Published in San Francisco Chronicle on October 17, 2010

Mike Stokinger A long time railroad buff and friend of many, died Sunday September 26th, he was 56 years old. There will be a gathering of friends to celebrate Mike’s life at the Josephine Randall Museum on Wednesday, October 20 from 6:30 to 9:00 pm.

From the Golden Gate Model Railroad Club blog:

Last week, the Golden Gate Model Railroad Club lost a long time member and friend: Mike Stokinger. Mike was not only an active participant with the GGMRC but also a great person and very much involved with building the organization and ties with the model railroad community and friends of the GGMRC. Help us remember him and his love of model trains by stopping by to see the passion that he lived for.

From The Peter Pan Express in April 1997 Salon

I recall Mike Stokinger, the genial treasurer of the Golden Gate Model Railroad Club, who described his love for trains in such different terms. “There’s something very soothing, very musical about them. When you’re in a train, you’re in a cozy enclosed space, you’ve got movement, this hypnotic hum of sound and it’s almost like being in the womb.”

My memories of Mike

I grew up in Noe Valley in the 1970’s and took classes at the Randall Museum. Open houses at the GGMRC were rare and big events. The line typically ran down Museum Way and the wait seemed like hours. I grew up, moved away, school, etc. but made it back to the Bay Area in 1996 and was a member of the GGMRC for a few years in the late 90′s.

Mike was a great guy. We had him over for dinner one night and he brought over a projector, a screen, and 4-5 slide carousels (several hundred slides) of his recent train trip to Chicago on Amtrak as well as photos from his trip to China. Mike managed to make a three hour slide show very entertaining. Mike was always passionate about passenger trains and I fondly recall his long strings of name-train cars snaking around the layout. I’m very sad and sorry he is gone and agree that he will be missed.

Ryan is another of our railroad-minded students and he chose to model a railroad yard. We used a classic John Allen Timesaver track plan and we added an Atlas turntable at one end.

We built the layout on a block of pink foam-board and glued 1/4″ plywood on the sides and bottom making a light but extremely rigid foundation.

Ryan soldered all the electrical connections.

Here the ground has been painted and the track has been airbrushed. Ryan is cleaning the paint off the tops of the rails.

The temptation to run some trains as soon as possible was irresistible.

Next we ballasted all the track.

Then we got Ryan started building some structures. He quickly mastered the plastic buildings.

We have placed the buildings on the layout and we’ll blend the bases into the scenery in the coming weeks.

Ready for some more scenery, grass, trees and trains.

This is a quick progress update and a state-of-the-project report. Erik is one of our railroad-minded students at Autistry Studios. In the spring we brainstormed ideas by collecting and organizing photos of scenes that Erik liked.

We found several trends in the photos that Erik liked and the one we focused on was Northwestern Pacific Railroad scenes in and around Sausalito, California. In the 20s and 30s Sausalito had a large passenger facility with electric, steam, standard gauge and narrow gauge trains connecting to ferry boats to San Francisco.

After we negotiated a footprint size for the project, Erik started by making a foam base.

Erik has completed the bay shore with rocks.

Laid all the track and preparing the electric third-rails — actually fourth-rails in this case because the Northwestern Pacific had dual standard-narrow gauge track at this station. Erik also painted the rails and the ties.

The third (fourth) rails ready to attach and the station platforms.

Pretty winter day in Old Sacramento.

We had the place pretty much to ourselves in the morning.

There are more photos at my pages on Flickr.

In the summer of 1989-90 I worked at The Roundhouse model railroad shop in the North Hollywood/San Fernando valley area of Los Angeles. I really enjoyed that summer job and bought several kits while I was there. One of them was Detail Associates kit number 7003, Foothill Station.

I’m very happy I recently finished the structure but embarrassed to say it took me 20 years to complete.

One of the great side effects of almost continually building things with young adults in our Autistry Studios workshops is that I find I am much better able to just sit down and build things without procrastination. I probably did 10% of this model’s construction in 1989-90,  another 10% in 2000, and the final 80% in a couple weeks of December 2009.

My review of the kit: This was actually a pretty tough kit. I did a little Google searching this evening and cannot find any pictures of this kit built-up. I’m thinking that maybe other folks found this kit hard too. What was hard?

The multi-level nature of the kit and the many walls which make the shape so appealing are really hard to get properly square and level. In fact, I failed to get the walls truly square although it does not show in the pictures. Overall it is a great kit and I’m really pleased with how it came out.

