Just introducing myself!

Hey all! It's a pleasure to be made so welcome here!

I'm Gene Barfield, I'm 61, married, a proud Navy vet by choice and a New York City kid by birth, and we live on our farm in the northern part of Michigan's lower peninsula.

This winter I start my dream layout. For over 25 years I've been collecting stuff for that purpose, and I've finally found space to actually do it by taking over, weathering in and prepping about 1/3 of our barn's first floor. Now the fun starts.

My layout will be my freelance transition era Great Lakes & Hudson River RR (GLHR). Its backstory is that it is the amalgamation of the former Erie, Nickel Plate, DL&W and a few lines around the Great Lakes region, with connections to the New York harbor area, and occasional visits on a PRR line transiting the layout to use the union station and yards serving Great Lakes City. Yeah, a big operation if it were the prototype, and maybe not likely, but my backstory is created to give me access to equipment and regions for purposes of operational scheduling and origin/destination for traffic, with room for my imagination thrown in as I develop the GLHR itself. (Still trying to come up with just the right livery and heralds for it, but I'm getting close.)

I decided to go this way because I struggled for years before arriving at a theme I could frame my thoughts in. My original troubles began because I have a fascination with famous named passenger trains which remains to this day. I have nice consists, with power, for the Daylight, the Southern Crescent, Powhatan Arrow, LIRR's Sunrise Special (I grew up on Long Island so this is purely a sentimental favorite), the Zephyr, some others and anything PRR. You can see how unwell these would fit on a layout for operations.

So I decided to cheat. If I had my own pike and a good-size urban union station I could work in scheduled visits from other regional lines by fictionalizing those other railroads and their routes a bit. (Can you tell I'm really into passenger railroading?) My PRR feeder line will bring in an occasional train with the historically accurate transcontinental interchange cars (PRR sleepers in SLSF, UP and other livery). I'm blatantly stealing some equipment, too, now contemplating relettering my Daylight equipment for a GLHR knockoff I'm tentatively calling the Lakeshore Daylight, and the CZ equipment becoming the Atlantic Zephyr, with connections in distant Chicago for transcontinental service via the CZ. I'm basically re-baking the cake so I can have it and eat it too. They haven't put a price on dreams yet!

My family knows I've gone completely 'round the bend kitbashing and upgrading building kits. I can't imagine a roundhouse without complete power and hand tool sets, air, water and lube piping and associated equipment and, of course, the one thing nobody seems to put in their building kits, bathrooms. Last week out of frustration with the costs involved in furnishing structures I figured out how I could - and then did - mass produce 36 office desks for use in structures around the layout, and then came up with a way to build a few dozen transition-era radiators for building interiors - it gets cold in the Great Lakes region! I've found online sources for good LEDs for less than 25 cents each, and am trying my best to remember my soldering and electrical/electronics training from my Navy years.

My layout will be powered by an NCE 10-amp system going to the layout through four PSX breakers and an auto-reversing breaker for power districts. I have, at last count, 36 locomotives - steam and early diesel with a GG1 thrown in that I'm thinking I need to use on the PRR line where they finally extended the catenary past Harrisburg to Great Lakes City. Most don't have decoders in them yet but I'm slowly working through my fleet, upgrading and servicing in prep for ops, and hope to have a lot of sound decoders installed later on. I also have an NCE Power Pro which I'm using on my test plant at present, happy that its throttle is designed to be full-featured on the large system.

I've always loved scratch building and have a few structures complete, but I especially value it for creating the small details that would otherwise cost a fortune. (The desks I built were out of frustration that the one I ordered, a resin casting, cost around $6 each. Mine cost less than $0.25 each and they' re just as good.) I look at the hobby catalogs and web sites today and wonder how we ever imagine we can attract new people, especially young people and those on fixed incomes like I am now, to the hobby. The good news is that because of forums like this people will not only find the ideas and techniques needed to do a lot of stuff themselves, they'll find the courage to do it too, with all the wonderful examples and support here.

My degrees are in history: a B.A. in history from Norwich University in Vermont, and a Master of Science in historic preservation from the University of Vermont in Burlington. When I was working toward my Masters I hesitated to say anything much about my interest in historic technology because about 100% of the preservation community is focused on high-style buildings they can have cocktail parties in. But when the director of the program found out about my 'other' life he was really happy and very supportive. I did my Masters internship at the late, much lamented Locomotive & Railway Preservation Magazine, and later learned that I am one of very few in my field to obtain professional preservation credentials specializing in historic technology. But it's growing. Been able to do a lot of good work, and the job I remember with the most pride is being in charge, after Hurricane Andrew in 1992, of the restoration of U.S. Rail Car No. 1, the Ferdinand Magellan, and two of its support vehicles, at the Gold Coast Railroad Museum in Miami.

I found and then joined Trainboard because I knew I could turn here for a lot of good conversation and assistance as I build and then operate my layout. I only hope I can give back, somehow, as much as I know I'll get here from all you other members and your thoughts and work. It's a real pleasure to be aboard!

 

Hi Gene, Welcome to the Train Board, happy to have you, and your preservation expertise, on board. Thank you for your service career, and for choosing Navy. Some of my finest customers were in NAVSEA 06.

 

Hi Gene, and welcome aboard. You are going to have quite a layout.

 

Having some experience with forums on other sites I thought I could count on one thing remaining consistent across the community and I am not disappointed, reading all of your responses. Positive thinking, welcoming comments and enthusiastic support seem to describe this community, which is one of many reasons I am so happy to be a model railroader. You people are wonderful!

