Page 13 - March April 2017

65TH STREET PIER COLD STORE - an On30 Inglenook shelf or table-top fold-away layout
John Levesley
Left: 65th Street Cold Store
Below:
The loading stage is a British laser-cut wood kit, the water tower is by Stoney Creek and is on loan from my other layout Sumach Grove until I’ve built an EMD wooden water tank kit to replace it. The other structures I obtained fifth hand but they were built originally by John Craigie.
The story starts with my wife who is enthusiastic about all forms of full size heritage steam lines, but is somewhat indifferent about their model equivalents. When she admitted that she rather liked the billboard reefers that Bachmann produce in On30 it was too good an opening to ignore. Ten reefers later, I had these great lookers but how to use them? Answer - a switching operation at a cold store and ice rack; ideally one I could set up easily at home, at the Bearwood group meetings or even exhibit at shows.
A bit of tweaking of some track templates and I came up with an Inglenook switching puzzle layout seven feet long and just twelve inches wide. Folded in half, that gives a footprint in storage of nine by twelve inches and forty-two inches high. The normal Inglenook configuration has two turnouts, a switch lead and three spurs. I’ve added an extra turnout and spur to allow for future options for operations but for now they are off limits. The layout uses a Prodigy DCC system with a wireless throttle, the turnouts are operated by Blue Point devices.
Operation is straight forward. The layout holds eight reefers and ventilated box cars, each with an associated car card. Shuffle the car cards and pick the top five. The first car drawn is to be switched to Dock One at the cold store, the second card drawn to Dock Two etc. I also pop a small numbered plaque onto the roof of each of the five cars – visible in some of the photos. I have three dedicated locos in the stud; a Forney, a Climax and a Porter however when I exhibited at Brockenhurst in November 2016 I also ran a Shay and a Heisler. Geared locos with sound always go down well with lay visitors, children and modellers who aren’t that familiar with US railroad modelling.
For the purists, apologies – I know the operation is completely fictitious and, so far as I know, there was never any narrow gauge in Brooklyn.
The cross bucks are scratch built, the figures are some of those sold unpainted in big bags of 50 figures for not a lot online. There are I think about 8 different figures designs in the bag, five men, three women. Two of them look a lot like the Queen and Prince Philip (?). Frustratingly the figures are not cold weather ready in their fashions, but few figures are. The car is a Ukrainian plastic kit of a WW2 Russian staff car, a GAZ-1M that was a licence built Ford model B 40hp sedan from the 1930s. For the road, I used Gordon Gravett’s technique; card base stiffened with shellac, painted gloss grey and gently dusted with talcum powder whilst still wet.
Left: 65th Street Cold Store
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