The building has a VERY small footprint which makes it ideal for smaller layouts. The admittedly UGLY bunches of grass around the various posts as they enter the ground scenery are intentional and hide that the building is not glued to the base so the posts all are in rather large holes in the scenery. Hopefully someday I will move the building to my layout.

Don’t get me started about how long I have been “building” my layout!

If I can’t build things a bit faster — I’ll be dead before I make any sort of a dent in my un-built kit collection! NOTE: the picture above was what it looked like three years ago — I have even more kits now.

My grandmother died over ten years ago and while she was born in the teens she was pretty young in the 20′s. I want to have a body of stories and information about the era so that my model work will reflect the correct “feeling” of that time. Since first-hand information is hard to come by, here are the resources I’m using.

Literature:

Dasheill Hammet stories are very readable and give some insight into life in the 20′s. A bonus is that many of Hammett’s stories are set in the Bay Area and they imply a seedy grittiness that I want to portray.

History:

Daily Life in the United States, 1920-1940: How Americans Lived Through the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression. A very good recent (2002) survey

Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s. Very interesting, especially when you consider that it was written in 1931!

Local history:

Both Sides of the Track: A Collection of Oral Histories from Belvedere and Tiburon.

A Pictorial History of Belvedere 1890 – 1990 a California Island Town.

Any number of the local Arcadia Publishing books…

In a separate post I’ll discuss what books I use as source material about the local railroads.

However Ryan, someone I’m building a yard module with, is big on diesels and so when he saw this engine on my blog about some pictures I took in Point Richmond, California, we wondered what it is exactly.

I speculated it was a GP35 but Ryan didn’t think so. He though it looked like a GP20 (one of his favorites) but the cab was wrong. I did a little digging and here’s what I found:

First, there are people on the Internet who are way more obsessive about the details of the complete rosters of every engine a railroad ever owned than I ever will be — and thank God for them!

I ended up at this very interesting site ATSF Diesel Rosters and found BNSF 1683:

BYW2, 15-in “BNSF” patch on cab, “Santa Fe” on long hood, “SANTA FE” cigar-band herald

Yep, that’s it. Anyway, BNSF 1683 started life as AT&SF 713 — a GP9 delivered in May 1956. And it is still trundling the rails in Point Richmond 53 years later.

Note: This review is my own opinion, unsolicited, and based purely on my experience as a customer.

I’m generally sad about the state of model railroading magazines. In August of 2006 I started a series of blog posts analyzing what has happened to Model Railroader to make it the raging wad of mediocrity it is today. I grew up loving MR. I have 46 years of MR back-issues in the loft bookcases of my office.

I have 32 years of Narrow Gauge & Shortline Gazettes and a few decades of Railroad Model Craftsman. They have ebbed and flowed as well but overall are reading now much as they did many years ago.

I’ve been open to the idea of other model railroading magazines and have subscribed to several. None stood any test of time.

I have something to be happier about.

Joe Fugate and friends started Model Railroad Hobbyist magazine in January of 2009. Model Railroad Hobbyist magazine (hereafter MRH) is published quarterly (bi-monthly in 2010) as a free download in PDF format using many of the rich media extensions available in that format.

I really liked the first issue and I wished them well in the tough world of model railroad publishing but I must admit I said to myself “I bet they threw everything into that first issue and the content will dwindle over the next few issues.”

I got busy with life, work, and other non-modeling pursuits and while I downloaded the 2nd and 3rd issues I did not read them.

This week the 4th quarter issue came out and I started to read it. And read it. And look at it again. It is great. I learned something new, several times. It was fun to read. It is what I think a great model railroading magazine should be.

I double checked by sitting down this morning and reading through all four issues back-to-back. I’m really impressed. I’m really happy I have these issues on my hard drive. It’s exciting to have a new magazine where I’m actually curious what the next issue will bring.

I carefully read Joe’s editorials and articles to see if he actually delineates the secret sauce. In issue #1 he says that it’s the rich media. In another issue he says it’s because he advocates “layout modeling.” I think he’s missed on both. It’s the content. Not only are the articles excellent quality but they have room to breathe. In a medium where megabytes are cheap MRH can allow an article to go long, go deep, have more pictures. Print can’t compete.

I highly recommend Model Railroad Hobbyist magazine.

Go look. It’s free and I feel really confident that you will find it time well spent.

Have you gone yet?

We just went this morning and it is a very nice display of the work and life of Walt Disney.

Photography is prohibited inside but some folks over at Mouse Planet have a great set of pictures and a detailed description.

