blog worth of your valuable time.

 

Today Vicki and I live in beautiful Montana but this hasn't always been so. We started.7th Street Shops in Lakewood CO, after 26 years of drafting for a number of Engineering companies. When that occupation dried up a friend and fellow modeler expressed his willingness to pay for work on some of his brass models. We formed 7th Street Shops in July 2009. I do the craft work and she does the administration work.

One of the neighbor's kids in our yard

This is it - Curt's Train Set

The knowledge behind our business began when as a 5-year-old, my brother got a Gilbert Train Set for his 4TH birthday. His interest was as expected - as was mine - short lived; and that little train set wound up in the mutual toy box where it rapidly decayed into junk. To my brother, that was that. To me it was an infection that slowly incubated into an all-out "Dez-zzeeze"...  

At 14 my brother and I got an HO train set for Christmas; to go with our HO race car set. We "reasoned" it would add excitement to our "Rapid Transit System". Exit "rubber tires". Enter rail and flange.  

But that isn't the whole story. By that point we were already avid model builders. Being best friends, brothers and constant rivals, we each worked at out-doing the other and we regularly destroyed each other's accomplishments - as the mood struck. As early as 9 and 10 we built plastic cars by the scores - along with model airplanes in plastic and balsa, ships and even Big Daddy Ross models of caricatures - and we regularly tore down our bicycles to grease the bearings - all of them... whether they needed "greezin' " or not. 

We were native born Coloradoans raised by Coloradoans. My mom was a farm girl and my Dad who was also rural bred started his own church in his living room. He built his own rider lawn mower from a truck chassis and they raised 5, more or less rebellious, kids - whew! Perhaps the greatest gift they gave us was that Americanist form of independence known as "Rugged Individualism"; that knowing, I can never lose if I don't quit.  

It's a good foundation for life if applied productively. It isn't about pride or a need to be better than anyone else. It's about just being better!