A Trip Down Memory Lane

26 SEPTEMBER 2010

A milestone has been reached on the layout: the Stephen A. Greene Building Supply Company is completed. To celebrate, I decided to compile a little history of the business—which, like real ones, grew and changed over time. It was literally years in the making, and ended up looking nothing like what was originally envisioned. Indeed, it wasn't envisioned at all; back when this version of the layout was planned, which was July of 2007, the space now occupied by the building supply was nothing more than a swatch of trees behind a fuel oil business.

The genesis of Stephen A. Greene's (named, incidentally, after an adopted grandfather) occurred sometime in March of '08, shortly after Robert Ray introduced one of his first "big box" laser-cut kits, Nail Brothers Salvage. I immediately saw the building as part of a lumber yard, something I'd always wanted to model. Meanwhile, the track plan as designed (above) didn't last long—two switches and a crossing were simply not going to fit in the available space. So, one siding came out, and the lumber yard went in. I had the kit half-assembled and posed in place by early April (below).

About four months later, I'd completed the scratchbuilt coal trestle, which was essentially the keystone of the whole scene (below). It also became one of the first areas to acquire finished scenery—but, like so many other features of the layout, it wouldn't stay that way very long...

By March of the following year, I'd torn out much of the scenery around the coal trestle to make way for a different lumber yard building. Robert Ray had released Lew Skroo's Hardware (below), which I found more appealing than Nail Brothers.

The problem then became how to orient the building. I'd rotated it twice before setting the foundation in place (not that this was any indicator of a done deal).

Once the orientation of the main building was finally settled, I began adding other structures, starting with a gravel pile in front of the coal trestle. My thinking was that I needed something low so as not to block the view of the trestle.

April saw the beginnings of the lumber shed, which was well along (below) when I suddenly decided to move the diner down next door to the building supply. I'd been working on the access panel for the town, and placed the diner there just to keep it out of harm's way. I liked how it looked there, so that was that.

With the arrival of the diner, the lumber shed was displaced, so I tore out the gravel pile and moved it there. In so doing, I realized that a taller structure worked just fine in front of the coal trestle; in addition, the interior of the lumber shed could be clearly seen—a real bonus.

Things pretty much stayed that way for about six months, until another upheaval took place. I moved the diner back where it came from—after I'd installed its foundation, no less—and trashed the whole building supply scene. I recall spending some weeks moving this here, that there, and not being satisfied with anything. When I struck upon the idea of merging the two kits together, things seemed to gel at last. I'd lost the lumber shed—that really hurt—but the gains outweighed the losses, and by mid-September, Greene's started looking like this:

Two months later (November '09), I had the building pretty much wrapped... except for the roof...

Ah, yes, the roof... What a royal PITA that turned out to be. I burned through quite a lot of micro-ply trying—and failing—to get the roof right. (Good thing I had an obscene supply of micro-ply on hand.) The problem? A faulty assumption. Based on the way the two kits went together, I assumed the pitch of the two main roof parts was the same. It wasn't. Even more embarrassing, it took me nine months to realize this! Once I discovered the error of my ways, however, the roof—and indeed the whole rest of the scene—came together in very short order. We're talking days, which is like lightning compared to the normally glacial pace of layout progress.

Which brings us to the present. I hope you've enjoyed my little excursion. You can learn how I bashed the building in great detail, and also see many more images of the whole scene as it came together over a two-and-a-half-year period. Despite the sharp bends, speed bumps and dead ends, it's still been a great trip.

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