Warehouse Wednesday: Canadian Folly

 

Thanks to David Youngs of Ontario, Canada for these fascinating photos from a local park. 

Apparently, this used to be the front wall of a local skating rink that burned down. However, the locals didn't want to lose the wall, so it was re-erected in the park. 

As David says, it's a prototype low-relief building, the sort of thing us modellers have been creating for years. The only difference is that this is pressed hard up against a backscene. 

In the UK, this sort of thing would probably be called a "folly", that is a pointless building often put up in the grounds of a stately home. I have always aspired to having the space to build one. 

Keeping this thing upright must be difficult, there's not much in the way of supporting walls - impressive engineering!

Waterborne Wednesday: Radium Yellowknife

Spotted moored in Toronto, the tugboat Radium Yellowknife has an interesting history according to Wikipedia.

Built in a Southern Canada shipyard, she was dismantled and transported by rail to Vancouver for re-assembly. Basically, she was delivered as a great big boat kit! An interesting train to model too.

The Radium name is because she and her sisters worked out of Port Radium where they hauled, among other things, uranium for Manhatten Project.

At 40 metres in length, she's massive compared to most UK tugboats, but on the great lakes, you need something large for those long loads.

More photos of Radium Yellowknife at work.

Tracking details.

Warehouse Wednesday: Wooden barn

I'll confess that one bit of Canada I didn't take to, was Niagara on the lake. We stopped off there on the way back from our trip to the fall as part of the coach tour. According to the driver, lots of people wish they had more than the allotted hour there.

Me, I was back on the bus in 45 minutes.

Maybe living close to the Cotswolds and Stratford-on-Avon, I have a greater resistance to horribly twee towns than most. Everything is brightly painted, over-restored and very "Canada by Disney".

Anyway, wandering around behind the main street, I found this very typical wooden barn - the sort you've seen in a thousand Westerns (OK, this is Canada, but the architecture is similar). The gambrel roof allows greater usable space in the loft - ideal for a model railway if people on this continent didn't tend to have cellars which are even better.

This example has been converted to a garage it appears, although the car lives outside! However, lose the new door and I reckon it would make a good prototype for an American layout.

The Credit Valley Railway Company

Visting Credit Valley Railway wasn't really an option. OK, getting there from Toronto took me about an hour of riding buses out into the middle of nowhere to places I couldn't pronounce, but the Rapido guys were insistent. And I'm glad they were.

Being North America, the shop is located on a strip mall - in the UK we'd call it an out-of-town shopping area. If you are in a car, there is loads of free parking, and to be fair, a bus stop 2 minutes walk away.

Passing by a small layout and wall full of ice hockey shirts from the team the shop sponsors, you enter the shop floor.

Wow - it's huge! We have smaller supermarkets in the UK.

I'm not going to bother trying to list everything sold as I do with other shops. There's too much of it. Basically, if you need anything in N or HO gauges, then you are in luck. O gauge, less so. I think this because the larger scale tends to involve coarse scale 3-rail and new tinplate. Presumably, there are specialist suppliers for this and less modelling?

The other big difference from the UK is there doesn't seem to be so much variety in RTR locos. Give us a shop like this and it would be around 50% loco. Yes, there is a wall full of cabinets and shelves to peruse, but far more of the space is given over to kits and bits. I think this is a good thing. The range of scratchbuilding parts alone kept me browsing for a long while.

There's also a whopping great big Canadian layout in the corner which would be a pretty good club project. I understand that there are modellers who meet up in the shop as a social occasion and work on this. It's also a good testing ground for models. I saw my loco run there.

If DCC is your thing, there's a sizable area for you with chip fitting and more test tracks at the back of the shop. The mail order department is next door.

My shopping took the best part of a couple of hours and the credit card says the hit was the price of a OO loco - thank goodness for a strong pound that day! This included a couple of T-shirts thrown in by the guys who run the shop, a friendlier bunch you would be hard pressed to find. They all wanted a chat and to show off the place they are proud to work at.

So, if you are in the area, add me to the list of people who say you need to visit, or head over to the Credit Valley Railway website where you can walk around the store.

George's Trains - Toronto

 

Handily situated for both the back of the Rapido Trains office and a main line real railway is George's Trains, which describes itself as "Canada's Greatest ModelTrain store!".

The shop is pretty sizable compared to many UK stores but not mahoosive. The first thing that struck me was the amount of O gauge 3-rail on sale. This is very popular in the US, far more than finescale it appears. Quite a few of the working Lionel sets were on sale in pre-owned form, but fortunately (for my wallet) not the giraffe car.

Moving through a short connecting corridor we find the magazine section which could rival the railway section in WH Smith, but with Canadian and American magazines. On the walls are some "classic" old boxes.

The second half of the shop is HO rolling stock and kits plus some N. Great range of building kits and also scratch building bits. Far too much for me to remember or even properly take in on one visit. Moving back toward the front, it's paint (no Humbrol), glue and other materials.

There's also a cabinet full of Korean brass models, probably more in one place than I've seen in my life. They look very impressive, but against modern RTR? Probably more a collectors thing now.

Obviously, I couldn't come away empty handed so as well as a building kit and HO scale Yeti, I bought the most horrible thing I could see packed in one of the shops own bags - it's an O scale plastic car that I wouldn't let near a layout, even a tinplate one. But it only cost $3.95 - £2.27 at time of writing.

It makes a nice souvenir though of my trip.

A final point, I understand this is where Rod Stewart drops in when he's in town for a gig, so you never know who you might bump in to.

George's Trains website.

Saturday Film Club: The Great British Train Show 2018

If you want to see the show I travelled all the way to Canada to attend, here it is in this rather well made video. 

