Page 13 - September October 2017

MT-4 SP 4360 has detached itself from the LA-bound Train #72, the Coast Mail, to pick up an express reefer of strawberries; this was a regular occurrence at Guadalupe CA for decades, and one staged here at Quisling
themselves, other than looking into windows, or waiting to cross the road. People mostly stand still when they meet another in the street, or are waiting for a train or a “walk/ don’t walk” instruction, so you’ll see a few small gather- ings at Quisling. The secret is to look at how your figures appear in a video, when the camera pans past them – you can do it with your phone. If they look as if they’re
Santa Maria Valley RR #203 has left its outbound load on the industry lead and will shortly return home with more cars
Fairbanks Morse H-12-44 SP 1490 rumbles down Second Street
realistic on the screen, then they are probably that. Dress-wise, well, older people in the nineteen-eighties seemed to be dressed in the way their parents did in the fifties, when “out to town”, conservatively and quite formally. I keep a few more figures in “walking” mode, but only for posing in still photographs, and temporarily placed. They just look daft when you see them in vide- os or real-life – frozen permanently in a Ministry-of-Sil- ly-Walks position.
Billboards are very period-specific; I keep a circa-1982 set that I’ve made using scaled-down images for use at Western Union monthly club meets, and at home, they are either removed, or covered over with 1954-era replacements.
The Big Plan is to commence building a new layout in my new basement – a reasonably accurate chunk of a very small part of the Coast Division of the Southern Pacific Railroad as it looked and operated in the summer-fall period of 1954. I’m already using Quisling to run, fettle and test much of the period-accurate stock that I’ve been collecting, building and modifying over the last ten years, and which will eventually run on the new layout.
With its cars assembled, Train #72 will shortly highball out of town
October 2017 - ROUNDHOUSE 13