Contest Time!

I subscribe to a pretty neat bulletin board dedicated to trains and model railroading called "BigBlueTrains.com". The people on the board like to post a lot of stuff and it's always interesting to see what other modelers and railfans are thinking and doing.

There's a new contest there starting June 1st, and it's a "Pick your Poison" Challenge. We can kitbash something, finish a kit, improve an area of our model railroad, etc.

I've been searching for more motivation to get back to working on scenery, but it's springtime here in Maryland and I've been spending A LOT of time outdoors working on the property. By the time I get down to my office, I'm beat and unmotivated. With the dead of summer coming on, I think this is a good excuse to get crackin'. I'm going to finish Hazleton, specifically the new platform that I built adjacent to the coal breaker and submit it as my contest entry. More to follow soon! I typically share my progress on BigBlue, but since this is a contest, I'll be posting my progress only on this blog entry and after the submission, I'll share a little bit of this with them after the fact.

First there's space availability. Here's a shot of what I had originally:

It was a space about 4 feet in width and about 2 feet in depth until the backdrop bent around the corner. For those of you who have been following the coal breaker build, you know I spent a good deal of time and effort adding the coal breaker to (primarily) hide the entrance through the backdrop to my storage area. I also added scenic details between the track and the backdrop:

...and I did add the blue sky behind the breaker, which was a big improvement over the brown wall. But then I decided that I needed some scenery on the backdrop and found a wide picture of Hazleton taken from afar that I decided to blow up and print out for an addition to the backdrop:

That was all well and good, but then I decided I wanted to add some structures and scenery in front of that city backdrop, and that meant building a small addition to the layout:

I've since added the foamboard on the plywood base, but I'm in a hold pattern until June 1st, when the contest starts. My entry will be showing the transformation of this space from something that looks like this, to something better.

The contest is over and it's now September! Turns out Big Blue wanted to see your work as you went, so I spent all of my time and energy reporting on that forum. Bottom line, I didn't finish my layout addition, but I did make a lot of progress and ended up submitting a kitbashed warehouse that I put together on to cover the area on the far right of the photo above, and both of the projects currently have one vote and the voting ends in about 3 weeks.

Most of the effort went into putting together potential buildings for the space, and I bought the Coal and Grain Storage Silos, Lucky's Lunch Counter and the Coal Dealer. They were basically stock kits from Clever. Each is shown more or less put together:

Here's the coal silos. The real difficulties here (in terms of time) were the bands around each silo - there were a lot of them and they're really narrow! and the dispensing chutes at the bottom of each one. I also bashed together an elevator that goes from the breaker to the top of the middle portion of the silo:

and here's the Coal Dealer:

and Lucky's, which I think I completed at the end of July:

My next project was a proposed warehouse to hide major portions of the wall, and I used mostly the Philly Modular Flat kit to build it. As Clever states, its intention is to make a low-profile building which is built against the backdrop, but as they say in the kit index, there's no reason you can't make a very large building out of the components - which is sort of what I did.

I wanted a series of buildings set against the backdrop that progressed downhill as viewed from the front of the layout, with the buildings getting further away from the backdrop as they got further away. I put up a backdrop panel, painted it with sky, added some painted hills and trees and then supplemented with some green polyfil:

I added the "Duplan" logo on the tallest building after doing a little research. I was looking for other businesses in Hazleton other than coal, and in 1903, a Frenchman named Duplan established the largest silk mill in the world in Hazleton. I found a logo on a "15-year service" pin on ebay that someone sold at one time, blew it up on the computer, built a stencil and painted the logo against the building. I am pretty pround of how it worked out, and it's also special because I work with Bernie Duplan, who loved the fact that I included his name into my layout.

Here's a couple of shots of the stenciling/painting:

I'm going to be adding a few more buildings before I attempt to create the terrain. More to follow!

One of the nice things about Clever Models (at least this was the case up until 2023, they would put out occasional "Freebies" - free kits to download and print. Over the years I've used some of these kits to add to a particular building, but I don't think I've ever put a full kit together that was a freebie. Decided to do that with two buildings - The Silver City Tool Shed and the Haunted House. These are small buildings that I may or may not include in Hazleton:

As I said, I have no definite plans for those buildings, but I did go out and purchase two more kits from Clever this weekend - The Cannery and Cream City Tool Works Building A. Cream City as a full set is 4 separate buildings (it is available in HO scale as a full set, but a couple of years ago Clever reinssued them in O-scale with a lot more detail, so I couldn't say no to that).

I was searching for a purpose for these last two building buys when I stumbled across a former Hazleton manufacturing effort - the Pilsener Brewery. Located right next to the Duplan Silk Mill (imagine that!), the massive brick edifice was torn down in 1958 to put up a parking lot. I'm going to pretend that they are still in business in 1976 and inhabit both the Cannery and Cream City, with the Cannery being a beer distributor and Cream City being the brewery.

I did find a few Pilsener logos online including this one:

The Cannery is done, and I've converted it into a beer distributor by adding some signage that I pulled off of the internet for PB Co. All of the signs were built with portions of the sign that comes with the Cannery coupled with the images that I pulled off the internet using Microsoft Paint. I then added the borders around the signs that went against walls. I plan on adding some beer kegs out on the loading dock and I hope to find some cases of bottles as well.

But for now, it's on to the Brewery itself.

Just found out today that my entry (even though it wasn't finished) won (tied actually) for the contest winner with 5 votes. This entitles me to .... absolutely nothing! (which is OK by me)