Malcolm Furlow's San Juan Central - A Rare Survivor

 Not many model railroads outlive their creators.  Fortunately, this one hasn't, but has survived several changes of ownership and multiple moves, and has come to rest at least temporarily at the California State Railroad Museum, thanks to the generosity of Bob Brown of the Narrow Gauge and Short Line Gazette, the current owner.  

Malcolm Furlow's San Juan Central, built as a project railroad for Model Railroader, is a rare exception.  Interestingly, the engine servicing facility section (identified in the plans and articles as "Montrose") bears a striking resemblance to pictures of the "Cascade Creek" section of his original Denver & Rio Chama Western.  On this section of the railroad, as on others, the scenery is used judiciously to split the railroad up into sections, with trees, hills, or buildings providing a sense of separation between the portions of the railroad.  This furthers two purposes: it makes the layout seem larger than it is, and it makes the discrete scenes easier to photograph, since a hill or a line of trees, properly positioned, make an effective compositional element and prevent other scenes from crowding into the shot.

Montrose Yard

One of the most remarkable aspects of the layout is the sheer amount of visual interest that's packed into a small space.  Even thought I have his book, and have a good visceral idea of how much space it takes up, my instinctive reaction on first viewing it was how small it seemed.  Stepping back to take a couple of views, I got a good sense for how much is packed into a very small space.

Station and buildings at "Tincup"

In spite of its comparatively small size, the vertical scenery limits your ability to survey the entire layout from any one point, even if you stand back a bit.  The picture above and the picture below were taken from opposite sides of the "lobe" that holds Tincup - but the hill makes a very effective scenic divide, with each isolated from the other.

Although the layout is not big, the vertical scenery helps to disguise the fact

While Malcolm used many commercial structures, he also built his own bridges, and expended considerable effort to ensure that they "fit" the terrain - not just in the sense that they are carefully embedded in the ground, but they fit our image of the era.  He was willing to take that so far as to use lumber of smaller-than-scale size to create an impression of "spindliness" in the viewer.  

Fascia boards subtly emphasize the elevation changes

Furlow's great scenic interest has always been vertical terrain and its concomitants - pine forests, white water, and the slopes, peaks, and gulches of the Southwest.  Using foam and a great deal of effort, he managed to avoid one of the great scenic problems of the typical layout - the effect of a tabletop.

Consistency of finish helps to create a unified scene

Because it was envisioned as a project layout, virtually all of the structures come from kit sources, and are recognizable as such.  They range from the ubiquitous and highly adaptable Woodland Scenics cast building kits, like the yellow structure in the picture above, to the high-end Scale Structures Miners' Union Hall and Rick's Place, both adapted to fit into the small pie-shaped wedge of buildings at the center of this picture.  Some were classic shake-the-box kits, like the AHM Rico station in the picture below, which was shorn of its baggage room.  Probably no more than $9.95 back in the 1980s, good preparatory work and attention to the finish of the building ensure that it "fits" seamlessly in with the more expensive and elaborate craftsman kits.

Station at Tincup

Almost the only completely level space in the photo above is at track level - a phenomenon that aficionados of Colorado railroading will recognize.  The bridge on the other size of the scene is the centerpiece of the kind of modeling he liked best - high mountains, deep chasms, water and bridges.  

He was never averse to using commercial products if they suited his needs, and the Montrose yard is a good example of how it can be done without a great expenditure of money.  I am not ordinarily a fan of commercial backdrops, but I found the blending of the old Walthers mountain scene into the foreground to be a surprisingly effective effort.

The Atlas turntable at Montrose is an inexpensive and space-conserving solution

I spent a lot of time looking at the layout and making the mental notes that would turn into this article.  The layout repays close study, and there is a lot to be learned about the design and building of scenery from it.  While it has never been a surprise to me that John Allen started out as an artist, after viewing this layout I can see how Malcolm Furlow ended up as one - because in this project layout, he created something that was designed to be viewed, photographed, and enjoyed, and he did it very successfully.  I'm grateful to Bob Brown and to all of the other people whose efforts allowed this layout to survive so that the public can enjoy Malcolm's artistry.

Building A Fleet

Last month's Model Railroader article on freelancing made me think the topic of freelancing a fleet might be of interest to period modelers.  Over the last year or so, I have been working on developing a fleet that looks like a fleet.  It's proverbially the case that most equipment on a railroad belongs to that railroad, and that was even more the case a century ago than it is today.  When traffic was mostly short-haul, the cars stayed closer to home, and to give a freelanced layout the look of an actual railroad, it's important that you should have a lot of cars that carry your railroad's name and logo.