For added bonus excitement, you even find a short piece from me at the end of it. Don't worry, you can switch off before you get to that bit...

Souvenirs of Canada

OK, I'm back from Canada and the rules of the Interweb say I must post pictures of stuff I bought. Here we go...


From the top, assume HO scale unless I say otherwise:

• Sylvan resin kit for a Mercury half ton pickup - Looks interesting and I was fascinated by the road vehicles I saw.
• Yeti - I've never seen one for sale in a model shop before.
• Triang CN caboose - I wanted something made in Britain but of a Canadian prototype. And it's bright orange.
• Triang Giraffe car (OO) - Sooo cheap. Less than a tenner of UK money!
• Walthers Trainline GP9M loco - I saw locos that looked a bit like this operating and this one was priced at just under 30 pounds.
• Bar Mills "Sweaty Betty's" dinner kit - It just looks fun.
• Walthers Cornerstone Lakeshore coal & ice shed kit - I have a feeling that this is the sort of building that might prove useful on a UK or US based layout one day. I like laser-cut kits too. 

Most of these will become blog projects eventually but for the moment, they will join the ones left over from my Australia trip. It might seem silly to buy this stuff, but I didn't want shirts with maple leaves on them, or maple syrup or any other tat. I'll build the kits one day and remember my trip.

Of course, I did come back with some other stuff.

The CN Tower is a proper railway building and so once I'd been up it, the mug was a given. The cuddly tower keyring is just the most bizarre thing I've ever seen.

The CN torch and screwdriver set and duck come from the Toronoto Railway Museum - a group so friendly they took me behind the scenes so I determined to come away with plenty of stuff from the little gift shop.

And the pencil, well one maple leaf thing is OK.

There's also a T-shirt from Credit Valley Railway and a lumberjack shirt.

And yes, there will be more Canada posts to come. I'll try to spread them out a bit as no-one wants to be bored by anyone's holiday slides. However, my photos are really interesting and you can see them here!

Warehouse wednesday: Canada Malting

Wandering along Toronto's waterfront to try the worlds shortest ferry ride, I trip over this building, fenced off and derelict.

According to Wikipedia, they were built in 1928 and a very early example of non-flammable concrete silos rather than wooden ones. They are 120 feet high. 

In the UK, I'm sure someone would have snapped these up years ago for conversion into waterfront apartments. The Canadians seem slower at this, but then they are thinking museum, which would be much nicer. Mind you, with all the rusty mechanical bits, I think they have a charm of their own as they stand.

The Great British Train Show

Note: I'm writing this sat in Toronto airport while my flight is repeatedly delayed, using the iffy Wi-Fi. It's 9:50 local time, I was due to fly at 11 and am very tired. Sorry for typos.

3700 miles. To take part in a show held on an ice hockey pitch. Well, it is Canada after all. Where else would you hold it?

Didsbury Green was set up as part of the Rapido trains stand and promptly embarrassed me by not working. Despite successful tests in the hotel room a couple of days earlier, the controller wasn't playing and I didn't get it fixed until the Sunday. However, that's for the write up in BRM, let's talk about the show itself.

Once I'd reached the "wandering around" stage of Friday night, I got a real surprise - one of the layouts I've always wanted to see, Roy Link's Crowsnest Tramway, was on display. Not only the O14 version, but the rolling stock and building for the unfinished 16mm scale version too.

As an operating model, the layout is a bit lacking, but then that's very much my sort of layout as regular readers will know. Of course this makes Crowsnest the layout I'd like to build from this event too.

Despite the distance from Blightly, the whole show could have been dropped into any UK town without anything looking out of place. The layouts were pretty good with models in 4 and 7mm including EM and P4 - working in the finer scales must be really tough in the land of HO!

Trade wasn't so hot, but only because the usual suspects can't afford to take the trip across the Atlantic. There was a good selection of local suppliers focusing on the UK prototype and while these might have been a bit heavy on the "pre-owned" rolling stock selection, many UK shows would be pleased to have all of them. I certainly found ways to spend money. In fact, only the thought of shipping larger boxes back slowed me down. If you are a Tri-ang collector, there were bargains to be had with several Canuck specific sets on sale for very modest sums. Most left pretty early on Saturday though.

With my Garden Rail hat on, I enjoyed the large scale test track. The volume's venue allowed any steam to dissipate too. We weren't that far away and couldn't smell a thing.

The biggest surprise were the opening times. 10 to 4 on Saturday and 10 to 3 on Sunday. I'm sure we could have managed another hour on both, although we did have to load a full-size Tardis onto the lorry at the end, and it wasn't as easy as you might think. There were people around at the end, numbers were OK and the organisers seemed happy enough.

I didn't notice the time as most of the Saturday flew by full of chat and banter. At least a dozen people over the weekend recognised me from either the magazine or even this blog. If one of those was you, thanks for dropping by and saying hello. I was slightly concerned about popping up at a foreign show and expecting people to know who I am. As it was, some did and those that didn't were (like all Canadians) very friendly and happy to chat.

Food - burgers and hot dogs cooked and served outside by a team braving the cold. Inside, there was cake and coffee in one of the dressing rooms. I managed to stay healthy, apart from one slice on the second day. Well, it was only polite and part of the Canadian experience.

By the end of the weekend, we were all tired, but happy. Didsbury Green now has a new owner - he was even good enough to come and collect the model on the Sunday. Handy, as I could explain how things should be plugged it, and get a photo for the mag.

Overall, a really nice event. Much like a friendly, local show, but further away - for me at least. Maybe I wouldn't normally go, but if you lived within sensible travelling distance, you'd be daft to miss it.

More photos over on Flickr.