My rating of the museum? It is a MUST SEE for die hard Disney fans.

For everyone else the quality and richness of the environment and displays is very impressive. If you are an autistic or aspie (and/or have one in your family like we do) bring earplugs because the audio in the displays can be a bit overwhelming otherwise. The price  is appropriate for the quality of the displays ($20 for adults, $12 for kids) but may be too high for some families.

Dan, a couple questions for you. I recently got back into model rr after only doing it as a kid…and those were the days when we’d run them like racecars to see if we could get train cars to tip off the track around corners!

[...]

So, I started from scratch and made a L-shape layout in a corner so far. It’s about 6 feet long on one wall and 8 feet on the adjacent wall.

Here’s my question.

I see that you use cork roadbed under your track. But What do you use for scenery ground? What I mean is this: do you glue the scenery to the plywood base, or do you use a styrofoam, or that putty compound?

If you use sytrofoam or something else, does it completely cover the plywood base, or do you use it only to attach certain scenery like a peg board?

Do these make sense? Please help…any helpful hints would be great!!!

I know there are much more complex ways to build layouts but bare plywood is a worthy start and I think it is super important to be able to actually achieve a certain level of “doneness” in the scant time modern life gives us and bare plywood is FAST.

I would use cork under the track. Next I would paint EVERYTHING (except the track!) with a coat of dirt colored paint.

Here’s Nick doing just that with his micro layout.

You can see two peanut butter jars full of two different colors of latex house paint. I get these colors by going to my local hardware store and they invariably have a stack of “rejects” where they mixed a can of color and the customer did not like it so they had to do another. They sell these for $5.00 a gallon. I look them over for a nice dirt brown/olive. I’d still buy a can at full price if they don’t have any rejects.

Anyway — paint over the whole layout with the base color so you cannot see any bare wood anymore.

Next I use a brown dirt-colored fine paper mache product mixed with real dirt and white glue to make a “mud” and paint this everywhere too.

To make hills you can build them up out of Styrofoam (very messy) or just use wads of paper and cover them with plaster cloth like Nick is doing here.

Then paint and mud the hill. Sprinkle real dirt and then glue it down by soaking with white-glue-water mix — with a few drops of Mr. Clean to break the surface tension so it soaks in better.

This makes a great “base” and then you can add rock castings, trees, grass, bushes as you go.

Keep an eye out for our next steps with Nick’s layout: we’re almost ready to build up the terrain.

Bachmann On30 Porter 0-4-0s can negotiate a 12″ minimum radius and Nick wants a large trestle.

I had an idea but was having a hard time describing it to Nick so I made a quick planning model in 1/8″ = 1″ scale. The footprint is 30″ x 4 feet long and about 4 feet tall.

I made a pencil sketch to show how the bridge would look.

The lower back will have room for a separate small town/logging camp area. We may do this in HO scale.

We labeled lots of the construction dimensions on the planning model so it’s acting as kind of a 3D blueprint.

The frame is made of 3/8″ x 4″ plywood planks ripped on the table saw and connected with 2×2 blocks glued and screwed. We added casters so it is easy to roll around.

Next we built up the sides and made an oval of plywood as the roadway.

We’ll cut away the portion that will be spanned by the bridge.

I think the methods routine in this modeling genre can be really effective for HO modeling. I found a horse that no one wanted and decided to do some painting.

I went for a softer, to my eye, more realistic look. Here’s how I did it:

First I assembled and primed the model.

The detail in the castings is really impressive.

Next I roughed in the main colors.

I detailed the edges and details like the harness. I used a dark wash of Burnt Umber followed by highlighting with white or light brown (depending on what I was edging).

Lastly, I used Dullcote and Polly S “Dust” to flatten out the shine.

I did the eyes with a black ball-point pen.

This was really fun and took me about two hours not counting drying time.

Finishing up!

Nick uses plaster-cloth to cover the hillside above the tunnel.

We painted and ballasted the track, added a retaining wall and added an initial layer of dirt-glue-celluclay ground cover.

Ready for trim: we cut some pieces to cover all four sides.

Gluing the trim.

Now for some grass and trees.

Pretty much finished.

Our one structure is an outhouse.

Using a “storey pole” marked with the locations of the bents, we shaped each bent pretty closely to the contour of the ground where they would be planted.

Then we glued the bents to the span — laid out upside down on the bench.

Once the glue dried a bit we set the bridge up and started gluing on teh cross braces. This really strengthens the bridge.

