michael mott
Western Thunderer
I have been posting about this layout on the what's on your workbench but really it is a small layout. The idea for building this tramway actually started back in 2010. I had read an article about this tramway in the hospital in Montreal Canada. It was quite extensive and many of the pictures that were on the web back then seem to have disappeared. this one is in the public domain so I feel secure in posting it.
Many of the others that were posted showed a wooden floor in the corridors. I have searched for more information about the locos, there were a few of them all with the same basic configuration but with minor detail changes, but with no luck. A few of the earlier web pictures like this one show terrazzo or stone type flooring. From a modeling point of view I felt that I would be able to render the wooden floors a little more convincingly than the terrazzo ones.
The corridors appear to be approx 8 feet wide perhaps a little wider with basically plain walls and with soft corners and a curved cove to paneled ceilings. Some of the earlier hand tinted pictures showed the flooring to be a blonde coloured wood, and this is what I will be building. My first experiments were using 16.5mm track and some printed flooring.
This was encouraging but did not go much further than a few weeks of experimenting and got put away perhaps to be resurrected at some future date.
Recently I was inspired to see what I could do with this hospital concept because of a layout competition proposed by Chris Stockdale on a Facebook page for 7/8ths and larger scales. but it could be no more than 4 square feet of layout. It seemed like an interesting gauntlet.
I wanted to be able to include a number of different photo opportunities with different corridors since there were a couple of different types and the details that were apparent could be done with some detail in such a large scale. One of the criteria was that it be operational and not just a diorama.
Without any firm information about the gauge of the tramway I deduced that it was somewhere between 18 and 20 inches. If I wanted to use a commercial gauge then 32mm or 1.25" seemed pretty close to 18 inches at 7/8ths or .875" = 1 foot. I began planning the layout and came up with a loop with three open sides and one closed corridor and the interesting "Y" intersections that were at some of the corners in the hospital. her is a rough sketch of the layout with only 4 square feet of layout space.
After a lot of experimenting I have done the basic layout baseboard structures and am closing in on completing the flooring, after which I will do some work on the patterns and molds for the tin ceiling panels.
I will continue the updates now here in the layout progress rather than the workbench because it is a layout and is not really on the workbench. this is the progress to date on the track and flooring I have had the loco do complete loops in both directions around the layout using the "Y" .
The three switches will be manually operated from the front fascia via a push pull button the track in not wired and the loco operates with 2 AA batteries. Lack of any real concrete data about this tramway without going to Montreal and physically going through historic archives of the hospital means that this layout is more of an artistic rendition of what was once an interesting operation at the turn of the last century.
Michael
Many of the others that were posted showed a wooden floor in the corridors. I have searched for more information about the locos, there were a few of them all with the same basic configuration but with minor detail changes, but with no luck. A few of the earlier web pictures like this one show terrazzo or stone type flooring. From a modeling point of view I felt that I would be able to render the wooden floors a little more convincingly than the terrazzo ones.
The corridors appear to be approx 8 feet wide perhaps a little wider with basically plain walls and with soft corners and a curved cove to paneled ceilings. Some of the earlier hand tinted pictures showed the flooring to be a blonde coloured wood, and this is what I will be building. My first experiments were using 16.5mm track and some printed flooring.
This was encouraging but did not go much further than a few weeks of experimenting and got put away perhaps to be resurrected at some future date.
Recently I was inspired to see what I could do with this hospital concept because of a layout competition proposed by Chris Stockdale on a Facebook page for 7/8ths and larger scales. but it could be no more than 4 square feet of layout. It seemed like an interesting gauntlet.
I wanted to be able to include a number of different photo opportunities with different corridors since there were a couple of different types and the details that were apparent could be done with some detail in such a large scale. One of the criteria was that it be operational and not just a diorama.
Without any firm information about the gauge of the tramway I deduced that it was somewhere between 18 and 20 inches. If I wanted to use a commercial gauge then 32mm or 1.25" seemed pretty close to 18 inches at 7/8ths or .875" = 1 foot. I began planning the layout and came up with a loop with three open sides and one closed corridor and the interesting "Y" intersections that were at some of the corners in the hospital. her is a rough sketch of the layout with only 4 square feet of layout space.
After a lot of experimenting I have done the basic layout baseboard structures and am closing in on completing the flooring, after which I will do some work on the patterns and molds for the tin ceiling panels.
I will continue the updates now here in the layout progress rather than the workbench because it is a layout and is not really on the workbench. this is the progress to date on the track and flooring I have had the loco do complete loops in both directions around the layout using the "Y" .
The three switches will be manually operated from the front fascia via a push pull button the track in not wired and the loco operates with 2 AA batteries. Lack of any real concrete data about this tramway without going to Montreal and physically going through historic archives of the hospital means that this layout is more of an artistic rendition of what was once an interesting operation at the turn of the last century.
Michael