You can certainly slap decals on cars, but one thing to remember is that every railroad changes its presentation over time - so no fleet is completely homogeneous.  Railroads vary their liveries, logos, mottoes and color palettes over time, so even a fleet of home-road cars can be pretty varied.  Here's my take on how I tried to capture the look of a fleet over time.  One caveat: still at the stage where equipment comes on and off the layout fairly frequently, so nothing yet has been weathered, just painted, lettered, and covered with a protective lacquer layer to preserve the paint.  

Beginning (mid-1870s)

Early equipment markings were sparse, to say the least: usually just reporting marks and a car number.  These two cars were built from BTS USMRR kits with Rio Grande Models 5' trucks.  The decaling is reflective of the practices of the Central Pacific and other western carriers of that pre-1870 era: very minimal markings, and little or no guidance to the shipper or operating crews about things like load and capacity limits or clearances.  With a monochromatic scheme (Scalecoat Oxide Red), MicroScale Railroad Roman decal sheets provided most of the individual lettering for these cars (and most of the others on this page).  Applying individual letters is a time-consuming process and demands care and concentration, but if done properly, it can give a very good look on a sheathed wooden side.  Key to the process is the finish: I start with Scalecoat paint, which gives a glossy finish, always essential for decals.  I use a decal softener (usually something heavy on the vinegar, like Micro-Set decal softening solution, and use Walthers Solvaset (which is the strongest solvent I have found) to dissolve the decal film and hold the decal in place; a good absorbent cloth to blot the excess fluid is essential.  Once all the decaling is complete, I put on a flat coat (Testors Dullcote or a similar product) to remove the sheen and cover the decal film.  

Maximilist and Minimalist (late 1870s-early 1880s)

These two cars have liveries that are typical of the late 1870s-early 1880s.  Boxcars tended to be simpler, because they were built in large numbers, so the lettering on this one closely follows elements of that in this sample model on the website of the kit maker, also BTS.

Refrigerator cars, on the other hand, were individually built at a cost that would have bought multiple boxcars, so they got the fanciest schemes that the Gilded Age could devise.  The car itself is scratchbuilt roughly to a set of diagrams for a 28' refrigerator car in the 1879 "Car Builders' Dictionary."  The livery was applied one laborious letter at a time, and closely mimics a D&RG scheme from the early 1880s that is featured in Bob Sloan's "A Century Plus Ten Years of D&RGW Freight Cars."  Only the font is different, since I used Black Railroad Roman decals from Microscale.  The arched lettering was applied with a template, the rest was done with a ruler and great care.  The lettering is not identical to the D&RG car, but it is very close.  I would love to have two or three of these, but one is probably eye-catching enough, even apart from the time consideration - when you're applying this many decals by hand, it is a laborious process!

Faint Glimmers of Branding (early 1880s)

These two cars are sisters to those in the preceding section - a BTS PRR XA 28' boxcar on the left, and the second of two refrigerator cars I scratchbuilt using the 1879 plans (the side on this one was resin-cast using a mold that was made from the side of the white refrigerator previously shown, which was built up from wood, castings, and strathmore paper).  All told, I used three schemes for five 28' boxcars of the same type; this was meant to reflect the application and reapplication of liveries to the fleet as they changed over time.  In addition to the basic railroad name and car number, each car 28' boxcar comes with a capacity marking and a build date.  

The paint schemes reflect a pair of early 1880s refrigerator cars, one a DSP&P refrigerator and the other a D&RG car.  I did not originally intend to lay out similar schemes for a reefer and a box car, but I liked the "eyebrow" look, and so I experimented with it on the boxcar after doing it on the reefer - obviously, I used different fonts and templates, which accounts for very different looking curves.  I liked the "eyebrow" look, but not enough to settle on it as "the look" for the fleet.  Like the text-heavy reefer, a very few cars are enough to be eye-catching, and they make a nice and prototypical variation from the "standard look" that you should aim for with the fleet - once you find it.

Finding a Look..... (early 1890s)

After the eyebrow experiment, I decided to letter the last three of the BTS cars with an "arched" scheme, using a smaller lettering font, that mimicked a pattern used by the Northern Pacific in pre-WWI days.  The "sunset" look was perfect - and when I found a good picture of an NP reefer in Schenk and Frey's "Engines of Growth," I felt like I had the look I wanted - eye-catching, but not too elaborate, and with plenty of extra space for the extra legends that cars acquired as the years went on - capacity markings, build dates, safety compliance markings, etc.  I adapted the NP scheme to fit a freelanced 30' scratchbuilt reefer that was loosely based on the car in the photograph- albeit with some physical changes to make it look like a Tiffany patent car.  This car is a little cruder than most, as I tried out some techniques to replace castings with fabricated components (strathmore door hinges, a wire door lock system, handmade queenposts, etc.  The elaborate paint scheme helps to draw the eye away from some of the less successful elements of the job.