I'll respond quickly to a couple things I mentioned, which you commented on.

I took the cast resin HO-scale desk I purchased as my template, and grabbed some scraps of sheet styrene I had, along with my Chopper II. After taking some very approximate measurements of the desktop, sides, backs, drawer fronts and the inside (footwell) sides, I chopped a few pieces. On the two pieces I'd made for the desk drawer fronts I scribed lines where the drawer separations would be. While gluing things up I set the drawer fronts back the tiniest bit into the sides, to emphasize their intent to appear as desk drawers. A little touch-up sanding and some gray spray paint and voila! I had a desk! All it cost me was using up styrene scraps that would otherwise have been cast-offs from some other project, and a few drops of Tenax.

The only really difficult part was the glue-up since the largest part, the desk top, was about 1/2" x 1"; the other pieces were much smaller. Using the desk top as a base, top down on my work table, I held the outside sides and back with tweezers while gluing them onto the top. Adding the next part, the drawer fronts, perpendicular to both the sides and the top squared everything up. Adding the footwell sides was a simple matter, again using tweezers to hold everything in place. Just a little patience on my trial run demonstrated that it was easy to get everything aligned well before I used a capillary tube to add glue at the joints. I usually add glue inside the joints, but it wouldn't really matter when you're using a thin 'styrene-welding' glue.

After mass producing my desks, a few swipes with each desk held right-side up on a piece of fine sandpaper leveled anything I'd assembled poorly, and let me change their standardized heights if I wanted. After all, the boss usually has the largest, tallest desk, right? We flunkies get something less grand. Changing their standard appearance can be easy, along with different paint jobs, by doing things like slightly easing corners, etc., with sandpaper or a file. Next, I think I've come up with a nifty way to use up some more styrene scraps - the tiniest ones we usually think there'll be no possible use for - making rows of books for desk tops and bookshelves.

After I made one, I set my Chopper II guides and mass produced parts for a few dozen more desks, keeping each stack of parts separate from others in little zip-loc bags until I needed them. All I did was use up some styrene scrap. Then I set up an assembly line and after less than two hours I had several dozen office desks to furnish my buildings. Yeah, they're all cut to the same size, but slight assembly variances and different paint jobs can make them all one-of-a-kind if that's what you need, although standardized desks purchased in quantity is nothing new for any office environment with more than two workers either.

The radiators were even easier, and I was surprised at how cool it looks to add these items - present in every prototype building from that era but never offered in building kits - to interior furnishings. Since I like to furnish and light my interiors, this was a natural.

I had a spool of fine wire, and I was playing with it to see what I could come up with when the radiator solution occurred to me. Wanting to keep things close to my HO scale I cut a strip of thin scrap sheet styrene to four scale feet high, and then began carefully wrapping the wire around it. Each wrap of the wire I kept tight against the previous one with simple finger pressure. It takes a little dexterity, or a little patience - probably both but all I needed was a near miss for it to look good at scale, through a window, from a little distance so we're not talking about museum-quality replication.

When I'd wrapped the wire long enough (12-16 turns maybe, but you can make them any length as appropriate for their end use) and kept the wrap tight to the styrene base, I drizzled a little thin CA over it, back and front, and let it dry. Later, I cut the wire ends off at the bottom, and sheared off the styrene core as close to the wrapped, glued wire as possible, making it pretty much invisible unless one looks closely. The fact that the wire is wrapped on a very slight diagonal is not even noticeable. What is important is to keep wrapping the wire tightly, ensuring a uniform appearance. So if you mess up, just unwrap the wire, pull it tight to straighten it a little, and begin again. A little silver paint, all around, and I had what passes quite well for an old stand-up radiator. Once confident with the process and the result, I realized I could use the same technique to mass produce radiators of any size easily. Every old house had these radiators, and most old office and other commercial structures too. One thing that did help was to cut a piece of wire off the spool that would be long enough to complete the job and work with easily, without having to handle the whole spool while wrapping.

While over-doing it furnishing the interior of things like my roundhouse, warehouses, passenger stations, etc., I remembered that I often saw long (sometimes as long as 12 feet or more) banks of one- or two-foot high radiators, either on the floor or mounted on the walls, used to add and spread heat in buildings much larger than houses too.

The one thing I didn't do was worry about the feet these radiators usually have, because their typically three- or four-inch height would not be noticed, if absent, in my model structures. As I began adding them to buildings I just used a drop of CA to mount them, in places like right under windows, and elsewhere, right on the floor, or up along walls in warehouse and other big structures. In a few instances, when I didn't trim the wire ends up tight against the wraps, those little tails looked like radiator feet anyway.

A quick look at the Walthers catalog later leads me to conclude that using up scrap materials and a few drops of glue and paint this way, I saved well over $150.00 not buying resin or other cast replicas. As much as I intend to support all the commercial suppliers and artisans in our community, I do need to be careful about expenditures. And I got more simple to make, cool looking interior detail, spending no more than a few hours happily playing in my shop.

I didn't think to make a photo record of my process while doing these things, so I have no pics to post other than of the finished items, which I'll add later. That may wait, though, until I make another set so I can get process photos and post all this in the right place when I learn more about where things belong here in these forums.

Meantime, If anyone gets any little bit of 'payback' from this because I'm so delighted at the warm welcome you are giving me, I'm really glad.

Best to you all! - Gene