Thoughts on structures

Never mind that I had not done any of these things before; I was on a roll.

At one of the first live-steam events I attended, I sidled up to two men I today know to be pioneers of modern small-scale live steaming. After the chit-chat, I outlined this vision, complete with the hand-laid track.

Both gents rolled their eyes and said I’d be lucky if I laid any rail, no less spiking it on hand-made ties.

Of course, they were right. My first compromise was to use commercial rail; my second was to use commercial sectional rail; my third ... well, there have been lots of compromises over the years. I’m about to reveal my 30th, or 53rd, or 153rd ...

The one real skill I actually brought to backyard model railroading was carpentry ... in junior and senior high school I had actually built cedar jewelry boxes and audio speaker cabinets in shop class. Though rusty, they were still skills I had and if I could build anything, it would be railroad structures.

I spent quite some time building a scale barn in the late 1990s and it served me well, both on the Westline & Mussel Rock as well as the GT&E. Unfortunately, it finally became a casualty of weather and now needs (quite) a bit of repair.

Over the years, the GT&E looked rather barren with just the little red barn (and the lighthouse; don’t forget the lighthouse) and one day in the spring of 2003 or 2005 I found myself in a local Walgreens Drug Store, in the gardening aisle. On a shelf, there were a couple of decorative birdhouses. I bought one for $10 and have never really looked back.

While popping one down on the layout was kind of cute — it was going to be a placeholder for a real building I would make at some future point — I began to realize that said future point might not be any day soon. So, if I encountered a decorated birdhouse — at Walgreens or Rite Aid or Michael’s or Ross Stores — and it wasn’t too expensive, I’d buy one.

When I started the illumination project, I took an existing birdhouse and added an LED to it. Then I put fire light into another. Then I started scouring the drug stores and art supply stores and knick-knack stores for decorative birdhouses. (Subsequently, I’ve found that these birdhouses are also available on-line; those illustrating this article can be obtained from Amazon.com.)

I have spent anywhere from $6 to $16 on a birdhouse; interestingly, birdhouses that cost $15 in the spring can sometimes cost $8 in the fall. At this writing, I have about 18 active birdhouses on the layout, plus another half-dozen in what I call the slum.

The reason there’s a slum is that while most decorated birdhouses are cute as hell — they have nifty details like charming signs, miniature cows and sheep and tiny chairs and tables, both inside and out — they use really cheap paint and really cheap adhesive.

Two full winter seasons on the layout and most of them are no longer painted; the signs have fallen off and many of the details have blown to the wind.

A partial solution comes from treating them in some way: some I have repainted; others I have sprayed with enough shellac to preserve them from even the worse elements. And note: many, if not all, have no paint on their undersides. Preservation will be assisted by a coat or two of even the cheapest paint on the bottom.

At this writing, we’re just a few weeks before the winter rains kick in and my plan is to take some of the more fragile and bring them indoors for the season.

So, there’s my compromise: for the foreseeable future I’ll be using decorative birdhouses as structures on the layout. Not for all of them, though: I have built a scale schoolhouse from scratch (it still needs siding) and have the plans to build a couple of other structures, including a water tower, a interlock office and a residence. And I’ll soon get around to fixing up that red barn.

But decorative birdhouses helped fill out the layout quickly and they actually look pretty good, especially at night, when they’re illuminated.

—

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.