Finally we test fit the bridge in place.

Once the bridge was planted we soldered up the approach tracks and it’s time to test that track again!

Next we made some guard rails by shaping rails as if they were going to be frog rails and soldering them together.

All for now!

Note that we pre-stained the wood with a simple ink-alcohol mix. Here’s the other side of the bridge.

The temptation to play with a train is just too much to resist!

We made little bents to go against the retaining boards glued earlier — the white glue is wet and still visible here.

We’re following the basic construction techniques of the Northwestern Pacific Railroad as seen in their Corte Madera Creek bridges since we can walk up and inspect them today.

Using six scale beams glued in two groups of three I made the main span and glued some Micro Engineering code 83 bridge track onto it.

In parallel while glue is drying we’re making more tunnel lining castings and painting the tunnel portal.

Using our jig we made the five trestle bents with profiles roughly matching the ground under them.

Once the base was set up and roadbed established we started to build up the hill and tunnel out of 4″ thick Styrofoam.

We cut a mock tunnel portal for sizing.

Then we gave everything that would become “ground” a good coat of dirt-colored latex paint.

Then we started preparation for the installation of the trestle bridge by hot-knifing the end abutments and here I’m making a “story pole” that will be used as a template for the location and height of the bents. The track has been rough cut and painted but is not yet installed.

We used Micro Engineering code 83 flex track and here we’re preparing some matching Micro Engineering code 83 bridge flex track with appropriate ties and spacing.

To make the bents we made a jig into which 3/16″ dowels will be held while being glued.

While the glue dries on bent assemblies we started to make plaster molds of the tunnel interior using a Woodland Scenics mold.

When you say “micro,” how micro do you really mean?

We want to run trains round-and-round so we need a loop. The size of a small layout is dominated by its turn radius. The size of the turns will be decided by the size of the motive power. I have a bunch of Bachmann Porter 0-4-0s in On30 around so we’ll use these to rule the design.

I love the Internet. A quick Google of “minimum radius porter 0-4-0” returned a link to a pdf:

On30 Commercial Loco and Car Minimum Radius Guide written by the infamous “Professor Klyzlr” [BTW, Professor Klyzlr, I would link into your site but it has no home page.]

And the data the Internet On30 community has given is that Bachmann says 18″ radius but people find that 12″ is a practical minimum and 6″ is absolute minimum. I’m going to shoot for 10″ radius — but I’m going to test that.

Nick joined our “build stuff” group with no idea what he wanted to build. We suggested he look though our library of books and he saw my copy of Stindt’s “Northwestern Pacific Railroad” and started explaining to me that this was the railroad that used to run through our neigborhood.

This, I knew. What I had not known is that Nick was a rail fan.

We had Nick sort through and tag all the photos in the books he liked and ended up with a concept of a micro-layout with a tunnel and a bridge.  We had about 50 building hours available to us in the project series so things needed to be kept small and simple.

Nick tagged about 50 different photos and we scanned them quickly at low resolution so we could see them all together. We all saw that Nick was strongly attracted to tunnels and trestle bridges so I proposed a small diorama with a hill, creek bed, tunnel and a bridge.

To get things started we cut some plywood to define the footprint.

Although it is not my favorite technique, I had a lot of styrofoam around so we cut and built up layers of foam.

We marked where the tracks, bridge and tunnel would be. I suggested making the tracks “skewed” (not parallel) to the layout edge but Nick insisted he wanted it straight.

Pretty soon, we had something starting to look like a micro-layout.

So much for plans. We’ve started teaching “build stuff” workshops on weekends for
teenagers/young adults. We started with a three month class meeting for four hours on Saturdays. That filled so we added a Sunday section. The projects are really great and since part of what the kids are doing will be blogging about their work I’ll just show a sample of what they are doing and I’ll provide a link to their blogs once they are up.

Ian is building an Airbus 380 in 1/144 scale.

Nick is building a micro layout in HO with a bridge and tunnel – the only model railroad project!

Sarah is building a fantasy diorama of a bed flying over a city at night.

Peter is building a super complex Gundam kit with a bagillion pieces.

Phoebe is making a ¾” scale room box of a Vamire’s Steampunk style home.

We’re all taking turns practicing airbrush and other painting techniques on my old model of the Millennium Falcon.

Kris is building a 1/48 scale tank for a diorama.

Not pictured: Reggie’s free-lanced 12” Globe, Devon’s Manga stage model and Steven’s world of eraser people.

It’s a huge amount of work but also tremendous fun.