December 2009

Home again – and a change in direction

           It was going to be a simply wonderful day. The summer weather had extended its hand into late September with sunny skies and unusually warm breezes. What’s more, my Loree’ was heading home from her job/tour in Switzerland. Life was good. So if I walked down the back road and along the tracks I could spend a few hours at work and still make the trip up to the airport in Grande Prairie. Loree’ would make the connection out of Calgary about 10:30. Perfect for both of us.  A light lunch and whatever…

           The Pearson – Hudson Mills scenery complex has some of the features of a small town, or two small towns, and some aspects of a prairie city.  I’ve tried too keep it simple, and open, and still have streetlights, parking meters and sidewalks. The photo below kind’a sums it all up.  A lot of steel, bricks, poles and wires.  That water tank is bashed from that old fire watchers tower.  Aristocraft I think.  The hard part, the bottom, is a funnel from the Dollar Store.  CN combine 7210 is also an Aristo bash.

          Do you ever get that "born looser’ feeling? Not five minutes before starting out for the airport, a good hours drive north of Pearson, my man back in Winter Valley was on the phone. Hydro workers at the Maple Leaf packing plant in Hudson’s Mill had dropped a high voltage line across a slow moving train that was working the terminal. No one was injured but both the main and the siding were completely blocked and we had a CN grain train due there in about 40 minutes. Could I head south and co-ordinate the cleanup? Yes, he was closer as the crow flies but the drive was a lot longer so it fell to me.

          Of course I would be there. It was my job – and it was a normal workday after all. Playing hooky for a lady friend, no matter how important she was to me, would have to come second. I called the airport and asked that Loree be met by staff and given a car – on my tab. Then I called the landlady and asked her to see that the doors were open and Loree was made welcome - with my apologies. Then, turning onto grid road 604 with conflicted feelings about all this, I headed south.

          These area the first photos of the new construction at Hudson’s Mill.  The kit on the far left has been sitting alone for years while I wrestled with what I was going to do with the river.  For some time it was populated by a half dozen kids playing hockey on some future ice but I just couldn’t wrap myself around “ice” in September.  The gift of a wharf kit and a Preiser fisherman got me heading in another direction.

           By early afternoon the track still hadn’t been freed up. Seems some tech type thought it would be a good idea to shut off all the power in the area in order to safely remove those downed wires. And then it wouldn’t come back on. Electric winches used to move hoppers through the terminal were useless and soon I was making switches by hand and pushing freight cars off the siding and out onto the main line. Some help was required here. There was just enough room to maneuver a heavy truck, and a long heavy pole, into play to push the cars over a small, narrow bridge and onto an adjoining spur. I bet that trick hadn’t been done for a few years.
 
           All this took time and so I was now on the phone apologizing to Loree once again. This time for not being around at lunch or even for most of what was otherwise a great summer like day. I would get home when I got home. A lady running her own successful business would understand that right?

           The rippled water was poured with a thin, soup like solution of Hydrocal and pushed, pulled and smoothed into place with a common drywall trowel.  The dried plaster was painted my own idea of what water should look like.  Yours will surely differ.  The water fall and small ripples were painted using a dry brush technique and finishing it off with clear silicone.  The whole thing was given a number of coats of a water-based high gloss Varathane.  The foreground and background trees are just local weeds

           Things were ‘back on the rail, around here by three o’clock. I’d called Loree and told her I’d be home in an hour or so. We’d find a nice place to eat and we’d enjoy at least one evening together - at last. "No" she said. "If we’re eating out anyway why not make a sort of holiday of all this." She could drive down and meet me here by five. I’d arrange a nice place to stay. We could hit the beach first and have a romantic dinner someplace new and different. "See you soon then." she said, and I was hanging on the phone smiling, almost laughing. Finally!

           An odd thing about the water at Hudson’s Mill is that it’s warmest in the fall after a long summer of high, bright sunshine. Even as the afternoons and evenings get shorter the small public park filled with swimmers and picnickers relaxing in misquote free play and pretending that winter is still a long way off.

           My swimmers are modern European folks properly attired in Speedo’s and nearly nothing.  Not real fitting for a prairie town in the mid seventies.  Some paint fixed up my lady friend but some masking tape was needed to give her guy some ‘decent’ swim ware. A small suitcase was converted into a genuine leather covered nine transistor radio and straw hats and beach towels came from a variety of Dollar Store stuff.

           That silence of the evening would not invade our suite. A single phone call, at the wrong time, from a well-intentioned supervisor in Winter Valley, a call simply to let me know every thing was fine and that I should enjoy a quiet evening, seemed to create an opening for the two of us to somehow review our goals. It was a review I never asked for, never wanted, but it was as inevitable as snow in the winter.

           The short story? Both of us were in love with our lives – as they were. Now, at the very peek of our careers we would be apart more than not. We would find our priorities in conflict at every turn and who could ask the other to leave it all behind and simply follow along. In the end, unspoken decisions were made that put us back on different paths. Loree would take the train to Grande Prairie tonight and fly away tomorrow. I would stay behind.

            The ‘high end high maintenance’ girl figure that Preiser offered was doing all the right stuff but she just wasn’t the girl next door I was looking for.  A more modest masking tape skirt and a ponytail did the trick.  The new hair, just visible here, was made out of a small paintbrush and gravity held it hanging down after it was soaked in diluted white glue and bent into shape.

            The station at Pearson is a stucco coated GTW Plan 100 scratch built to for the location.  These smaller stations were located just about everywhere on the prairies so it fits just right here.  The Coke machine is a fridge magnet.

           Power was restored. CN’s much delayed grain shipment was ready to leave the city and that big diesel generator across from the terminal was finally shut down. A welcome sigh was heard up and down the valley. Dinners could be prepared and TV’s would lighten up the corners of a thousand rooms in Hudson’s Mill.

           At the mill itself, the shifts had been pretty screwed up. New crews had been called in and others had stayed behind but now that things were humming again the evening gang was hard at work. And some hard work it would be too. No cylindrical hoppers tonight. They would be using manpower and a forklift to load bags of seed and fertilizer into two 50-foot cars bound for the lower mainland in BC. 7000 cu ft was a big space to fill.

           Some of the scenery items on the Winter Valley are ‘the wrong scale’ and it drives the purists among us crazy.  The diesel engine in this scene is 1/24th scale as is the black pick-up parked outside the fence.  That’s about 20% too large for the trains.  No one visiting down here has ever noticed and if your real careful about placing your scenery details then no one will ever notice on your layout either.  In smaller scales there’s just about everything you’d ever want, in the correct size, right down at local hobby shop but I’ve seen some mix-and-match being nicely done in HO.

           There was no point in me staying around making the night even longer and more painful than it already was. Even the most business like good-byes can be gut wrenching. Fumbling around, keeping it light, avoiding eye contact. I knew of course, as the days and weeks and months passed, I would miss even the anticipation of her. The making plans, the picking out of small gifts, reading her horoscope instead of mine, always waiting by the phone. These things I would miss the longest.

           So I walked out of the hotel, turned up Home Street, stepped off the road onto the ballast and headed towards the station in reflected light. I found that comforting in a way because I knew that sound and that smell and the extra care it takes not to stumble on a tie or a high spike. There might be someone to talk to at the station even at this time of night and there would be a train in the morning. And another and another. They would always be with me. I could count on that.

See you all at www.mylargescale.com