Mt Vernon January 27, 2015 NMRA Clinic Report

by Roger Johnson / Photos by Paul Koren & Roger Johnson

The January 2015 Mount Vernon clinic of the local Fourth Division, PNR, NMRA was attended by 14 folks including two spouses. We hope they will return and be joined by even more spouses. Let’s hear it for co-ed clinics!

The Mt Vernon Model Railroad Clinic is a NMRA sanctioned event with the 4^th Division of NMRA providing a modest sum of seed money to help us get started. While NMRA membership is not required to attend the clinics, it was once again heartily encouraged. Please let Al Carter or Roger Johnson know if you wish to join NMRA.

There were several announcements of upcoming events (editor added a couple):

• First up was the Monroe Model Railroad show & swap meet to be held at the fairgrounds in Monroe Saturday and Sunday February 28^th & March 1^st. All proceeds go to 4H. Info at http://www.unwclub.org/unwshow.html
• 30^th Annual Sn3 Symposium in Bellevue April 16-18, 2015. Info at http://sn3symposium-2015.com
• The annual Olympia area layout tours will take place May 16^th. Per the NMRA Pacific Northwest Region calendar, additional information will be available from Scott Buckley, sbuckley54@comcast.net
• Portland Daylight Express, the NMRA national convention, will be held August 23 – 28, 2015. Additional information is available at www.nmra2015portland.org

Our Show & Tell (or Bring & Brag) segment featured:

• A Southern Pacific ‘outside braced’ auto boxcar model built by Paul Koren from a kit by Speedwitch Media.  The model represents a car made in the early 1920’s, modified in the 30’s and retired by the late 40’s (likely).
• An Athearn 50 ft gondola modified by Bob Stafford for cement bottle service. Car has holes cut into the sides to allow for the attachment of air hoses and unloading hoses to the bottles. Bottles have been modified with brass wire lifting straps. Lackawanna’s fleet of bottle cars operated between the cement mills on its Bangor and Portland Division and New York Harbor. According to Bob each of the bottles held 11 tons of cement headed for construction sites in New York City.

Paul Koren’s SP automobile box car

Bob Stafford’s cement bottle car

The presentation for the evening was titled “Structures on a Diet,” with Roger Johnson showing how many plastic kits on the market today can be reduced in size, primarily the footprint, to better fit into the limited real estate of our layouts. There were numerous slides showing how he has done and how he is doing this on several different structure kits. While his work has thus far been limited to plastic kits the same techniques could be used on other material. In addition to making structures smaller Roger showed some other kit bash examples including modification of a stock pen to mate a loading ramp with his meat packing house and a combination of two freight house kits into an unusual three story structure. This project is based upon an Art Curren kitbashing article in Model Railroader in the early 1980’s.

Diagram showing reduction of machine Shop footprint

Completed smaller machine shop–narrower & shorter than kit design

Next up February 24^th is “Weathering Buildings with Bragdon Weathering Chalk” by Bob Stafford. He has put together a Power Point presentation on weathering buildings using Bragdon Weathering Chalks. The program shows how some buildings were finished using oil stains and dry brushing before applying chalk. We will learn what kinds of brushes he used to apply the chalk and the use of over spray when needed. Also included will be the making and weathering of roads. If you have seen any of Bob’s work you know you want to catch this clinic.