The NP car dated from the early 1890s, and one of the elements of the scheme that really attracted me was the diagonal "air brake" legend on one end of the car.  I first saw this years ago in a woodcut in "The American Railway," a volume originally published in 1888 to commemorate the first anniversary of national railroad regulation in America, and a great source of "period" information.  Before air brakes were universal, marking the side of an equipped car was a great aid to crews, since air braked cars had to be blocked together at the head of a train for the brakes to be usable.  I liked this scheme enough to decide that eventually, I wanted to use it when I painted and lettered new equipment in a post-1900 scheme.  

.....And Sticking To It (post-1900)

These cars exemplify the post-1900 look I wanted, and the two box cars were built from 34' Labelle Soo Line kits.  Each came with a full set of decals for the smaller data markings, so I only needed to hand-decal the company name, number, reporting marks, and the "air brake" legend.  I had some Tuscan Red I wanted to use up, and that color went on the center car, here; the left hand car was done as most of my boxcars are, in red oxide.  The Tuscan Red makes the lettering "pop" a bit more, and although I will probably do most of the boxcars in red oxide, the Tuscan Red cars look great.  The Soo Line cars are marked as built in 1888, and are small for their length, but the grabiron positioning in the kit diagrams is right for the post-1911 era, and they include a little decal (lower left hand corner of the car in these pictures) stating their compliance with the 1911 Act, so they're perfect for 1913.  

The yellow reefer is a good example of an old 36' Roundhouse car, bought second hand for less than ten dollars, painted but unlettered.  The lettering was the hardest part of the kit, but a pair of these added color and modernity to my refrigerator fleet, adapting the lettering scheme used on the other cars.  Taken as a whole, these cars give me about fifteen cars clearly marked for my home road, which (when combined with ore cars, gondolas, log cars, etc) is a sufficient number to give the "home road" feeling.  

Finding Furlow's Denver and Rio Chama

Malcolm Furlow has always been one of my favorite modelers.  He started building a model railroad in the 1970s, and photos of his work were soon in print in all the major modeling magazines.  He was a constant presence (and a controversial one) for about a decade before he departed the hobby to pursue a successful career as a Western artist.

He built several layouts, but his home layout, the Denver and Rio Chama Western, is to me the most interesting.  It was the subject of numerous articles, typically "how-to" pieces, that detailed the construction of individual scenes, as well as two in-depth profiles; one ran in Railroad Model Craftsman in 1978, when he was just getting started, and the other in Narrow Gauge and Shortline Gazette in 1982. 

For all of its coverage, there was always an elusive quality about the D&RCW: when you see it in magazine photos, the pictures are almost invariably close-ups of a particular scene; when Furlow did a long shot that encompassed an entire segment of the layout, it was carefully done to make the whole appear as a single scene - there was never a point where the camera seemed to pull back far enough that you could lose your sense of seeing a discrete scene, and form a picture of the whole layout.  I think this was probably deliberate: one criticism that I have read of the railroad is that it was essentially a collection of large diorama scenes, and that it "worked" visually only in photographic formats: when seen from the kind of visual perspective that personal viewing gives, the crowding of scenery, tracks, and buildings together seemed overdone.  The phrase "Disneyfied," is sometimes used, and I have seen it asserted that the curves were so sharp that most locomotives couldn't make them if the lead wheels were in place.

As criticism, this is fair enough, but I think the builder's intent matters in these kinds of things, and Furlow clearly built it to be photographed: if the pictures worked, than the railroad accomplished his goals; QED.  I happen to think that the pictures did work in some way, and if you Google his name with "Denver & Rio Chama Western," you find approximately 186,000 results, many of them photographic.  Many of the photos that pop up show models in the state of total disrepair that he loved: obsolete equipment, rusty and dirty, and frequently of outlandish design and construction.  Not all of these results were inspired by him, of course, but many of them were - and for all that he meant his photography to be the ultimate end product of model building, there are relatively few pictures of his own work that show up.  

In other words, the Denver & Rio Chama Western is as elusive as ever.  But I think it's important to understand that people are using Furlow's work as a touchstone, even if they aren't still looking at the pictures themselves.  He is clearly an inspiration for a lot of modelers, and so it's interesting to take a look at the pictures and see what they tell us about the railroad.

Interestingly, Furlow originally meant it to be a set of modular, diorama-like scenes.  He was inspired by pictures of a module built by John Olson, and published by Railroad Model Craftsman in two articles in January and February, 1975.  The Olson articles included a lengthy discussion on what it was Olson was trying to do.  He wanted to build a railroad that was, in essence, a series of scenes, with each capturing the look of a different region or locale.  Olson called his first effort "Stop Gap Falls," and it was clearly inspired by John Allen's work, which was widely available in the modeling magazines and books in those days.

Olson followed Stop Gap Falls up a year later with an article about a second module, called "Mule Shoes Meadows."  Where Stop Gap Falls was a crossing of a river gorge deep in a mountain range, Mule Shoes Meadows was a division point on a small logging railroad, somewhere in the Wooded Sierra foothills.  When I later saw pictures of Mather on the Hetch Hetchy Railroad, or some of the larger camps on the Pickering and West Side lumber railroads, it was Mule Shoes Meadow that I thought of: they seemed like plausible prototypes.

By the time Model Railroader ran its fiftieth anniversary issue in 1984, John Olson's layout was sufficiently well developed to be the month's featured layout- and both his "Mescal Lines" and the Rio Chama were sufficiently well known to warrant a "visit" from the special "anniversary train," headed by an allegedly resurrected Hiawatha engine.  The track plan and photos for the Mescal Lines showed that Olson had largely followed through on his original vision, for the layout was in fact a beautifully executed series of distinct scenes, featuring high desert, Sierra foothills, river valleys, and even a port.  Neither of the modules made it into a track plan, but there was a tantalizing dashed line, suggesting that they might yet find a place in his miniature world.  Sadly, it seems neither ever did; the Disney career that was sparked by his modeling took off, and the layout went into storage.  The Gazette suggested a few years back that he had plans to revive it, but if they have come to fruition, I missed the report.

Furlow started out with this modular concept, and the idea of placing it in the Rockies.  He found his inspiration in the San Juan Mountains of Southwestern Colorado, and his goal was to translate their precipitous mountainsides and white water into a model.  Since he was working in a space that was small, in terms of floor area, the ruggedness of the terrain actually made it easier to model, because he built his scenery up and down into unoccupied or unusable vertical space, creating the illusion of high mountains in a relatively small area.  

By the time his layout was featured for the first time (in Railroad Model Craftsman in September, 1978), he had a working design.  The layout was to be shaped like an E, and he began at the ends, building two sections he labeled "Chama Creek" and "Cascade Creek."  The track plan that was published in that article is unfortunately covered by copyright, but it underwent substantial revision (reflecting changes he made to the layout), and when the Narrow Gauge and Short Line Gazette published an article covering the Rio Chama in its May/June 1982 issue, the track plan had changed substantially, with the "Cascade Creek" section change substantially, with a section labelled "Sheridan" added either in place of or around Cascade Creek  This added a town clinging to a mountainside, adding considerably to the scenic drama.  

While it is possible to trace some of the changes and improvements made to the Rio Chama over the years in back issues of Model Railroader, which published many articles by Furlow about his techniques, and many individual photos, MR never published a full article devoted to the D&RCW, which was highly unusual in those days.  Typically, when they had an author whose work appeared repeatedly, they often ran an article on that author's layout, since the pictures and descriptions in the articles often raised readers' curiosity about how it all "fitted together" on the author's home layout.  In those days, of course, the media saturation point was far lower than it is today, and a splashy cover shot with a name familiar to readers helped attract magazine sales, and Furlow's appearances were frequent.  He built project layouts (one of them, the San Juan Central, famous enough to be housed in the California State Railroad Museum's exhibit on model railroading).  He wrote articles on how he built other people's railroads - but MR for some reason never devoted an article to the topic of the Rio Chama.  

This site has an interesting collection of pictures from the D&RCW, and it includes a track plan which is derived from the NG&SLG plan.  The accompanying photos were clearly taken at different times in the layout's life, and are identifiably different.  Several of them are colorized versions of photos that were published in the 1978 RMC article in black and white, while some of the others were taken at more advanced stages of the railroad's existence.  The very topmost picture must, I think, show the railroad in its later stages, since it shows Silver Canyon with the road bridges and highway running up to Sheridan that were the topic of one of Furlow's last articles for MR.  Conversely, the bottommost picture is a colorized version of one that was published in black and white in RMC in 1978.  This is also true for the pictures identified as "Chama Creek," while the picture of engine 8 comes, I think, from the Cascade Creek area.  Another useful aid is provided by this VHS-quality video which shows the layout toward full build-out.  

Colors of the Nineteenth Century

 An interesting new Google Docs posted from Josh Bernhard and Evan Abma of the Early Rail group: some background research on the always-controversial topic of paint colors.

This is a hard enough question for historical researchers working on real engines.  For modelers attempting to replicate the effect of a color when seen at a considerable distance, it’s a lot of guesswork and some time with the color theory experts (although British modelers like Iain Rice, who have a more complex and varied palette to deal with, have produced some interesting how-to pieces).